Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $4.83 shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.
& FREE Shipping
86% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the author
OK
The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground Paperback – May 11, 2004
Purchase options and add-ons
The Singular Pilgrim is a riveting account of one woman's personal quest to find the root of belief among modern religious pilgrims. The intrepid Rosemary Mahoney undertakes six extraordinary journeys: visiting an Anglican shrine to Saint Mary in Walsingham, England; walking the five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago in northern Spain; braving the icy bathwater at Lourdes; rowing alone across the Sea of Galilee to spend a night camped below the Golan Heights; viewing Varanasi, India’s holiest city, from a rubber raft on the Ganges; soldiering barefoot through the three-day penitential Catholic pilgrimage on Ireland’s Station Island. A fiercely observant traveler and an insightful writer, Mahoney offers a witty and provocative chronicle of her adventures.
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperOne
- Publication dateMay 11, 2004
- Dimensions5.5 x 1.05 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100618446656
- ISBN-13978-0618446650
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
About the Author
ROSEMARY MAHONEY is the author of Whoredom in Kimmage, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the New York Times Notable Book The Early Arrival of Dreams. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, she lives in Rhode Island.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
A few years ago a friend of mine, whom I know to be an intelligent and
compassionate woman, listened carefully as I told her about a Greek
Orthodox pilgrimage I had witnessed on the tiny Cycladic island of Tinos in
the Aegean Sea. Each year on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption,
which marks the spiritual and bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into
heaven, the Greek Orthodox faithful travel great distances to Tinos to
venerate an icon of the Virgin housed in a church atop a small hill at the
end of an avenue of marble paving stones. The icon, which was discovered
in the early nineteenth century amid the rubble left by an earthquake, is said
to have worked miraculous cures and to have granted many pilgrims their
individual wishes. The pilgrims arrive by ferry. The moment the gangplank
touches the dock, they rush forward, fall to the ground, and begin making
their way to the church on hands and knees. Some slither the half-mile on
their bellies, poling themselves forward with their elbows in the manner of
besieged soldiers creeping through underbrush. Some lie across the street
and, like horizontal dervishes, roll themselves slowly up the gradual incline
across stones baked torrid by the August sun. As they proceed they pray
for miracles and for mercy. Some weep, others call out the name of the
Virgin. Many carry on their backs offerings of wax candles the length of
their bodies. In the terrible heat the candles droop and sweat. Elderly
white-haired widows in black dresses inch their way silently up the hill,
humbling themselves in hope of the Virgin"s attention, their frail backs forming
saddles for the punishing sun. (Many women in need of divine intervention in
some grave family matter — an illness, a wayward or disobedient child, a
financial bind, an unfaithful husband — vow to return to Tinos every year if the
Virgin will grant the desired outcome.) By the time they reach the church
after several hours of crawling, their hands and knees are galled into raw and
bloody emblems of their belief. Once before the icon they prostrate
themselves in a rapture of spiritual desire.
My friend, who had listened patiently to my story, suddenly shook
her head and said with disdain, "How pathetic!"
Her remark struck me with a disorienting slap of surprise. It was
uncharacteristically dismissive, and it was far enough from my own
response to the Tinos pilgrims that I suffered a moment of self-doubt. Had I
been wrong in my view of them? Were they in fact pathetic? It was true that
standing at the edge of that Tinos street I had been astonished by what I
saw, had even looked with skepticism upon some of the more ostentatious
displays of piety, and when a military parade of admirals and ensigns came
quick-marching up the street in honor of the Virgin I had found the procession
pompous and incongruous. But at the end of that day (the flow of pilgrims
ran long into the night), after watching untold numbers of elderly women
crawling gravely, silently toward their goal, making their souls vulnerable by
extending an invitation to one they deemed infinitely superior, something in
me was impressed. Belief, whether blind or examined, divinely guided or
superstitiously misguided, had made those pilgrims singular and bold,
strange and determined. I am attached to reason and am not easily awed
by the miraculous powers of the Virgin Mary, but I was awed by her
pilgrims. It wasn"t their religion that interested me so much as their faith, that
palpable surge of the soul. Were they pathetic? I didn"t think so.
Not long after my visit to Tinos I found in a trunk in my basement an old
college notebook in which, nearly twenty years before, I had written: "I"m
too forgetful to pray and I fool with religion as though it"s some kind of game
to be resumed when I have the urge." The words surprised and unsettled
me. I was thirty-eight, and that was still an accurate description of my
relationship to spiritual concerns — a curious but evasive flirtation, one that
burgeoned when it was convenient and died when it wasn"t. For years I had
been aware of something faintly glowing at the back of my own soul, and for
years I had effectively ignored it. To thoroughly examine one"s spirituality, to
question with care the source and the essence of creation was a maddening,
sometimes nauseating struggle. I had simply found it easier to fend off
those questions with the false promise that I would deal with them later.
Spurred by the Tinos pilgrims and the words of my younger self,
I .shed out of the same basement trunk my college Bible, the only one I
owned at that time, and began rereading the New Testament. In the Gospel
according to Matthew, I found several passages that I had long ago marked
with a dull pencil. One stood out: "Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper in
your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff;
for the laborer deserves his food. And whatever town you enter, find out who
is worthy in it, and stay with him until you depart." I had drawn a mushy
graphite box around the words. Unlike most of my other underlinings and
bracketings, this was not a pithy aphorism or a wise piece of advice that I
thought applicable to myself. It was a command from Jesus to his disciples
to trust, travel humbly, and spread his word. As soon as I read the passage
I knew why I had marked it. It had seemed — as it seemed now — entirely
unrealistic. No money? No provisions? No change of clothing? Live off the
generosity of those you encounter along the way? Find out who is worthy?
It was a command to wander and spread the word, and in the age I lived in,
that proposition was not only preposterous, it was dangerous. (Within six
months of my noting those words in Matthew, Ronald Reagan and the pope
had both been shot at, and John Lennon had been shot dead.)
I put down the musty Bible, called my mother, and asked her how
she would react if I gave away all of my material possessions, my extra
clothing, and whatever tiny wealth I had accumulated, and went walking
across the country with no cash on my person, nothing but one pair of
sandals and a tunic, and no plan but to seek God and spread the word of
Jesus Christ. Would she think I had lost my mind? Would she worry?
Would she be horrified by the direction my life had taken, as parents often
are when a child under the influence of a religious cult radically alters the
course of his life? My mother, a devout Catholic, answered with
certitude, "Not at all. I would think that finally one of my children had got it
right." (For my mother the redeeming factor in this hypothetical journey was
its particular focus on Jesus. Had I proposed the same scenario of material
divestment and extended travel with, say, Buddha as my inspiration and
spiritual focus, or Krishna and Shiva, or Allah and Muhammad, or the
Hebrew God, or Mother Earth, or Elvis Presley, I am certain that her answer
would have been markedly different.)
Although the possibilities and meaning inherent in the human
search for spirituality had always inspired curiosity in me, and though from
time to time I had been nagged by uncertainty over the lack of spiritual
focus in my life, my rare attempts at spiritual enlightenment had been
halfhearted, conventional, and thwarted by a wavering faith. Upon reading
the New Testament I may have mused about embarking on a spiritual
peregrination, but there had never been a time in my life when it was even
remotely likely that I would take to the road with nothing but a pair of
sandals on my feet, looking for God. My experiences with shrines and holy
places, as at Tinos, had been strictly touristic — glancing and accidental
observations of the devotions of true pilgrims, whose realm I stood apart from.
I had never been a participant.
When I lived in China in the late 1980s, I watched with fascination
the scores of Chinese peasants who walked hundreds of miles in flimsy
cloth slippers from their farms to the city to pay homage at Buddhist
temples in hopes of a prosperous planting season. I had seen Irish Catholic
pilgrims climbing the mountain Croagh Patrick on their knees in order to save
their souls. In New Mexico I had seen crutches and canes hanging from nails
driven into the wall of the Santuario de Chimayo, where the soil of the
chapel floor is said to have curative properties. In Coptic Cairo I had seen
evangelical Korean Christians singing hymns, eyes closed in devotion, near
the purported hiding place of Jesus and Mary.
Though my interest in such pilgrimage exercises was passive, it
was never difficult for me to sense the spiritual weight of these holy places
and the weight of feeling the pilgrims carried with them, believing
wholeheartedly and seeking unabashedly as they do. Their pilgrimages
triggered in me a small degree of envy. If it is true that the largest human
gatherings in the world are those of religious pilgrims to Rome and
Jerusalem during Holy Week or Mecca during Ramadan or the banks of the
Ganges at the Kumb Mela festival, what inspires that phenomenon, and
why hadn"t it managed to reach me? Why wasn"t I drawn to participate in
such activities?
I read Jennifer Westwood"s comprehensive guide, Sacred
Journeys, and learned that across the ages the forms of pilgrimage have
been as varied as its goals and results. Some pilgrims see the very
difficulty of their physical journey as the ultimate source of redemption and
renewal. Medieval Christians, for example, felt that mortification of the flesh
was the most direct route to salvation: for each arduous journey to a
European shrine of note, centuries were believed to be subtracted from the
stay in purgatory. Hindus also believe that mortification of the flesh leads to
higher spirituality and virtue as well as the expiation of sins. Other pilgrims
see physical contact with or proximity to the relics of saints or prophets as
salubrious. Still others focus on geological wonders that are thought to be
invested with a divine force. Many pilgrims, seeing their journey as a
transaction, set off with specific temporal rewards in mind: a cure, a change
of fortune, a better job, high marks on an examination. (Westwood writes of
a shrine in Mexico where drug traffickers annually pay homage to a dead
bandit — lighting votive candles, wearing scapulars, seeking the bandit"s
intervention for a healthy harvest for the cocaine and marijuana farmers, as
well as blessings for the safe passage of drugs into the United States.
"Their hit men reputedly ask him to bless their bullets.") Whatever its
purpose, pilgrimage seemed both a preparation for death and a hedge against
it.
Drawn by the subject of pilgrimage, I began reading Chaucer"s
Canterbury Tales and found myself asking new questions. With the modern
corrosion of organized religion and the emergence of quick spiritual fixes
and alluring self-help seminars now available in exchange for little more than
money, why was the religious pilgrimage — a practice that reached its
height in medieval times — not only still thriving at the end of the twentieth
century but enjoying a marked resurgence? How had the ease and
swiftness of modern travel altered the traditional pilgrimage? What stories lay
behind contemporary spiritual searches, who undertook them, what exactly
constituted a pilgrimage, and why, at any point in history, have human
beings felt the need to leave the place they know and travel great distances
to envision or experience God at a previously ordained site? Why do certain
places on earth seem to possess a greater holiness than others? Why
would God be likely to show his face in one place and not another? The self
can certainly be transformed by a physical journey, but in what way would it
be changed by a physical journey with a spiritual intent?
What most appealed to me in Chaucer"s tales was their
revelations about the nature of medieval secular life precisely as it
intertwined with the religious devotion of his pilgrims. Their stories create an
entire world in which the physical body is contrasted with the spirit, and the
basest impulses of human nature coincide with the highest. The concerns
of the Canterbury pilgrims run the gamut from proper social mores, chivalry,
piety, and honor to blasphemy, lechery, lasciviousness, and buffoonery.
The pursuit of God in the face of mundane pressures and demands, the force
of true belief, and the lengths to which people are willing to go to transcend
their humanity and find spiritual solace are elemental and have remained
fundamentally unaltered through the ages.
In 1999 I was inspired to explore several religious pilgrimages that
interested me and to write about my experiences, the people I met, and the
meaning of these journeys undertaken in the name of an unknowable,
unseeable God. I visited the shrine at Lourdes, walked the medieval
pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela, participated in the penitential
Irish pilgrimage at St. Patrick"s Purgatory on Station Island, spent two
weeks in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, attended the Anglican pilgrimage to
the Marian shrine at Walsingham, England, and visited several pilgrimage
sites in the Holy Land. While the resulting six chapters are discrete, each
with its own particular cosmos and religious references, they are all parts of
one longer journey.
At its core the pilgrimage search concerns the relationship of the
individual self to God, beyond the standard rituals of a religious institution; it
is an attempt to achieve a direct personal connection with the divine. As a
result, this is less a book about religion than a book about belief. In the two
years that I spent on the road I met a variety of pilgrims from diverse
religious backgrounds; the one constant among them was belief. If I was
struck by anything, it was the shared human struggle to find reason, to
confront our natural fears of uncertainty and obscurity.
Concluding the second chapter of The Way of Perfection, written
for the Discalced Nuns of Our Lady of Carmel of the First Rule, Theresa of
Ávila wrote: "I do not remember what I had begun to say, for I have strayed
from my subject. But I think this must have been the Lord"s will, for I never
intended to write what I have said here.&
Continues...
Excerpted from The Singular Pilgrimby Rosemary Mahoney Copyright © 2004 by Rosemary Mahoney. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.Copyright © 2004 Rosemary Mahoney
All right reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : HarperOne (May 11, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0618446656
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618446650
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1.05 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #546,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #843 in Travel Writing Reference
- #1,553 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- #11,410 in Personal Transformation Self-Help
- Customer Reviews:
Important information
To report an issue with this product or seller, click here.
About the author

Rosemary Mahoney was educated at Harvard College and Johns Hopkins University and has been awarded numerous awards for her writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a nomination for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, and Harvard's Charles E. Horman Prize for writing.
Mahoney is the author of six books of non-fiction: For the Benefit of Those Who See; Dispatches from the World of the Blind, Down the Nile; Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff, A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman, The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground, Whoredom in Kimmage: The World of Irish Women, and The Early Arrival of Dreams; A Year in China.
She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Observer, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, National Geographic Traveler, O, the Oprah Magazine, and many others. She is a citizen of Ireland and the United States and lives in Athens, Greece.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Peter Stevens
The author's ending was a bit rushed. Burgos is a little less than the half way mark to Santiago and the author devoted 59 pages to that portion of the trip. The last half of The Camino was condensed into 15 pages and seemed to end abruptly because her detailed experiences before her tendinitis attack in Burgos all of a sudden were few and "skimpy" which led me to ask myself: did she really walk 800 km. in 21 days with 2 rest days in Burgos? That's an average of almost 24 miles a day which is an outrageous distance to travel day after day considering how difficult some sections are and especially after having tendinitis! Did The Camino get less interesting for the author after Burgos that she did not write more about it? I was disappointed that she did not continue in the same vein as her pre-Burgos episodes and adventures on the road. Her writing was entertaining and engaging but somehow fell flat at the end of this chapter.
I don't know if I will read the rest of this book after the chapter on The Camino. I guess it has brought on a crisis of faith after reading Ms. Mahoney's narrative of The Camino to Santiago de Compostela! I keep asking myself: Did she really walk 800 kilometers in 21 days??????
As a pilgrim, however, I found her disappointing. This book lacks the extra dimension that Kathleen Norris's "Cloister Walk" or Peter Matthiessen's "The Snow Leopard" have, where the author is sincerely searching and is changed by that search. Instead, Mahoney seems to do what she accuses herself of doing early on in the book -- she takes out religious issues to play with them a bit and then tucks them away again. I very much felt she was playing at being a pilgrim here, more to write an entertaining book than anything else. On that level, she succeeds very well.
The reader joins her as a tourist, then, and as an observer of others' walks of faith rather than a participant. She does a marvelous job recreating some very interesting places and the colorful characters she encounters. Her most memorable--even haunting--character is the young man who becomes her guide in Varanasi; in the perceptively written passages involving him, Mahoney shines.
VERY ENJOYABLE . BUT BEST IF SOMEONE IS INTERESTED IN LEARNING ABOUT DIFFERENT WAYS OF LIFE AND DIFFERENT RELEIGIOUS THOUGHTS AND CULTURES AND HAS AN "OPEN MIND".



