Miracles in Motion

I was listening to a friend this week talk about the idea of pilgrimage. It’s a word that may give rise to mixed associations depending on your life experiences, but I am interested in any phenomena that spring up repeatedly across multiple cultures and belief systems.

When I was at school, we were sent on a pilgrimage in the very literal sense, dispatched as a gang of strong-bodied teenagers in yellow t-shirts to support the delivery of sick catholics to the pilgrimage site in Lourdes, mainly by pushing wheelchairs up steep hills in the small Pyrenees town. Although I am no longer part of that world, Lourdes was a fascinating experience when it came to people-watching (my favourite thing to do as an illustrator); a vast walled sanctuary where over 700,000 people visit every year to see the place where a young woman claimed to have seen a miracle, each in pursuit of their own healing miracle. Outside the walls, stalls selling all manner of plastic tat such as illuminating statues, rainbow rosaries, wee bottles of holy water and ‘Mary Mints’, which are basically just breath mints but with the Virgin Mary on them for some reason. The juxtaposition of the serious and the silly is somewhat glorious and I shall never forget the exquisite agony of taking a 30-hour coach trip with a bagpipe playing priest enlivening (or enraging) the bus from the back row.

It also makes me think of the Sycamore Gap tree I wrote about last week. I have heard so many people describe taking a pilgrimage to that tree. I’ve heard it described as sacred by people of somewhat varied belief systems and somehow it really was special, a site for sojourners. But again, why there? Why this place? Why journey to a specific location?

There are stories of pilgrimage all around us. In the book/film ‘Wild’ we see

Cheryl Strayed

processing her grief on the formidable Pacific Crest Trail. She writes “I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.” When I was a researcher in the USA, I happened to observe the pilgrimage of people who flocked to the home of Michael Jackson following his death. I have a creative friend who makes her own pilgrimages to the graves of famous musicians and poets she loves, to pay homage. This week, I also admired the pilgrimage of the ‘Coat of Hopes’ as it passed through the Northeast, a beautiful storytelling patchwork garment described as a ‘patchwork pilgrim coat’, created originally to be walked to COP 26, the UN climate summit, in Glasgow autumn 2021. We like the idea of pilgrimage, it seems.

Last year, in the depths of life unravelling a bit, I made my own sort of pilgrimage to the Atlantic west coast of the Isle of Mull, deliberately choosing somewhere remote to be temporarily out of normal existence. I had this funny little wish in the back of my mind, that I’d love to spot a whale while there (Whales were showing up a lot in my art). Somehow, I’d love to imagine life to be so poetic that one might just show up and make me believe in magic again after feeling so destroyed. I waited by the water a few times but sadly, no whale. It was very statistically unlikely to happen, but I wonder; did that disappointment bear any similarity to that of those emerging from the supposed healing waters of Lourdes still sick?

When on a family reunion in Ireland 15 years ago, we all made a small sort of pilgrimage to a very ordinary spot by the roadside where my great, great grandmother had laid down and died, just a few hundred yards from her house which was no bigger than Maud Lewis’ tiny shack and had since become an animal feed shed. It was special to go there, to somehow trace my DNA to a particular place and to see the same view that my ancestor saw before her eyes closed, but there was also something so important about WHO I went there with. There are huge parts of my family history that are unknown to me, but to walk along a path with my Irish relatives and share our stories was significant indeed.

These experiences then, what to make of them? I will admit, I treated the Lourdes experience as basically a fun trip and kept the idea of miracles at a skeptical arms length as a young person. When it comes to the supernatural claims of any such thing, I obviously just don’t know for sure. But with age, I realise what miracles I may have overlooked. No whale appeared near Mull but the majestic herons were there, singing their ancient guttural song. When a person is ill or crushed by grief or desperate for answers, when all they want to do is lie down and despair, I think it’s a miracle to get up, to be in motion, to seek and search and believe that something wonderful may just be possible. When I walked down a Wicklow country lane with my great aunts to see the place our ancestor lived and died, I experienced for a moment the full embodiment of belonging, of heritage, of place, of being a part of something. As someone whose heritage is largely unknown, that was a miracle for me; to be one in a group of travellers with a common aim.

Perhaps, rather than reaching any one destination or site, the motion itself IS the miracle? Perhaps one could pilgrimage by walking around the block where your house is, or purely by travelling inwardly. To travel peacefully with others, to be in motion as equals in your humanity and in your search of something better, even if you don’t find exactly what you set out to find, does seem like a rare and special thing to do in this moment in the world.

With love to all fellow travellers and seekers,

Gill x