Pilgrimage is an age-old practice. People have gone on pilgrimages all through history. Today a steady stream of Christians visit Compostela in Spain; just as millions of Muslims make their way to Mecca; or Hindu holy men travel barefoot to the freezing headwaters of the Ganges in the Himalayas. The aim is to divest oneself of all that stands between you and God and, at the same time, to absorb some of the holiness of the place, often where a saint or holy man (or woman) has lived a life of prayer and turned it into a spiritual oasis. Now in our sesquicentennial year, we in the Diocese of Wellington are seeking to do something similar.

It was perhaps in the 1920s and 30s that things began to change. People started making what can only be called pilgrimages to First World War battle sites: the Somme, Passchendael, Ypres, Messines Ridge, Verdun – and of course, Gallipoli. Hardly ‘holy places’ because there hundreds of thousands of men, mostly young men, were slaughtered. They made these journeys partly to remember the fallen, but also because people realized that these events were somehow central to what was unfolding in the 20th century. They also deeply contradicted what they had been brought up to believe about God. How could God allow such things?

Come the Second World War, things got a whole lot worse. A racially motivated, screaming homicidal maniac called Adolf Hitler got control of the most powerful nation in Europe, Germany, with the express purpose of eliminating the entire Jewish People, the ‘people of God’. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec are the monuments to how far he got down that track – which is where I come in with my notion of being a pilgrim to unholy places. In 1995 I visited Auschwitz and, in subsequent years, the above-named places and many others. I plan to visit more in October and November of this year.
I.
So what does it mean to be a ‘pilgrim to unholy places’? Let me briefly sketch the three nodal points around which this practice of pilgrimage revolves.

First, the pilgrim needs to be open-hearted, receptive or vulnerable. This is about getting a sense of reality. When you stand on the site of a death camp where hundreds of thousands of innocent people were murdered, what first strikes you is the silence. No human voice is audible. Just a big absence, absence of the hubbub of normal human life: people shouting, talking, praying, singing, and going about the business of normal human life: loving and hating, being born and dying. And all the rest. Just a big silence, an absence. You can read about this in books, but to be there is qualitatively different. It’s like in Genesis after Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, God says, ‘Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground’. So there is a listening and a grieving to be done. The pilgrim is faced with that task. It is of course quite overwhelming.

Second, to be a pilgrim to unholy places is in some way to recapitulate the way of Christ. When the poet Dante visited the Inferno of his imagination, he took with him (as his companion and guide) the great poet of antiquity, Virgil. In something of the same way, the pilgrim is companioned to unholy places by the Christ of Golgotha. For who else has the knowledge and wisdom to be a true friend and brother in such a place?

Let me put it this way. In visiting unholy places in an open-hearted, vulnerable way, the pilgrim is inevitably emptied (or divested) of most of what he or she takes for granted: things like language, culture, worldview, wealth, property, privilege, work, education – all the things that make us who we are. None of this is adequate to deal with what the pilgrim experiences – rather as no words are adequate to describe God. As this emptying process makes its devastating way through our being, we begin to discover the authentic, self-emptying Christ of the New Testament. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul addresses his readers with these words:
Let the same mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross. (2:5-8)
If the pilgrim is divested reluctantly (and inevitably incompletely) of power and privilege, the self-emptying, self-limiting Christ did so voluntarily, proactively and completely. We could put it like this. Not only did he himself become a victim amongst all the other victims – including, of course, his fellow Jews in the Holocaust – he also acted out (or modelled) what it means – and what it costs – to be the caring, healing, redeeming presence of God amidst all that horror.

Which brings me to the third point. The aim of the kind of pilgrimages I am describing is not masochism or self-punishment. Sometimes along the way you can break off, have a good meal and a jug of beer! No; what it’s all about has been well expressed by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. He speaks of reaching ‘a deeper level of solidarity with [all] those bearing … human form.’ In plain English, pilgrimage gives you a whole new depth of empathy with people who suffer; with those who are ‘out’ rather than ‘in’; who are discarded onto some social junk heap as dysfunctional or useless. I have put it like this:
‘At this juncture in history we have to learn to hear the cries of the victims before we can hear the voice of God, see God’s God’s face. Here the … self-emptying Christ as redeemer-victim has a double function: to heal our deafness (restore our sight, loose our tongues) so that we get to hear what there is to hear, see what there is to see; and, at the same time, become aware of God’s holy presence even (or especially) in unholy places.’
There is, in other words, a tie-up (or link) between the form (the shape, the figure) of the self-emptying Christ, the form of the victims and what they suffered, and the form of the shambling, self-limiting figure of the pilgrim. This is the Christ who enables the pilgrim to see and to hear; who stands in solidarity with the victims; and, I dare to say, brings redemption as one victim-in-process-of-liberation to another.
II.
None of this – as I’m sure you can imagine – comes easily; and to attempt it on one’s own is to invite disaster. With this in mind, we come to the final part of what it means to be a pilgrim to unholy places. Here the rule is: however much time you spend on your feet walking (or pilgrimming) over unholy places, you must spend an equal or greater amount of time on your knees. Or, to put it another way, prayer for the pilgrim is a matter of sheer survival. You are not, in other words, a tourist, but a pilgrim.

But there is more to it than that. The greatest gift of my pilgrimages has been to discover that often somewhere in the vicinity of the unholy places there is a Carmelite Community. These are groups of praying women (and sometimes, men), contemplatives, who are the spiritual descendents of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross; or, in modern times, Edith Stein, a Jewish woman who became a Carmelite Sister under the name of Sister Benedicta of the Cross and who, with her sister Rosa, was herself a victim of Auschwitz.

To my astonishment and delight, I found that these communities have a theology very similar to my own – with the big difference that whereas I am just an occasional visitor to unholy places, they are there permanently. These convents are not at all gloomy places (as you might imagine). Rather, they are places of light and peace; with guesthouses where you can meet all sorts of interesting people. But they are above all places of prayer.

Each day has big chunks of silence where you can begin to process what is happening to you – not run away from it or repress it. Central and fundamental, however, is the daily Mass (or Eucharist) where ever and again we unite ourselves to the self-emptying yet living Christ in his solidarity with all people, especially the victims, and in his great (and continuing) self-offering of himself and all life to our passionately loving God.

There is, in my experience, no more wonderfully enlivening place to be in all creation; and one, moreover, that is deeply (and often painfully) in touch with reality, the world we now actually inhabit.

That is why I look forward to my next pilgrimage in October and November with trepidation, but also with great joy and in eager anticipation.

Raymond Pelly is Priest Associate at St Paul’s Cathedral, Wellington.