Dead serious: a theology of literary pilgrimage.

  ... for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on
  unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as
  they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
  faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
  --George Eliot, Middlemarch. (1)

     Was the pilgrimage
  I made to come to my own
   self, to learn that in times
  like these and for one like me
    God will never be plain and
   out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?
  --R. S. Thomas, "Pilgrimages." (2)

  No bowstring can be tightened in such a way and is able to give the
  arrow such momentum the way the thought of death is able to
  accelerate the living when earnestness stretches the thought. Then
  earnestness grasps the present this very day, disdains no task as too
  insignificant, rejects no time as too short, works with all its might
  even though it is willing to smile at itself if this effort is said
  to be
  merit before God, in weakness is willing to understand that a
  human being is nothing at all and that one who works with all one's
  might gains only the proper opportunity to wonder at God.
  --Soren Kierkegaard, "At a Graveside." (3)

Introduction

The goal of my University introductory course, "Understanding Religion," is a large one. However, I narrow our focus to a study of the Bible as a means to achieving this goal. Thus, over the semester, my students read many biblical texts, stories with which they are probably familiar. But here, we begin to explore them in light of traditional and contemporary scholarship. While we move through the Hebrew and Christian Bibles chronologically, we also consider three critical approaches to studying these texts: the historical approach, which investigates the events and situations shaping the Bible as it was being written and interpreted; the literary approach, which examines compositional as well as thematic aspects of the Bible such as story, myth and symbol; and the contemporary approach, which explores how people receive and use the Bible today. These three approaches represent the Bible's three worlds. And we journey through each world during the semester. (4) Such mental migration is tough, as my undergraduates quickly discover, and yet, as I often say, taking a trip in the mind's eye can and will be interesting as well as challenging to those who make the effort to set out and explore for themselves. (5)

Fifteen years teaching has taught me that my students enjoy learning to travel over different territories of thought. Of the three, though, they enjoy touring the Bible's contemporary world most of all. Indeed, they relish investigating the many and varied ways in which Scripture surfaces in modern culture--the Baby Moses law in Texas; Bono's use of Isaiah 58.7-8 at the 2006 White House Prayer Breakfast; Jean Claude LaMarre's The Color of the Cross movie; and, how neuroimaging pinpoints the most active areas of the brain during glossolalia. Quite frankly, my students cannot seem to get enough of the "world in front of the text" or "the world of the reader." (6) They also appear to appreciate how and why a journey into this world obliges them to return to their so-called real world with a revised understanding of religion's nature and function. Such is the case with the concept of pilgrimage, which I define and teach traditionally and non-traditionally. After drawing from the Bible and world religions to outline conventional forms of pilgrimage, this essay explores unconventional forms of pilgrimage by using my visits to the graves of three Roman Catholic writers--Shusaku Endo, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor--to illustrate the increasingly popular phenomenon of "literary trips." (7)

Traditional pilgrimage

I often begin my class on traditional understandings of pilgrimage by using a biblical dictionary definition to frame the discussion. Here, we learn that a pilgrimage is

  A journey to attend a shrine or place of religious importance. This
  practice has its roots in the Old Testament, when Abraham visited
  Mount Moriah (Genesis 22). In the course of time journeys to the
  temple became a part of Jewish life (hence Luke 2:41ff). The New
  Testament sometimes regards human life as a pilgrimage; Christian
  believers are temporary dwellers on earth who are traveling toward an
  eternal destination (Hebrews 11:13ff). (8)

We then proceed out from this definition to explore the ancestral narratives more closely, showing how it is that pilgrimage serves as the dominant trope in the stories involving Abraham and Jacob, and how the different faith-travels of ancient Israel's foundational figures signify different typologies of faith. Biblical scholars Christian Hauer and William Young express the difference this way: "Jacob's journey balances Abraham's. Abraham's journey is that of a man of faith, whose faith is tested; Jacob's journey is of a man who comes to faith after finally seeing the face of God in his brother's compassion." (9) The rest of the Hebrew Bible, at the risk of oversimplifying things, becomes an account of a peoples' journey, rendered eloquently in the many and varied passages that we read from week to week.

Cross-cultural visual studies of pilgrimage only add to this excursion into biblical descriptions of sacred journeys. (10) We watch while Muslims circumambulate the ka'aba during the hajj to Mecca, for example, and see Hindu pilgrims to Varanasi bathing in the sacred river Ganges. (11) Judaism does not include pilgrimage as an essential obligation, as my class soon discovers, yet we learn that Jerusalem attracts Jews across the world to visit sites associated with their religion. Devotees gather at the ruins of the first temple built by Solomon, for example, and read the Torah as well as grieve for the temple's destruction in 70 CE, which teaches us that pilgrims sometimes experience sacred travel in bittersweet, ambiguous ways. Such ambiguity also marks England's Canterbury, which became a place of Christian pilgrimage after the murder of Thomas a Becket before the high altar in the cathedral in the twelfth century. (12)

The comparative study of religious pilgrimage offers many insights, as religion scholars well know, and arguably the most important of these concerns the way most believers in practically all faiths describe their holy adventure as a gradual passing from one state, like innocence or even ignorance, to another regarded as more advanced, like mature awareness or heightened consciousness. One of my most effective examples of such a transition, at least recently, may be seen in the anecdotal accounts of 160 members of New York City's Abyssinian Baptist church who undertook the 7,000-mile journey to Ethiopia. Featured on "Going Home: A Pilgrimage," a three-part report by Fox News religion correspondent Lauren Greene that first aired in late November 2007, this storied black congregation traveled to Africa's Holy Land and found themselves as well as one of Christianity's most ancient forms. "We believe that [Ethiopia] is the real center of the redemption of Africa," the church's senior pastor remarks, "because it's peaceful, it's never been colonized and its peoples are fiercely independent and self reliant, and that's how we see ourselves." (13) Here, as elsewhere, my students learn how traditional or conventional religion creates and sustains identity, binding people together (re-ligare) through attention to a personal and collective ritual action that gestures toward transcendence. In the words of theologian Virgil Elizondo:

  The sense of pilgrimage seems to respond to a profound need of the
  human being to go beyond the limits of ordinary experience into the
  mysterious realm of the beyond, and pilgrimage sites seem to have the
  force of a geographical biological-spiritual magnet attracting the
  pilgrims into the realm of its life-giving mystery. Yet pilgrimage
  sites are not ends in themselves, but often serve as thresholds into
  new stages of life. One does not go as a pilgrim to stay, but to pass
  through a privileged experience that will change us in unsuspected
  and uncontrolled ways so that we return to ordinary life in a
  completely new way. One breaks through limitations to experience a
  bit more of the ultimate and unlimited existence. (14)

Non-traditional pilgrimage

It is not at all difficult for my students to regard pilgrims walking the road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain as religious. But what about folk who attend Star Trek conventions? Is their experience "religious," as anthropologist Jennifer Porter suggests, or are we stretching the term's meaning to the point of collapse? (15) To be sure, everything hinges upon the definition attached to "religious," yet such definitions are numberless. And many are contestable. This said, I often find myself teaching that whatever else it is, "religious" is the term we give to the act of constructing meaning from the material of everyday life; it is that which gives multifaceted activities abiding significance and stimulates individual as well as community flourishing. The practice of marking a crash site with candles, cards, and flowers would count as "religious," so defined, and visiting such a place, like the ruins of the World Trade Center, qualifies as a non-traditional pilgrimage, as cultural critics Kevin Burbriski and Richard Woodward aver. (16) Using Porter's more technical language, visiting Ground Zero and attending Star Trek conventions illustrate unconventional religious activities because they fit in "with the broader definition of pilgrimage as a negotiated, constructed, and hetereogenous process, rather than within the more restricted notions of pilgrimage as journeys in pursuit of perceived theophanies." (17)

I often show what I mean by this "broader definition of pilgrimage" by telling how and why, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the King's death, I gathered outside the gates at Graceland with other Elvis Presley fans and stood for six hours in the pouring Memphis rain, before moving "silently and reverentially"--as the Candlelight Vigil's order of service put it--up the driveway and past the grave, which is situated in the mansion's well-known Meditation Garden. (18) Married to a Memphian, I have visited Graceland many times, even conducted tours for friends, but this was my first and only Candlelight Vigil. It required me to leave work early and make the nearly 500-mile road trip from Fort Worth. My students are often skeptical at first. And many wonder out loud if Graceland qualifies as a pilgrimage site. Yet several scholars have addressed the phenomenon and many believers, for this is how we label ourselves, describe being called to the home and final resting place of a singer whose art transports us in sublime ways. (19) Gradually, student skepticism evolves into an acceptance of the possibility of a passion they do not share.

There are at least two reasons for this change. First, students realize that music serves as a handmaiden to religion, as observers of Jamaican Rastafarianism as well as Haitian Vodou well know, and, second, they recognize that music, like religion, fosters personal significance and social belonging (communitas). I ask them to consider how the 2006 Live 8 concerts inspired people around the world to "help make poverty history," for example, and I show them DVD scene selections from The Vigil (for Kurt Cobain), a 2001 pilgrimage movie inspired by the tragic life and untimely death of Nirvana's lead singer. Such examples eventually persuade some of my students, if not all, that there is more to the terms "religious" and "pilgrimage" than meets the eye. "A pilgrim does not have to be moving toward something holy, I think, so much as toward whatever resides in the deepest part of him," novelist Pico Iyer remarks. (20)

Over the years, I have found myself visiting the graves of celebrated authors, moved not by something sacred but by an intense urge to pay respect to those who have shaped the way I view life's insubstantiality and grasp my sense of belonging within it. Some might say that such journeying represents morbid tourism. Perhaps. But I treat it as making literary pilgrimage. (21) Do graves exist for the dead or for the living? More and more I think they exist for the living. Occurring over Christmas 1992, my first literary pilgrimage took me to Le Cimetiere du Pere-Lach-aise, Paris, France, where the eminent ghosts of Abelard and Heloise, Chopin and Bizet, Proust and Balzac, as well as Morrison and Piaf appear to circle the air above the cemetery's distinctively rising and falling ground. (22) I came in search of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) whose tomb, decorated by an arresting Jacob Epstein sculpture, announces: "And alien tears will fill for him/Pity's long-broken urn/For his mourners will be outcast men/And outcasts always mourn." (23) (See Figure 1)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Wilde cast burning coals into the courtyard of every peaceful, late Victorian home, an action that eventually forced him into exile, and as I traced my finger over his epitaph's poetic lines, I gave thanks for his life and literary art. (24) Apparently, I am not alone in such behavior. (25) Writing in his tender introduction to Dietrich Christian Lammert's haunting photographs of the graves of modernism's many makers, religionist Mark C. Taylor captures the cemetery's existential lure and, in doing so, explains what stirred within me sixteen years ago:

  Graves matter. It is not just the matter of matter--dust, dirt,
  tones, grass, leaves, moss, even mould--but the matter of place or
  its ack. Death forces us to consider our final place in the
  world--physical as well as social. By the side of the grave, life
  appears to be a constant flight from or search for place. Even in a
  world where everything seems to have been displaced, there is a
  finality to place that cannot be avoided. If one ponders--really
  ponders--the images gathered in Grave Matters, it is impossible not
  to ask "What is my place in relation to these ghosts? How have they
  made me what I am? How have I made them what they were not? And after
  all is said and done, where will I end up?" (26)

One day I will rest in an unvisited tomb, to steal Middlemarch's bracing insight, and my fate resembles the many others who pass through this vale of tears. But for now, as I try to make sense of myself and the "growing good of the world," I feel moved to honor those who have helped me think and act, however "unhistoric" my life turns out to be.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

I had lived and worked in the American South for over a decade before I eventually rode Georgia's single-lane highways in search of Flannery O'Connor's burial place (27) (see Figure 2).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Famous for her belief that the South's landscape remains Christ-haunted, O'Connor was acutely aware of herself as a Catholic in a Protestant world. And she often felt like an outsider. Looking back, I suspect that my own interloper identity--an Englishman in Dixie--caused me to find her compelling. On a deeper level, though, I believe her work captures how I experience life. We struggle to find our place within a broken and fallen world, she says, and contemporary society's tendency to evacuate Mystery entails that we often feel lonely without God. (28) In her fiction, especially her first novel Wise Blood (1952), she articulates her theology in deft, crystalline prose. And she shows how sin and redemption coexist within our souls, how God often shocks us into surrender, and how faith frequently makes us appear odd to others.

"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it," O'Connor once wrote. (29) Divine grace hunts people down in her stories, and occasionally it faces up to them violently. Consider how the symbolically named Mary Grace, armed with purple prose and a book on human development, confronts the self-righteous Mrs. Turpin and forces her to experience an epiphany that involves learning how Christ-like it is to withhold judgment on others. O'Connor wrote stories like "Revelation" (1961) because she found our modern, nihilistic culture worrying; and its loss of "mystery and manners" agitated her tremendously. In her view, we have willfully abandoned all feeling for the church's rituals and dogmas (manners), which mediate God's otherness (mystery) and, in being so reckless, we now find ourselves unable to orient our created lives toward our Creator. We are lonely without God. But since God appears unable to use beauty to woo us back, God must stun us into faith, leave us uptight as well as afraid by what we experience, like the women before the Easter Garden tomb, and this shocking strategy has roots in Aquinas. "Thomas, whatever the coolness or dryness of his tone, never forgets that grace is a word at which we are disturbed, a word that stirs us to reach out beyond the confines of our nature," writes theologian Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt. (30)

I am a minister as well as a professional theologian. And there are times, if I am honest, when I want to believe, simply and naively, without asking questions. I want to. But I cannot. Something gets under my skin, agitates me, spurs me onward and upward; in short, the divine seems to dog my every move. Reading O'Connor taught me to appreciate such grace-flecked moments. And as I stood in Milledgeville's tightly packed Memorial Hill Cemetery, viewing her grave intently, I celebrated O'Connor's sense that God serves as our basic source of existential unrest, disturbing us to be dissatisfied with who we are and what we have become, beckoning us toward fresh, unexpected incarnations of the Kingdom. One April afternoon when, as Chaucer remarks, the "sweet showers fall" and "people long to go on pilgrimages," I visited the so-called novelist of violent grace and found tremendous spiritual solace; no doubt O'Connor would have adored the irony. (31)

Shusaku Endo (1923-1996)

On the final day of a three-week university study abroad trip to Japan, which saw us take in some of the traditional pilgrimage sites, such as the Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto and the outdoor bronze statue of the Amida Buddha at Kamakura, I journeyed just beyond Japan's capital in search of the grave of Shusaku Endo, Catholic novelist and humorist, and my non-traditional pilgrimage proved to be as physically demanding as it was spiritually rewarding (see Figure 3).

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Finding the grave was tough. I had to navigate the busy capital's subway system, for example, and I do not speak or read Japanese. Various individuals eventually assisted me, of course, and one person even wrote down the location of Endo's tomb, the Huchu Catholic Cemetery, using the Chinese characters called kanji. Her note proved invaluable when I came up from the train station and realized I needed a taxi to reach my final destination. I found myself alone when I arrived at the cemetery and, as the afternoon wore on, I started to panic. Not knowing Japanese, how would I ever find Endo's grave among the others? Walking the avenues of the dead, clutching a photograph that I had obtained from the Find A Grave website, I was about to abandon my quest, for the light was fast fading, when a gardener, who seemed to arrive from nowhere, addressed and offered me his support. (32) He escorted me to Endo's grave immediately, and then left me alone to connect to the spirit of an artist whose work illustrates Christian commitment's always arduous and often costly road.

Endo's Silence (1966), his acknowledged classic novel, tackles theological themes--faith as troubled commitment in an ambiguous world; exemplarist soteriology; and discipleship's dilemmas--that first resonated with the English Roman Catholic writer Graham Greene, who introduced Endo to the West. (33) And even today its tender portrait of a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest struggling to model Christian presence in a hostile, non-Christian environment repays close attention. Like God, Christ appears to be silent and absent, at least for the greater part of the novel, leaving the priest alone with his spiritual quandary: Should he safeguard his own faith's integrity and thus hasten his congregation's suffering or should he betray Christ publicly and thus save his people from persecution? Eventually, Endo's Christ breaks His silence. And He encounters the priest in his betrayal and his parish in their weakness, entering into such suffering with them.

Social scientist Daniele Hervieu-Leger notes that pilgrims almost always engage in "biographic construction." (34) As part of our personal identity quest, we arrange our experiences as well as ideas into a pattern and, in the process, secure our sense of significance and direction not from some external authority or program but from ourselves. Like my earlier visit to O'Connor's grave, the pilgrimage to Endo's burial site became a way to understand myself religiously. Reflecting on (as well as in) Silence as I stood before Endo's grave, aware that my own discipleship has not been without its moments of doubt and disloyalty, I became overwhelmed by Endo's image of Christ as the fellow-sufferer who understands, the eternal companion who loves wastefully and identifies with us when our pilgrimage seems beset with problems. "Endo explores the crevices of failure and betrayal that every person on earth lives with, and often seeks to hide," Philip Yancey declares, and "in doing so, Endo sheds new light on the Christian faith--at once a harshly revealing light that exposes long-hidden corners, and also a softening light that erases shadows." (35) In Tokyo's twilight, I sensed in Endo's own agonized faith an edifying parallel with my own. And on the Keio Line train back to Shinjuku I prayed silently, and not for the last time as it turns out, to the Grace that guides us through our own disgrace.

Graham Greene (1904-1991)

Arriving in Geneva, Switzerland, the day after Graham Greene's birthday, I checked into my hotel and made arrangements to take the one-hour train ride to Vevey, the resort town where Greene died at age 86. He lies buried in Cimetiere des Monts-de-Corsier (36) (see Figure 4). Received into the Catholic Church in Nottingham, my hometown, in 1926, Greene ranks as my favorite writer, because he adroitly chronicles the two impulses that have haunted me from my early teens--namely, a sense of sin's mystery and the desire for salvation. Not black and white, Greene insists, human nature is black and gray, which entails that both good and evil can always find a place in our lives. We are marked by an intricate duality that stains and pains us and from which we desperately seek some way of escape. Greene's fiction is replete with examples of this struggle. Consider Major Scobie, Greene's symbol of fragmented consciousness in The Heart of the Matter, who feels torn between the competing values of pity and pride, or else Alden Pyle, Greene's symbol of innocence and experience in The Quiet American, who feels caught on the borderland between naive intrusiveness and informed engagement, never sure exactly which way to turn. Pyle and Scobie eventually escape their predicament. But we, as readers, come to their stories' end to find that Greene has dared us to ponder the ambiguous nature of their salvation or escape.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Besides having found over the years that Greene challenges me to appreciate vice and virtue's complexity, even how sin breeds sanctity, and to admit God's ironic grace, reading Greene has inspired me to honor the conflicting emotions that swirl and rage within me, struggling for my unbroken attention, and to reach out to the Love that refuses to let me go. Like Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair I have spent my life trying to be strong because I sense that I am weak. And like Father Leon Rivas in The Honorary Consul I have tried to be virtuous because I am aware of my transgressions. The Apostle Paul captures similar sentiments in Romans 7:14-25, and I thrummed to his words about the Christian's inner conflict when I first read them, but it was Greene who helped me countenance the scarcely visible but exhaustingly intense divisions within me. His striking literary imagination inspired me to hear God's call, in other words, and to come face to face with the fact as well as meaning of my existence. As I made my way down Route de Chalet St. Dennis, then, and turned left at the railway bridge, a peculiar providence appeared to unhinge me. I became convinced that the "strange and appalling mercy" that seems to save Pinkie, Greene's symbol of sin in Brighton Rock, had moved me to make pilgrimage to Vevey, to enter the cemetery, pausing at plot 528 to appreciate Greene's life of unblinking scrutiny of God. (37)

I finished reading Yvonne Cloetta's remarkable memoir, In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene, on the plane ride from Dallas to Geneva. And as I stood before Greene's grave, on what was a brisk and cloudless October morning, I recalled words he uttered to his beloved companion a few days before his death:

  If we human beings come on this earth only in order to spend about
  eighty years here, that makes no sense. What is eighty years compared
  to eternity? So there must be something else ... Perhaps in Paradise
  we are given the power to help the living. I picture Paradise as a
  place of activity. Sometimes I pray not for the dead friends but to
  dead friends, asking their help. (38)

As I mouthed and filled the sterile Swiss air with these words I sensed an uncertain, cautious answer to the question my students and colleagues often ask: Why would a Baptist theologian circle the globe to make pilgrimage at the graves of Catholic writers? (39) Over the years, I have identified with the spirit of the artist I have sought after, able to say "thank you" for the almost numberless ways in which each has shaped the way I examine as well as understand life, and I have come to appreciate such women and men as the voices that call to my pilgrim soul. More than this, though, they are my lost saints: heavenly friends through whom God continues to call me to become saintly as well (Hebrews 12:1). (40)

Conclusion

Sociologists William H. Swatos, Jr., and Luigi Tomasi are two among several scholars who think that increased travel and the deeply experiential dimension of contemporary religion are combining to force a redrawing of the traditional boundaries for understanding "religion" and "pilgrimage." Sensing that the numinous, for want of a better term, is no longer tied to officially sanctioned holy sites, they declare:

  As we study religions up until modern times, we see that pilgrimage
  was a major religious "style of life." Looked at across the longue
  duree, it may well be argued that the modern era of rationally
  organized congregational religiosity is in fact the deviant case.
  Hence, we should anticipate that the pilgrim tourist and the tourist
  pilgrim will continue to grow anew into the
  coming centuries. (41)

Today, as in the past, I view myself as a pilgrim tourist on a graced search for spiritual meaning, looking out for what ethnographer Peter Jan Margry calls "new itineraries into the sacred." (42) And so I take literary field trips to famous graves, to pay my respects as well as map the interior landscape of my soul, and each time I return to the classroom after various jaunts I resolve to journey on, to help my students see that whether it be Ganges or Graceland, no travel is trivial, and no detail is without sense. (43)

Notes

(1.) Eliot, George, Middlemarch, Complete and Unabridged, with an introduction by A. S. Byatt, New York: Modern Library, 1994, p. 799. Special thanks to the students in my "Theology in the Catholic Novel" class for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

(2.) Thomas, R. S., Collected Poems: 1945-1990, London: Phoenix, 2000, p. 364.

(3.) Kierkegaard, Soren, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, edited and translated with an introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 83.

(4.) The origin of my metaphor lies in one of my assigned texts: Hauer, Christian E., and William A. Young, An Introduction to the Bible: A Journey into Three Worlds, 7th ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007.

(5.) I owe appreciation to Andy O. Fort, my TCU colleague and mentor, for the felicitous phrase: "mental migration."

(6.) Hauer, Christian E., and William A. Young, An Introduction to the Bible, p. 4.

(7.) While this phenomenon has a history, it has become enormously popular recently. See Kuchment, Anna, "Take a Literary Field Trip," Newsweek, October 22, 2007, pp. 61-2. This article notes at least two websites: http://www.literarytraveler.com and http://www.classicalpursuits.com. Also see Malamud, Randy, "You've Read the Book, Now Take a Look!: Literary Tourism and the Quest for Authenticity," The Chronicle Review, May 15, 2009, B12-5. On related books, see Brooks, Victoria, eds., Literary Trips: Following in the Footsteps of Fame, Vancouver, BC: GreatestEscapes.com Publishing, 2000. Among other stops on the writer's trail, this book explores Noel Coward's Jamaica, Bruce Chatwin's Australia, and Mary Shelley's Switzerland. Also see Literary Trips 2: Following in the Footsteps of Fame, Vancouver, BC: GreatestEscapes.com Publishing, 2001. This second volume includes chapters on Arthur C. Clarke's Sri Lanka, Beatrix Potter's Lake District, and Franz Kafka's Prague. Also see Cousineau, Phil, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred, San Francisco, CA, Conari Press, 2000. Finally, see Varlow, Sally, A Reader's Guide to Writers' Britain, 2nd ed., London, Prion, 2000.

(8.) Browning, W. R. F., A Dictionary of the Bible, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 296.

(9.) Hauer and Young, An Introduction to the Bible, p. 82.

(10.) I select scenes from Mystic Lands, a thirteen-part series on DVD, and urge students to acquire and use some cross-cultural sensitivity as well as terminology in understanding sacred places. For details on the series, see http://www.duncanentertainment.com/movie_mystic_set.php. Also, I encourage students to consult two other sites http://www.usnews.com/features/news/sacred-places/sacred-places,html and http://www.sacredsites.com/.

(11.) Where possible, I have students supplement their audio-visual experience by reading relevant, short sections from two fine anthologies of religious travel tales: O'Reilly, Sean, and James O'Reilly, eds., Pilgrimage: Adventures of the Spirit, San Francisco, CA: Travelers' Tales, 2000; and Bouldrey, Brian, ed., Traveling Souls: Contemporary Pilgrimage Stories, San Francisco, CA: Whearabouts Press, 1999.

(12.) Spiritual travel has become enormously popular among contemporary Christians. The writers at Christianity Today, North America's leading evangelical magazine, recently devoted a cover article to the trend. Here Ted Olsen focuses on those classic places where Christians have journeyed for centuries--the biblical lands, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and Iona--as well as more modern sites that stimulate the sacred--Taize, the Kilns, the Holy band Experience, short-term mission trips, major worship conferences, and Wheaton, Illinois (home to C. S. Lewis's wardrobe, J. R. R Tolkien's desk, and Billy Graham's pulpit, among other so-called relics). See Olsen, Ted, "He Talked to Us on the Road: The Surprising Rewards of Christian Travel," Christianity Today 53.4 (April 2009), 23-9.

(13.) See http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312279,00.html.

(14.) Elizondo, Virgil, "Pilgrimage: An Enduring Ritual of Humanity," in Virgil Elizondo and Sean Freyne, editors, Pilgrimage, London: SCM Press, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996, p. ix.

(15.) See Porter, Jennifer E., "Pilgrimage and the IDIC Ethic: Exploring Star Trek Convention Attendance as Pilgrimage," in Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, eds., Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004, pp. 160-179.

(16.) See Bubriski, Kevin, and Richard B. Woodward, Pilgrimage: Looking at Ground Zero, New York: Powerhouse Books, 2002. Introduced by Woodward, this stunning series of photographs captures how Ground Zero's ruins attracts thousands of different people and inspires them to reflect on loss and mortality in ways that open out to an impressive sense of belonging.

(17.) Porter, Jennifer E., "Pilgrimage and the 1D1C Ethic," p. 161.

(18.) What follows from this point is an exercise in what the historian Stephen Prothero calls "belief unbracketed," in that it reveals where I am coming from as a religion scholar, especially as an academic who believes, and it represents one of my most personal accounts of a scholarly topic to date. See Prothero, Stephen, "Belief Unbracketed," Harvard Divinity Bulletin 32.2 (Winter/Spring 2004), pp. 10-11.

(19.) In particular, see Doss, Erika, Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image, Kansas City: University Press of Kansas, 1999, pp. 69-113, 213-59. Also see Davidson, J. W., et al. "The Pilgrimage to Graceland," in G. Rinschede and S. Bhardwaj, eds., Pilgrimage in the United States, Berlin, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990, pp. 229-52.

(20.) Iyer, Pico, "A Journey into Candlelight," in Brian Bouldrey, ed., Traveling Souls, p. vii.

(21.) Good guidebooks helped me find such sites in the past. These days, I use Jim Tipton's online database of over twenty-one million burial records. See http://www.findagrave.com/ Tipton created and launched this site in 1995, an attempt to help those who shared his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people. The site is now open to non-famous memorials, making it an excellent genealogical database also.

(22.) This cemetery was the scene of the Paris Commune's final and bloody stand on May 28, 1871; the last insurgents were cornered and attacked the night before, fierce fighting taking place among the graves. Today, the famous Mur de Federes stands as a monument to the 147 survivors and remains a political pilgrimage for many.

(23.) An amusing account of the pilgrimage to Wilde's grave is captured by director Wes Craven in his contribution to Paris, Je T'Aime (Paris, I Love You), a film in which many artists portray aspects of the city they admire so fiercely.

(24.) Wilde is not remembered for his religious views, generally speaking, though I have found reading The Selfish Giant--a children's story with simply marvelous allusions to Christ--to my toddler (born exactly 104 years after Wilde's death) very moving. I think it worth noting that Wilde was received into the Catholic Church on his death bed. He is not a Catholic writer in the sense that Endo, Greene, and O'Connor are or were, to be true, but I do find it fascinating that I, a Protestant, should feel drawn to the graves of Catholic writers. "What's up with that?" my students often remark. I confess: I'm not entirely sure!

(25.) For Wilde's grave, see http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=1102.

(26.) Taylor, Mark C, "Ghost Stories," in Mark C. Taylor and Dietrich Christian Lammerts, Grave Matters, London, Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002, p. 38.

(27.) For O'Connor's grave, see http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=767.

(28.) For studies on O'Connor's theology, I recommend Elie, Paul, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003, for the way it treats O'Connor's life as a spiritual journey and suggests several ways in which future pilgrims might benefit from her struggles with the Catholic faith.

(29.) See Fitzgerald, Sally, ed., Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor, New York: Library of America, Viking Press, 1988, p. 1,067.

(30.) See Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian, "Shouting in the Land of the Hard of Hearing: On Being a Hillbilly Thomist," in Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, eds., Aquinas in Dialogue: Thomas for the Twenty-First Century, Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p. 171-2. For more information on O'Connor's theological views, see O'Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, eds., New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

(31.) Geoffery Chaucer describes April as the month for pilgrimages in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. See Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2003, p. 3. I journeyed to Milledgeville shortly after presenting a paper at The Christianity and Literature Southeast Regional Meeting, Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, April 10-12, 2003.

(32.) For Endo's grave, see http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6825793.

(33.) "In my opinion one of the finest novels of our time," Greene wrote on the cover of Silence. For an account of Endo's significance for contemporary Christians, see Yancey, Philip. Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church, New York: Doubleday, 2001, pp. 273-92. I should note that one of the most powerful Catholic film directors of our time, Martin Scorsese, has adapted this novel for the silver screen. As I write, Scorsese's movie is in production; it is scheduled for release to the general public in 2010.

(34.) Hervieu-Leger, Daniele, Le pelerin et le converti: La religion en mouvement, Paris, Flammarion, 1999, p. 102. Translation mine.

(35.) Yancey, Philip, Soul Survivor, p. 282.

(36.) For Greene's grave, see http://www.findagrave.com/cgibin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=5204. It is worth noting that Greene valued unconventional approaches to pilgrimage. He penned "The People's Pilgrimage," a January 1936 Daily Mail Op-Ed about George V lying in state at Westminster Hall, for example, and he admired Malcom Muggeridge's 1938 series of articles on literary pilgrimages, written for Night and Day, especially the piece on D. H. Lawrence. See Greene, Graham, Reflections, selected and introduced by Judith Adamson, Toronto, Lester & Orpen Dennys Limited, 1990. Also see Greene, Richard, ed., Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, London: Little, Brown, 2007, p. 86.

(37.) On Greene's theology, I recommend the essays in Hill, Thomas Wm., ed., Perceptions of Religious Faith in the Work of Graham Greene, London and Bern: Peter Lang, 2001.

(38.) Cloetta, Yvonne, In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene, as told to Marie-Francoise Allain, translated by Euan Cameron, London: Bloomsbury, 2004, p. 186. Compare Greene's remark with Pope John Paul II's words: "... it is the pious tradition during these days for the faithful to go visit the graves of their dear ones and to pray for them." This remark forms an integral part of the Catholic Church's approach to All Souls Day, which, in 2008, stands out as "Cemetery Sunday." For additional information, visit: http://www.CatholicCemeteryConference.org.

(39.) Thanks to Johnny Miles, my TCU colleague, for helping me frame the issue in this manner. And my sincere appreciation to Donia Pelton for initial feedback.

(40.) Don Cupitt, whom I admire greatly, provides another way to view and reflect on this issue, one I find refreshingly disturbing. See Cupitt, Don, Impossible Loves, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2007, pp. 10, 12, 14:

  ... as our lives pass we cannot help but become aware of the extent
  to which we continue to yearn after and pursue various impossible
  objects, loves, dreams, and projects. Why do we do this--and indeed,
  do it more and more? What is the role of these "impossible loves" in
  our lives, and especially in our spiritual lives? ... Here is the
  first hint of the answer. If love for someone who is dead is love for
  an impossible object that is not in any condition and is not in any
  sense there, then it must be a particularly gratuitous, unrewarded,
  and therefore unselfish kind of love. Could the practice of love for
  one's dead perhaps be seen as training in objectless, unrewarded,
  purely generous love--like the Mahayana Buddhist's metta (universal
  compassion) and the Christian's pure agape?

Furthermore:

  The desire to commemorate one's dead is felt in much the same way by
  people all around the world, and it finds expression in many exotic
  practices. Everywhere it is irrational and absurd: it shows human
  beings attempting the impossible, trying somehow to overcome the
  eternal separation that is death. It is utterly futile, and all the
  religious beliefs about "life after death" are absurd. But the very
  fact that our love for the dead cannot be stifled even by the
  knowledge of its impossibility and absurdity makes it somehow divine.
  This excessive, objectless, irrepressible love for the dead is divine
  love. Being human and therefore speakers, we can recognize that some
  things are quite impossible, and that contingent possibilities are
  continually being left unfulfilled, and soon lost forever.
  Contingency, finitude, sadness, yearning, and cosmic love are all
  tangled together in a single package. That's life. It is
  bittersweet.

(41.) Swatos, William H., Jr., and Luigi Tomasi, "Epilogue: Pilgrimage for a New Millennium," in William H. Swatos, Jr., and Luigi Tomasi, eds., From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002, p. 208.

(42.) See Margry, Peter Jan, ed., Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred, Amsterdam: The University of Amsterdam Press, 2008. This anthology explores the modern pilgrimage by referencing, among other things, visits to Graceland, the veterans' annual ride to the Vietnam Memorial, and travel to Jim Morrison's Paris grave.

(43.) Most of my students are Texans. To bring the issue of modern pilgrimage and thanatology closer to home, then, I have experienced success using portions of Untiedt, Kenneth L., ed., Death Lore: Texas Rituals, Superstitions, and Legends of the Hereafter, Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2008.