Sunrise over Pendle Hill Photo: tallpomlin / flickr CC
The pilgrimage paradox
Rowena Loverance goes in search of religious sites and looks at the merits of two recent books
‘To kneel where prayer has been valid.’ This line from TS Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, quoted in the preface of Arthur Kincaid’s new book The Cradle of Quakerism, sums up the paradox that Quakers have to surmount when deciding how to commemorate and celebrate their roots. For prayer can be valid at any time and in any place.
Sacred places
Janet Scott once wrote of the parallel testimony against the keeping of ‘times and seasons’ that it seemed to be dying of neglect. Is the same true of Friends’ testimony against the keeping of sacred places?
Doubts about the value of pilgrimage are as old as pilgrimage itself. In the 380s, whilst the Spanish nun Egeria, one of the earliest recorded Christian pilgrims, was enthusing her way around sacred sites in the Holy Land, the theologian Gregory of Nyssa commented acidly, ‘When the Lord called the chosen ones to inherit the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 25:34), he did not include the journey to Jerusalem among the good deeds’. Gregory also worried about opportunities for debauchery when travelling abroad (especially hazardous for women) and the immoral behaviour of local inhabitants. Surely, he argued, if a place was particularly sacred, this should be mirrored in the conduct of its current residents. One wonders whether this requirement featured in the job description for the recently appointed warden of Swarthmoor Hall.
Kincaid dates the origin of Quaker pilgrimage to the ‘foundation’ sites in northwest England to John Wilhelm Rowntree’s call in 1905 to ‘climb Pendle Hill with Fox and see once more his vision of “a great people to be gathered”’. Around 1930 Ernest Taylor organised the first Quaker tours to what became known as ‘the 1652 country’. Taylor’s account of Fox and his companions, The Valiant Sixty, was first published in 1947; Elfrida Vipont Foulds’ classic, The Birthplace of Quakerism, followed in time for the tercentenary in 1952. Many editions later, the decision was taken in 2009 to commission a new version.
Replacing a treasured text can be a thankless task and Kincaid’s book is, if anything, too faithful to the original. Like Foulds, Kincaid follows as far as possible the route of Fox’s travels, though with an additional chapter covering the Lake District, which has few Fox connections but is too beautiful to omit. The photographs, now in colour rather than black and white, are again grouped together rather than illuminating the text. There is still no index and, though grid references are liberally scattered, there is now not even a sketch map to tide the reader over until the appropriate OS map comes to hand.
Wells and relics
Nick Mayhew Smith’s Britain’s Holiest Places provides a contrasting Anglican perspective on whether any of these much-loved Quaker sites can stand alongside not just high-flyers like Canterbury and Durham but also a host of less well-known sites. Interestingly, he uses Quakers, with their presumed doubts about holy places, as an encouragement to novice pilgrims to take their first steps. ‘If the notion of celebrating – let alone venerating – our holy ancestors makes you feel uneasy… a gentle introduction might be the hill where George Fox had his founding vision of the Quaker movement’. Mayhew Smith specializes in holy wells, such as the oldest recorded baptismal site in England, Taplow in Buckinghamshire. So Pendle Hill makes the cut as much for its holy well, barely mentioned in Kincaid, as for its ‘great people to be gathered’.
Another site that merits a Quaker mention is Launceston, where Fox’s eight-month imprisonment in 1656, which he survived to live to the ripe old age of sixty-six, is contrasted with the martyrdom of St Cuthbert Mayne in 1577 at the age of twenty. And at Lichfield, where Fox stood shoeless in winter to denounce the city, Mayhew Smith asks plaintively, ‘Do Quakers really do that sort of thing?’
The usual supporting cast from the Valiant Sixty make brief appearances in Kincaid’s book: Margaret Fell, weeping in her pew at Ulverston, and troublesome John Story, soon to form half of the Wilkinson-Story controversy, whose offer of a pipe caused Fox, a non-smoker, to suspect him of Ranterist tendencies. Mayhew Smith’s UK-wide canvas allows him to invoke two more Quaker greats, William Penn at Jordans (described as the ‘first Meeting house built by the Society of Friends’, a title that surely belongs to Hertford) and Elizabeth Fry at Norwich. Both are warmly treated.
Mayhew Smith’s star system for his five hundred sites is heavily loaded in favour of those with relics (so why isn’t Jordans awarded a star for Penn’s grave?). In this respect he harks back to Gregory of Nyssa, whose doubts about pilgrimage to Jerusalem did not extend to the shrines of his local martyrs in Cappadocia: he called ‘the very special dead’. But by the time Kincaid had detailed the fragment of a yew tree under which Fox preached at Sedburgh, preserved at Brigflatts, and Robert Foster’s walking stick, preserved at Preston Patrick, it was clear that Friends do not sit quite so lightly to relics after all.
Other faiths
The greatest disappointment with both these books, however, is in what they leave out. Despite Mayhew Smith’s title, his book adopts a largely Christian perspective, which he justifies by saying that he lacks the active engagement with devotional practice that would enable him to write about other faiths. Buddhism is half an exception, because two Christian sites, Taplow and Arran Holy Island, have been taken over by Buddhist organizations. But this points up all the more the lack of any Islamic, Hindu or Sikh sites and as for sites sacred to Jews, surely there should have been a mention at York of the horrific massacre at Clifford’s Tower in 1190.
Sustainable pilgrimages
British Quakers have recently made a public commitment to sustainability, but I looked in vain in Kincaid’s book for any exhortation to pilgrims and their hosts to travel sustainably or to limit environmental impact on arrival. Such ideas are being promoted by the recently launched international Green Pilgrimage movement, represented in England by St Alban’s Cathedral and in Scotland by Luss, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs.
With pilgrimage flourishing so spectacularly as a modern phenomenon – estimated at around a hundred million people per year – it appears that we may just have to continue to live with the paradox. As Gregory of Nyssa wrote: ‘Just as he [Christ] is found in us, he is present in each and every one… in the same way he passes through all regions and all the places of Creation, and he appears in a uniform fashion everywhere in the world’. James Nayler could not have put it better.
The Cradle of Quakerism, Arthur Kincaid, Quaker Books, 2011. ISBN: 9781907123221. £8.00
Britain’s Holiest Places, Nick Mayhew Smith, Lifestyle Press Ltd, Bristol, 2011. ISBN: 9780954476748. £19.99
For further information:
- Young people’s resources on Quaker pilgrimage: http://bit.ly/YFPilgrimagePDF
- Green Pilgrimage network: http://bit.ly/GreenPilgrimage
