From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Walk This Way
Not all religious pilgrimages are as strenuous as the Shiites'.
It is an old human belief that the virtue of a venerated place rubs off on those who make a pilgrimage there.
All this week we have seen images from Iraq, of Shiites on their way to Karbala, large musters of bloodstained men inching their way toward the place where their first spiritual leader, Imam Hussein, was killed in the year 680. His violent death imbued Shiites forever after with a devotional attachment to martyrdom and with the conviction that the visitation of physical pain upon the self is the purest form of piety.
The mass-pilgrimage had been banned for 25 years by Saddam Hussein, possibly the longest period of peregrinal deprivation in Karbala's history. And to think that many in the Muslim world regard the U.S.--whose ousting of Saddam has made the simple pains of pilgrimage possible again--as anti-Islamic.
Yet not all pilgrimage is as gory as the one to Karbala--or as gaudy, for the self-flagellation is as much melodrama as it is prayer. Hindu pilgrimages, in contrast, are more like saga holidays, with men and women traveling together to sacred mountaintops or rivers. Top-of-the-line asceticism is optional, and only the most untemporal holy men deny themselves food or adequate clothing. Most other pilgrims get by with a simple avoidance of meat and alcohol. Easily done, and more pleasant than flagellation.
Christian pilgrimage, too, has tended to be more of a jolly bustle than a puritanical exercise: Chaucer, in this respect, is a notable anthropologist. One would be as unlikely to find a Wife of Bath on the road to Karbala as one would a bloody-backed man in an alehouse on the road to Canterbury. But old-fashioned pilgrimages have died out in Europe--one goes to Santiago de Compostela by train or air, to Fatima by bus--and only religious enthusiasts of a woopsy persuasion still make an annual pilgrimage to Canterbury on foot, with smells and bells and mock-Chaucerian vestments. Their way is theater.
Of course, there are pilgrimages--such as those commonplace in precommunist Tibet, when men hurled themselves down to the ground every three steps on the way to Lhasa--that are treks of true hardship, where the manner of the trip matters as much as the arrival.
Here, as in other peregrinations, the concept of "rites of passage"--offered by the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep, although not in the context of pilgrimages per se--might be of modest service in describing the trajectory of the pilgrim. He begins with "separation" (from one's family, for example, or a previous, less exalted spiritual status); he then experiences a period of "transition" (the physical and emotional journey); and he concludes with a "reincorporation" into the life that he put on hold for the duration of the pilgrimage.
In all cases, a purgation, or atonement, is the point. The pilgrim returns with a clean slate. In the more emotional religious sects, such as the Shiites', it helps if the experience is a transporting one physically, a kind of ecstatic trance (here born of pain) or loss of self.
Why do modern societies lose the urge of religious pilgrimage? The obvious answer is that religion plays a smaller role in the West--or at least a less stylized one--than in the countries of the East. One might also say that, in coming to America, the Pilgrims exhausted their need for further pilgrimage. The Protestant ethos (which, through the English language and America's influence, also pervades the Catholic world) dictates clear-eyed, disciplined living, rational virtues and a control of the self. It discourages intensity of feeling, which is the fuel in every religious pilgrim's tank.
That is not to say that pilgrimages, broadly defined, are absent in a place like America. Our society has other ritual journeys.
Is there a family in the U.S. that hasn't made the trip to Washington to see the Lincoln Memorial, the Mall, the White House? Previous generations (though fewer do so now) flocked to Civil War battlefields. Others go to Graceland, which has become a hybrid of Lourdes and Disney World. Texans visit San Antonio to remember the Alamo. American literature and popular culture are replete with examples of the "road trip"--a pilgrimage of a peculiar sort, but a pilgrimage still, in which one discovers oneself as well as one's country.
In Karbala, Iraqis are now doing the same. But it's a very Shiite road trip.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.
