The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground [Hardcover]

Rosemary Mahoney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 27, 2003

In an increasingly secular age of high-speed travel and advanced technology, it is surprising to learn that the ancient tradition of religious pilgrimage is on the rise. Charting this phenomenon from Ireland to India, Rosemary Mahoney turns her sharp eye and discerning ear on the pilgrims she meets in the course of six extraordinary journeys. Never a passive observer, Mahoney is a full participant, soldiering barefoot through the three-day penitential Catholic pilgrimage on Ireland’s Station Island, walking the five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain, braving the icy bathwater at Lourdes, where pilgrims beseech the Blessed Virgin for miraculous cures. In Varanasi, India’s holiest city, Mahoney befriends a curious young boy whose intelligence and sensitivity provide startling insights into this ancient culture, with its public cremations and elaborate prayer rituals. And in the Holy Land, she rows alone across the Sea of Galilee to spend an unnerving, hilarious night camped below the Golan Heights in search of the essence of Jesus, a vigil punctuated by a pack of howling cats and a bad case of the jitters.
What Mahoney discovers among the true believers and charlatans, the holy and the profane, is the single thread that binds all religions: the desire for a relationship with God. "If I was struck by anything," she writes, "it was the shared human struggle to find reason, to confront the natural fear of uncertainty and obscurity." The Singular Pilgrim is a book less about religion than about belief. "An affecting visit to the ancient, humbling act of pilgrimage . . . [Mahoney] conveys a genuine sense of spiritual mindfulness on the road, and there is no denying that these pilgrimages paid her back in full" (Kirkus Reviews).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sometimes purposeful, sometimes footloose, the act of undertaking a pilgrimage is "both a preparation for death and a hedge against it." So writes Rosemary Mahoney, who knows well whereof she speaks. A reluctant churchgoer, and less interested in religion per se than in the faith that underlies it, she travels in this absorbing narrative to some of the world’s great pilgrimage sites: Ireland’s Croagh Patrick, Lourdes, Santiago de Compostela, Canterbury, the banks of the Ganges. "As I got into the rhythm of it," she writes, "I found that the more I walked, the more I wanted to walk." Walk she does, over hundreds of miles, observing and recording along the way, talking with ascetics and skeptics, joining the multitude whose physical beings wander in order that their minds might turn toward the divine. And to what end is all this hard slogging? "Dunno, really," one of Mahoney’s fellow travelers shrugs. "When it’s done, you feel very good about it." Fans of travel narratives and religious memoirs alike will find much pleasure, and much on which to reflect, in Mahoney’s pages. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Most pilgrims are on a very personal quest in which they hope to encounter God, whether it be at a roadside shrine or under the soaring arches of a medieval cathedral. In this reflection on her experiences in Christian and Hindu holy places, the critically acclaimed author of previous books on Lillian Hellman and Ireland is deeply skeptical, occasionally biting and sporadically hopeful about the possibility that a transcendent God might exist. As she encounters anti-Catholic protesters in Walsingham, England, or shares trail chat and blisters with an impressive multinational array of eccentric comrades on the way to Santiago de Compostela, Mahoney's objective is both to understand the nature of belief and to grapple with the remnants of her own Irish Catholic heritage. The bulk of this compelling and evocative memoir recounts time spent in places redolent with Christian history. Yet it is in the ancient Hindu sacred city of Varanasi, India, that Mahoney seems to drop her guard. In her wise and resigned teenage guide, Jaga, she finds a kindred spirit. "I wanted to hug him for his cleverness. His faith, I knew, was similar in nature to mine-faded, worn, resentful, and stubbornly evasive. And yet it was there." At book's end, Mahoney emerges from another pilgrimage incrementally more peaceful but with her singularity intact. Readers seeking small marvels, instead of life-changing miracles, will find this a provocative and illuminating armchair adventure.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (March 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618022627
• ISBN-13: 978-0618022625
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #608,386 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Singular Pilgrim's Progress, May 29, 2003

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground (Hardcover)

There are all sorts of pilgrims making their tours. Chaucer knew this, of course, and his crew is composed of all from the reverent to the venal. Some of his pilgrims, like the Wife of Bath, were journeying just for the fun of it, but none of his pilgrims were confessed skeptics, out to see what they could see and write a book about the experience. That is what Rosemary Mahoney has done in _The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground_ (Houghton Mifflin), not just once but within six of the most celebrated pilgrimages, and not just Christian pilgrimages, but a Hindu one, too. She has a fine eye for detail, an attraction to odd people, and a smooth way of telling a story, so that the armchair pilgrim gets to go vicariously on these jaunts with little risk except perhaps laughing at people who ought to be solemn, and questioning the purpose of pilgrimages and of worship itself.

Every year in May, there is an Anglican National Pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary in Walsingham, an English village. The procession is attended not only by pilgrims, but by protesters. Methodists, Presbyterians, and others who think that the procession is too close to Catholicism shout down the parade and put up signs like "This procession & mass denies the Word of God which forbids it." Lourdes is very Catholic and very kitschy. Mahoney's first physically demanding pilgrimage was to the city of Santiago de Compostela in Spain via walking El Camino de Santiago, hundreds of miles across northern Spain. Mahoney's view of the pilgrims here, as she hobbles with crippling tendonitis, is the most cynical; as befits a "new" ancient route, the pilgrims on it are New-Agey secular seekers, taking the hike during some free months in between jobs, to find a spouse, to heal a karma, or to lose weight. Mahoney's Hindu pilgrimage was to Varanasi, the ancient city on the Ganges where the very best cremations happen and where reverent Hindus go to bathe in the fetid waters. In the Holy Land, she is amused by how different churches insist that they own, say, the authentic place where the water-into-wine miracle. The struggle for authenticity has manifested itself in different religions or different branches of one religion trying to claim possession of particular sacred sites, and Mahoney notes, "Everyone was fighting to own a piece of the man who lived for peace and said, _Own nothing_." The final pilgrimage is to Saint Patrick's Purgatory on Station Island in the middle of Lough Derg, a rigorous pilgrimage including sleep deprivation, cold, midges, and mind-numbing recitations of rigid prayers, perhaps in anticipation of purgatory's entertainments.

Mahoney is a wonderful guide to these strange locales, practices, and people. She examines her own beliefs throughout, and contrasts them with those of her mother, a staunch Catholic. Conversations with her mother are remembered frequently throughout the book. There is serious introspection here, and serious inquiry into a form of human activity that has many participants, but she has conducted the research with irrepressible humor. At the end of the Camino trip, she reflects that although she was still unsure why she had walked all that way, "... I felt I had accomplished something strange and monumental." Yes, and that can be said of her book as well.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Journey IS the Answer!, May 24, 2003

By 

J. Stone (Charlotte, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground (Hardcover)

This writer has put a voice to all the questions, doubts, and uncertainties of which my belief system is composed. Her honesty about herself, her reactions to the many pilgrims she has met in her travels, her adventurousness and acceptance of differences reflect my own yearnings for what I should have done. I was thrilled by her 0bservations and revelations on each journey, but I was overwhelmed by her journal of her time in Varanesi. Her immersion into the life of this place, without "going native", her ability to not be revolted by the seeming desparation of the life around her,her quiet strength and assurance are excitng and moving and inspiring. The two young boys who become her guides and friends are extremely moving. She and they give what feels to be the truest account of the nature of faith that I have read. The myriad questions that all seekers have are not answered or resolved, but they are illuminated in such a way that those who share them may feel affirmed in the knowledge that it is the search and the questions which are important. Everyone's answers will be different, which is as it should be in the examination of such universal questions. This book is a treasure.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars funny and fascinating, May 2, 2003

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground (Hardcover)

I was afraid this book was going to be very pious and all about religion. But it's one of the most entertaining and exciting things I've read in a long time. Mahoney is a very funny writer, with kind of a deadpan, wry sense of humor and really nice take on life and human relationships. She is very brave and adventurous, rowing a boat across the sea of galilee all by herself, walking 500 miles across spain on the Camino de Santiago, and spending three days on St, Patrick's purgatory in Ireland praying and fasting while barefoot the whole time. I think what I loved most about this book was the way the writer portrays the people she meets. It's very vivid and clear. You almost feel like you're right there beside her. The scene where she takes the holy bath at Lourdes in France is really funny, and a lot of what happens to her in India is a riot. Even though the writer is on a search of pilgrimages, she is always a little bit skeptical, which adds to the humor of the book. But most of all you can tell that she cares about people and wants to find out about their lives and why they are on these pilgrimages just as much as she wants to find out about her own spirituality. I learned a lot about the history of religious places that I didn't know before from reading this book. I really didn't want it to end because it was so fun to read.