The Singular Pilgrim
by Mahoney, Rosemary
In an increasingly secular age of high-speed travel and advanced technology, it is surprising to learn that the ancient tradition of religious pilgrimage is on the rise. Charting this phenomenon from Ireland to India, Rosemary Mahoney turns her sharp eye and discerning ear on the pilgrims she meets in the course of six extraordinary journeys. Never a passive observer, Mahoney is a full participant, soldiering barefoot through the three-day penitential Catholic pilgrimage on Ireland’s Station Island, walking the five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain, braving the icy bathwater at Lourdes, where pilgrims beseech the Blessed Virgin for miraculous cures. In Varanasi, India’s holiest city, Mahoney befriends a curious young boy whose intelligence and sensitivity provide startling insights into this ancient culture, with its public cremations and elaborate prayer rituals. And in the Holy Land, she rows alone across the Sea of Galilee to spend an unnerving, hilarious night camped below the Golan Heights in search of the essence of Jesus, a vigil punctuated by a pack of howling cats and a bad case of the jitters. What Mahoney discovers among the true believers and charlatans, the holy and the profane, is the single thread that binds all religions: the desire for a relationship with God. "If I was struck by anything," she writes, "it was the shared human struggle to find reason, to confront the natural fear of uncertainty and obscurity." The Singular Pilgrim is a book less about religion than about belief. "An affecting visit to the ancient, humbling act of pilgrimage . . . [Mahoney] conveys a genuine sense of spiritual mindfulness on the road, and there is no denying that these pilgrimages paid her back in full" (Kirkus Reviews).
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On Apr 23, 2014, Anonymous said
“It seemed a delightful thing to be sitting in a kitchen at the dead center of a house with nothing buts bats and stars for a ceiling and a lizard shrieking and chattering behind the refrigerator.” What with bloggers and journal keepers and personal websites and the viral welter of personalia, writers like Rosemary Mahoney are both an example and a caution. She does what the introspecting young dream of: writing, not novels or poems or short stories but non-fiction books based on her personal experiences. The trick is, she does it awfully, awfully well. THE EARLY ARRIVAL OF DREAMS: A Year in China (Fawcett) and WHOREDOM IN KIMMAGE: The World of Irish Women (Anchor) are accounts of residencies abroad; A LIKELY STORY: One Summer with Lillian Hellman (Anchor) is a reminiscence of when in late adolescence she worked as a housegirl for the devastatingly irascible playwright; her most recent, DOWN THE NILE: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff (Little, Brown) is about an Egyptian voyage, with wonderful word-portraits and a comic, horrible, self-terrifying passage about crocodiles; perhaps my favorite, THE SINGULAR PILGRIM: Travels on Sacred Ground (Mariner), brings us to Walsingham, Lourdes, Santiago, Varanasi, the Holy Land and Lough Derg in Ireland. They are all terrifically readable and the least narcissistic, most sharply observed books you could imagine. They are full of people, to whom Mahoney reacts with intelligence, kindness, fury and respect. The writing is lively and vivid and when there is introspection we come to enjoy it, because of its honesty and depth, as much as we enjoy her snapshot-perfect eye for detail and her memory for things said. She captures how in the midst of observation the past can stick its insisting nose into the present; she is infinitely curious and adventurous; and when she says, in THE SINGULAR PILGRIM, “Humor seemed to me the height of wisdom,” we believe her. She’s done her reading and knows where she is, and then sees where the place will take her. PILGRIM addresses the problem of religious belief and in its personal, sidewise tack says as much, and as honestly, as anything I’ve read on the subject. There’s been a huge boom of memoir and personal reportage in the last decades—in Mahoney’s books we find out how well it can be done.
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The Singular Pilgrim
by Rosemary Mahoney
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Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003 . First edition. Paperback. Very good/No Dustjacket. 8vo. pp.404.paperback edition.""The author explores the meaning and practice of religious pilgrimage as she recreates the Irish Catholic pilgrimage to Station Island, visits to holy sites in Israel, the Hindu pilgrimage to Varanasi, and a trip to Lourdes, among others."" Item Price
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The Singular Pilgrim : Travels on Sacred Ground
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