how to be a pilgrim

a pilgrim's May Day diary

It is Beltane, May Day, and the first day of pilgrimage. This sabbat is a praise of fire, a reckoning between sun-worship and saint-worship. Pilgrimage is a praxis of devotion where its object is somehow occluded at the edges — I think this journey is about resurrection, but I cannot yet tell whether it is that of the Spring, or of Christ, or of the hidden parts of ourselves. Or whether it is just a very long walk.

My last pilgrimage was on the winter solstice to the Chaldon doom mural. I walked in long dresses and my fur coat, dark to hide the damp and the soil. Now I revel in white. I have two pilgrim badges, an angel affixed on a ribbon at my neck and a swan at my breast. I have my staff, cut from a Hazel tree, as tall as me. Talismanic, they keep me safe.

♱

This pilgrimage follows the Royal Saxon Way over four days: beginning with the relics of Eanswythe in Folkestone and ending with Saint Mildred’s Priory in Minster. We honour the early Anglo Saxon female saints who descend from the first Christian King in England, Æthelberht, and Queen Bertha.¹

Abbie’s introductory e-mail to the pilgrim contingent

Church signifies sanctuary. To spy a steeple after hours of walking is visceral, exaltatory relief. But anxiety over sacrilege, of preserving perfect sanctity, is not useful here. The pilgrim is a pragmatist; she is unabashed in making God’s house her bedroom. We brush our teeth in the nave, undress half turned toward the altar. I hang my pink slip dress and vest over the back of the pew. Sink-washed garments are draped over old tombstones. We sleep deeply in the pews, slight as coffins, heads on hard hassocks. The church wardens give us hot buttered toast in the morning. When we leave there is an email asking after a forgotten bikini top.

So the modern collapses into the medieval. We glimpse a white chalk horse from the ditch at the side of a motorway. We are separated from the other pilgrims and I am unwillingly elected shepherd, leading the pilgrim-lambs by the guiding light of my smartphone map. The inscriptions carved into the stone church columns include apotropaic marks, symbolic crosses from crusaders or those on their way to Canterbury, and the names YASMIN / DEREK, scrawled large.

♱

There are angels, or some spectre of God, surely resting amidst the trees. A moon hangs in the day’s sky. We commune with the butterflies: the Red Admiral, Peacock, Orange-Tip, Small White, Brimstone. There is a pleasure in naming. Hawthorne in full blossom, Weeping Willow, Horse Chestnut. Bluebells, speedwell, red campion: our walking companions, persisting through woodland and roadside. We pick wild garlic in the graveyard and chew their stems. Gabriel, who has the name of an Angel and I think really may be one, places a sprig of celandine at her heart and cow parsley between her teeth. I worry that the flower might be its deadly copycat, hemlock, and she spits it back out.

Thus the girl was witness at the grave of the world, finding again, against belief, against all reason and sense, the resurrection of earthly things: the daffodils, bergenias, the daphne. It was a miracle, those things dead and long buried rising again from the tomb of the underworld to live ecstatically, announcing itself into the order of things.

— from the draft of my novel, following a pilgrim known as ‘the girl’

♱

Sacred space need not be enclosed. Land is an extension of shrine, merely unmoored from architectural boundaries.

We rest at a holy well. It is a river that widens into a pool, dappled with light, sanctified by a chapel that now stands in ruins. It is otherwise entirely hidden. We wade in, wash the stickiness of heat off our skin. The water is numbing and so I do not realise that nettles have gathered under my feet. When I pull my socks back on the skein of nettle is impressed into my sole. I do not realise until six hours later.

This feels like an archaic penitentiary rite, a necklace of thorns or hair shirt, forbidding me to forget that I am walking, that this is physical as well as psychic labour. I compare it to the Little Mermaid walking on knives after she exchanges her tail for feet. And then I remember Saint Brendan the Navigator giving the sacrament to a mermaid. We are deep in an old, old England, where the Christian is not yet distinct from the pagan. Everything takes on a strange, mystical tinge.

♱

Tiredness makes me permeable. I thought I would be able to write but I cannot: I tread out thought, lose my words to the river. I receive holy communion at the beginning and end of the pilgrimage, and each time am remade with this bread, which is flesh, and this wine, which is blood. I am not sure where I end and where the sky begins. My shoulders are flushed with burn and the weight of my pack, my feet are malformed with blisters. The pain ebbs and flows. I am undone, and yet so full up with a swooning peace I feel somnambulist, walking through the landscapes of my dreams.

A little suffering is appropriate for a pilgrimage, I say, and I repeat this with a humour that starts to turn towards hysteria. I have started, so I must finish. I keep walking.

There is something of surprise when we complete the pilgrimage: it seems unlikely that we will not simply keep walking, up to the coast and past the cliffs and into the sea, on and on and on. Instead, we stop. We greet the nuns. Gabriel buys me a rosary with amber-coloured beads. I sit in the chapel before the bones of Saint Mildred. I try to think of a suitable prayer, and fail. We go home.

♱

what saints are these? whose miracles are confused,
their names dispersed; and yet the fruit of stones
can come to bear in flesh and broken groans,
where wonder finds itself a common use.

don’t leave, my heart. if you must walk ahead,
leave little signs along the way for me.

— from Gabriel’s crown of pilgrim sonnets, written out and slipped into my copy of Rilke’s elegies

𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔩𝔬𝔳𝔢,

𝔄𝔫𝔫𝔞 𝔊𝔦𝔰𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔢 𝔡𝔢 𝔚𝔞𝔞𝔩

@anna.c.dewaal & @lunulaezine

1. with full credit and whole-hearted gratitude to Abbie Butfoy, who researched & organised & led the pilgrimage… <3