Creative Pilgrim Walks: Using the Ordinary to Touch the Sacred

By The Rev. Sandy Honnold

This book is a creative "tool" that can be used by clergypersons, spiritual directors, and retreat leaders as well as those who would like to create a meditative walk on their own property for their own pleasure or for others' enjoyment.

Creative Pilgrim Walks will enliven the participants who attend a conference, a retreat or a quiet day by helping them to see how their everyday life experiences connect to the sacred.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462035724

The Rev. Sandy Honnold

The lure of Celtic spirituality and the haunting sounds of Celtic music drew The Rev. Sandy Honnold on a pilgrimage to East Ireland where she experienced a number of different pilgrim walks. Out of that experience grew this book so you, too, can create your own unique pilgrim walk. The Rev. Sandy Honnold is a vocational deacon in the Episcopal Church. She lives on the big island of Hawai`i with her husband, three cats and two dogs. She is a poet, artist, quilter and writer who enjoys gardening and designing labyrinths

Book preview

Where to Find What

Foreword

Chapter 1

An Overview

Chapter 2

Location, location, location!

Chapter 3

Part of a Whole or Stand-Alone?

Chapter 4

Draw it, Note it

Chapter 5

Use Your Imagination

Chapter 6

A Hazard You Say?

Chapter 7

Pastoral Concerns

Chapter 8

Drawing From Many Sources

Chapter 9

Putting It All Together

Chapter 10

Have fun! but give guidelines

A note to the reader:

Appendix

Dedicated

to

all those friends and my family

who have walked with me

on my pilgrimage through life

and

Sister Cintra

who introduced me to Ireland

and its rich history of pilgrim walks

Foreword

In the early 1990s I found myself drawn to Celtic music. Then I heard on my local PBS channel that Riverdance, a high energy Celtic dance troupe, would be performing in a nearby city only an hour or so from my home. I had to see them perform! I bought two tickets, invited a friend to go with me and had a marvelous time being entertained and energized.

By the late 1990’s I had a number of books about the Celts and Celtic spirituality. Christian Celtic spirituality and the haunting sounds of Celtic music touched my soul in a way I couldn’t quite explain. I was attracted by the knotwork in their art. It seemed to express their belief that all things, everything, is interconnected. Body and soul, the material world and the unseen beyond our vision, the mind and the spirit are all intertwined. God is with us at all times and in everything we do, and so they created prayers to say upon waking, eating, working, playing, bathing. There seemed to be a prayer for every activity and all occasions. Now Celtic music CDs overflowed my music storage space.

I was on a journey looking for the sacred in my everyday life when a series of events came together which changed 1999 into a pilgrimage year for me.

I was looking once more for a theme for our next yearly women’s retreat. A friend who knew of my interest in all things Celtic pointed the way to information about pilgrimage trips to Ireland, Wales and Scotland. When I read the brochure, I was hooked. I booked a pilgrimage to East Ireland and invited a friend to go with me.

Then two women in my congregation put together a journey to Turkey and Israel so we could walk in the footsteps of St. Paul and Jesus. Well, I had to sign up for that pilgrimage, too.

And there was the trip I had planned with my husband to visit some of my father’s favorite places in Austria. And, what the heck! Why not include southern Germany and a small part of Hungary in that trip. It was going to be a busy six months.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, each of these journeys was going to be a pilgrimage, one way or another, in search of the holy. Even our journey to Austria, Germany and Hungary was a search for the holy, and to see my father’s favorite ski resort of Lech in the high snow-covered Austrian Alps. I read about the old village of Hellein in a guide book, then unexpectedly found an old pre-Christian Celtic village and the salt mines they worked in nearby. We visited the old town of St. Stephen, Hungary, and we must have walked miles around Castle Hill in Budapest.

And need I mention the wonder and beauty of seeing God’s tapestry of creation in the green valleys, the flowing water of rivers and streams, the rugged snow-capped mountains and looking at the blue sky? Even the beauty of man’s creations were inspiring. Magnificent stone castles and buildings, miles of rock walls, masterful paintings, wood carvings, sturdily built houses and barns in immaculate, neat-as-a-pin yards. Tunnels dug through mountains; real feats of engineering and hard labor plus roads clinging to the sides of cliffs.

In Turkey and Israel I truly did walk in the footsteps of St. Paul and Jesus. I gazed at ancient buildings and explored the ruins of cities long ago abandoned—Ephesus, Colossae, Perge, and Caesarea—to name a few. We toured the ruins of ancient cave cities and an underground city of refuge.

With no stretch of the imagination I found the holy everywhere. Walking on the shore of the sea of Galilee. In the undercroft of the Church of the Beatitudes when a dove flew in the door and circled around just as Father Bill consecrated the bread and wine. Standing in the small tomb and taking part in Communion in the lush garden in the Garden Tomb area. Walking the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem as we approached the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Visiting the tiny chapel on a high hill overlooking Ephesus which is believed to have been St. John’s home with a tiny room to one side for Mary, mother of Jesus.

My last flight that year was to Ireland. And here, once again, I found the holy everywhere: holy wells (usually natural springs bubbling up out of a crack in the earth), the ruins of old monastic cities, the worn cobblestones of an ancient Roman road, Celtic saints’ oratories, high crosses from St. Patrick’s time, and colorful stories told with a brogue as only the Irish can tell them.

What I didn’t expect were the pilgrim walks. Now I don’t mean just taking a walk around an ancient town or some old ruins and buildings. No, the pilgrim walks were different. Each had it’s own feel and focus yet each in its own way was a pilgrimage in search of the holy. The holy in history. The sacred in a saint’s life. The holiness of a place. The sacredness of God’s creation made just for us and for God’s creatures. We were surrounded by history and the holy.

But most truly these