A Pilgrimage to Wales
I look out the window of the passenger bus as the English landscape flashes by. Leaving Birmingham, we pass the Museum of the Motorcycle and then we’re almost in the countryside. But not quite: Large paneled trucks parked in fields serve as portable billboards. The only memorable message is one boasting: “Birmingham’s Rubbish: We love it.”
Leaving Birmingham and the rubbish behind, we move through English midlands west toward Wales. Flat lowlands with gentle rising hillocks dotted with copses of polars and oaks. Fields and Fields of fluorescent yellow Rape Seed hedged by rows of yellow gorse and white blossomed hawthorne from fields of green grazed upon by herds of sheep – shorn and unshorn, lambs and ewes and rams, usually white but often mixed with brown and black sheep. In some fields, horses and cows also graze, and once I spy a large brown cow browing the lower branch of a shady tree.
Slowly the hills get higher and the topography more rolling as we enter Wales where the pilgrimage is to begin.
Of course it already has begun – and depending on how you view the term pilgrimage, it can be a metaphor for life. From this perspective, my life pilgrimage is now in its 69th year.
But in the usual sense, pilgrimage means a journey of moral significance often to a place of spiritual significance. Every major religion has these – Muslims journey to Mecca, Christians to Rome or the Holy Land, Jews to Jerusalem, even Buddhists – I am told – seek the important sites in the lives of the Buddha. When I was a child, I remember my Roman Catholic aunt, Jennie, journeying to Lourdes in France; I still have the rosary she brought me that contains a bit of holy water from the well there. And as a high schooler (and in College), I read Chaucer’s tales of Canterbury and the pilgrims that journeyed to the place Thomas a Becket had made holy.
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