A pilgrim’s tale: Harvey Gillman embraces ‘liberation, exile, and confinement all at once’

‘I have stopped at many shrines sacred and profane (though I am unsure about the difference).’

When I came back from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela some years ago, I attached a shell, the symbol of that journey, onto a rucksack to remind me that everyday was a pilgrimage. One day, I lost the shell at a supermarket. I had to remember that symbols were useful but not necessary, though they can sometimes lead to interesting conversations with strangers. When I look back at the journey of my life, it does seem like a pilgrimage. I have stopped at many shrines sacred and profane (though I am unsure about the difference). Or perhaps they are just oases where I can pause momentarily from the restless search. Many of these places have given me gifts and changed me in some way.

I have often wondered what keeps me moving, why I am so restless. As a child I was part of a warm working-class Jewish community but increasingly dissatisfied at what felt to me its conformity and fearfulness of the world outside. Leaving it to go to university however (no one of my family had ever gone there before) led to a sense of exile. The move from working-class Cheetham Hill in Manchester to a very upper-middle-class coterie studying French and Italian at Oxford was extremely challenging. I wanted to explore new things, new friendships, new ways of being, a new sense of belonging, but also to keep ‘real’, whatever that meant in those foreign parts. Continually I sensed a difference, an experience of otherness. This was my feeling, even when, just before going up to Oxford, I visited Mount Street Meeting In Manchester. I warmed to the people I met there, but felt I did not really have a place among them.

The word pilgrim is from the Latin, peregrinus, one who is from abroad, someone who does not belong here, someone who has travelled from out there to here.  We can see its use in Christian literature – we are in the world but not of it, our real home is elsewhere. I have now published an anthology of poems, the original title of which was Poems of Liberation, Exile, and Confinement. They depict chronologically the journey of breaking free and then feeling in exile from too much freedom. Now there is this latest stage, our confinement, the word used in Latin languages today for lockdown. Confinement refers both to putting bounds to our lives – we live with boundaries (con + finis), but confinement also refers to the restriction to the childbed, as we await new birth.

As the outreach secretary for Quaker Home Service (now Quaker Life), I met many exiles, refugees and pilgrims, who were escaping from the restrictions of their former lives. For many of these, the Quaker world was a step of the journey away from what they knew as home. Several stayed with us but were hesitant, lest the Quaker shrine/oasis might be another, albeit more agreeable, place of confinement. What, they would say as they discovered more of our ways, you have a Quaker discipline? You have elders and overseers? Are there inner and outer groups? I appreciated the comment of one enquirer who said: ‘You don’t know the rules until you have broken them’. So strong is this resistance to a feeling of new restrictions on the part of some religious refugees, that they may fear membership as yet another fetter tied to their pilgrim’s feet.

We are aware of these paradoxes. Our book of discipline is not an enforcement of faith and practice, but an anthology (anthos is Greek for flower, hence an anthology is a sort of garden) of the experiences of pilgrims now and in the past, and of the practices they have found useful for communal living. We have corporate testimonies, but also individual leadings, as members or attenders interpret for themselves how they are led by the voice of life, which we may see as the voice of God. We try to welcome the flowering of diversity but we often worry that we do not all speak the same languages. On the way to Santiago, we did not all speak the same language, but what we had in common there was the intention and the direction and the need for reverence – and the attempt to communicate. We shared our pilgrims’ tales.

In large parts of the Christian church, it was recently the season of Epiphany, the season of revelation of the divine. The astrologers, who did not belong to Jewish society, came from the east and were not at home in their old wisdom. They had to make a journey to an unknown land. Perhaps they returned home with a sense of exile in their hearts. Did they still belong to their old ways of doing things? Where did they now belong? Somehow, I do not think they regretted the risk of pilgrimage. The new title of my book of poems is Epiphanies, embracing liberation, exile, and confinement all at once. Each shrine is a revelation (the meaning of epiphany) on the way to a destination which remains uncertain.

At the beginning of the lockdown in Spain, I wrote the following, which is included in the new book.

Pedregalejo. Prayer

Each day, before this time began,
before the beach was cordoned off
and policemen guarded sand and sea
he came alone to shore and sun,
and crawled across the broken rocks
to find a place to hold him firm.
He sat where sea, and sky, and cloud alone
might fill his eyes, his arms outstretched.

One day a cormorant came into view;
the next, out, out to sea a sail;
the next, a sudden revelation
of overwhelming light. Words
were washed away like footmarks on sand.
He closed his eyes. An unvoiced cry
from deep within, a letting go, a giving up.
‘All that I ever was, to all that ever is’.

The light was tendered.
The sun turned rose.
The night fell softly,
from dark to light
and light to dark

the silence
and the lapping waves.

Epiphanies: Poems of liberation, exile and confinement is available from harveygillman@gmail.com for £5 plus £1.53 postage inland.

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