Pilgrimages into and away from belief

If, as she was once told by an Episcopal bishop, the idea of pilgrimage is an attempt to “invite into our hearts what we know in our heads,” then the disparate journeys undertaken by Rosemary Mahoney in her travelogue-memoir “The Singular Pilgrim” are successful in different ways, inviting into her heart aspects of herself and her struggles with belief that previously were known to her intellect alone. Though religion plays a part in her searching, the excursions are as much into the human condition and the traits we hold in common as they are reaches toward divine awareness.

Mahoney, author of the 1993 book “Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age,” considers herself a religious skeptic. She no longer follows the Roman Catholicism of her youth and isn’t quite sure she believes in God at all, yet at the same time yearns for the kind of faith she witnesses in others. Watching Greek Orthodox pilgrims make their way on hands and knees to venerate an icon, she is touched by what she sees, even as her cynicism flares. “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,” she writes. “It wasn’t their religion that interested me so much as their faith, that palpable surge of the soul.”

After years of being an outsider to religion, Mahoney undertakes six pilgrimages, aware that her disbelief may interfere with what she hopes will be a transformative experience. At first she hides behind her curiosity and her stance as a writer. But the journeys wear on, each more physically, emotionally and spiritually demanding, until the act itself changes her, stripping away some of her hesitation and dilating her willingness to believe.

She visits France’s Lourdes, in whose grotto Our Lady is said to have appeared to St. Bernadette; the spring water there is rumored to have healing properties. “[S]ome 400,000 people take the baths each year,” she reports, and she joins in, shocked by the frigid water. Mahoney then walks Spain’s 475-mile “Camino de Santiago” over the course of 23 grueling days, unsure of her real motive, only that she needs to do it. Meeting odd characters, encountering stunning countryside, enduring blisters and tendinitis severe enough to require a hospital visit, she finds a quiet kind of peace. “[T]he best parts of these long days were the stretches when I was alone, thinking and listening to the steady rhythm of my own footsteps trailing me like a heartbeat.”

On the west bank of the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, the holy Hindu city, she makes friends with an intelligent boy who’s trying to scrape together a living in the poverty-stricken region. “Under the circumstances, a mind as sharp as his seemed almost a curse,” she laments. Ultimately, she realizes that her time spent with the boy is the most sacred aspect of her journey. This is a trait common to her six pilgrimages: The people she meets and the difficulties she endures enrich her life more than her stops at holy places.

In the Holy Land she stays in Nazareth, looking for signs of Jesus, and is surprised by her reaction to the landscape. “Being here in Galilee had not made Jesus bigger in my mind; instead, it had brought him down to human size, and that small size in turn made him great.”

A tiny island on Lough Derg, Ireland, is the location of Mahoney’s final pilgrimage, an arduous scripted ordeal filled with fasting, an all-night vigil, countless Hail Marys and Our Fathers while walking barefoot and kneeling at preordained places. It is at this site, a place of penance for more than 1,000 years, as Mahoney is put through her paces with physical hardships, that her resistance to faith peels away and she floats, if only for a few moments, on the current of belief. “I had never imagined I would find myself on my knees with a rosary in my fingers, pressing out the Hail Mary. But having come and submitted myself to the stations of Lough Derg, I was a noisy tom-tom of intentions, drumming out messages and sending them sailing over the water.”

Her essays, filled with rich detail and lyric writing, speak to the human desire to believe in something, even when religious faith seems untenable, and of the need to take action toward that belief. Time and again, Mahoney continues putting one foot in front of the other, circuitously approaching the faith she admires while casting to the side (without completely dismissing) her cynicism. Ultimately, this walking carries her from skepticism to a consoling kind of belief -- if not in a specific religion then in the human struggle to survive and flourish.

*

‘The Singular Pilgrim’

Travels on Sacred Ground

Rosemary Mahoney

Houghton Mifflin: 416 pp., $25