Pilgrimage: Walking to Peace, Walking for Change

By Ian S. McIntosh

This is a book about pilgrimage, peace building, and being here in the future. Sacred journeys are by far the most peaceful mass rituals that humankind has yet devised for itself. Can these journeys contribute to ending the poverty, racial inequality, and intractable conflict so common on the world stage today? In a radical rethinking of the nature and definition of pilgrimage, anthropologist Ian McIntosh describes this ancient practice as a handy tool in the peace-builder’s toolkit. In a range of case studies, he shows how pilgrimage provides geographically and historically separated peoples with a strong sense of their membership in a global community facing global challenges. The text includes autobiographical accounts of the author’s experience of pilgrimage in Aboriginal Australia, Communist China, multi-faith Sri Lanka, and the embattled Gaza Strip. There are also academic papers that advance the proposed link between pilgrimage and peace building from Canada, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Russia and elsewhere. The common thread in all these sacred journeys is a vision of peace, justice and sustainability. We are all in this together. For humankind to survive on this planet, pilgrimage, in all its rich diversity, will undoubtedly play a critical role.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781984578754

Ian S. McIntosh

is an Adjunct Professor in Anthropology in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, Indiana (IUPUI). He is also the Director of International Partnerships at IUPUI, and the Associate Director of the Confucius Institute in Indianapolis. He is a co-founder of Past Masters International, and the Indianapolis Spiritual Trail.

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Rev. date: 06/05/2020

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Signposts

We are pilgrims and strangers on the earth.

Hebrews 11:13-16

I wandered lonely as a cloud.

William Wordsworth

Not all those who wander are lost.

J.R.R. Tolkien

It is only the pilgrims who in the travails of their earthy voyage do not lose their way.

Werner Herzog/Thomas a Kempis

When the train pulls into the platform, step off the train. Hidden behind the platform is a broken machine; a mechanised fortune teller—the ‘voice of truth’—discarded from the nearby arcade of slot machines. Propped against the side of a building, its mouth is silent, its pronouncements have ceased; any truths you find today will be your own.

Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage

Signposts

We give thanks for places of simplicity and peace. Let us find such a place within ourselves. We give thanks for places of refuge and beauty. Let us find such a place within ourselves. We give thanks for places of nature’s truth and freedom, of joy, inspiration, and renewal, places where all creatures may find acceptance and belonging. Let us search for these places in the world, in ourselves, and in others. Let us restore them. Let us strengthen and protect them, and let us create them. May we amend this outer world according to the truth of our inner life and may our souls be shaped and nourished by nature’s eternal wisdom.

Michael Leunig

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter, floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it marveling at its big pools of water, its little pools, and the water flowing between the pools… The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface and at the creatures in the water. The people would declare it sacred because it was the only one, and they would protect it… The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to pray to it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty... People would love it and defend it with their lives because they would somehow know that their lives, their own roundness, could be nothing without it.

Joe Miller

Contents

Prelude The Context for an Exploration of Pilgrimage and Visioning

The Journey to Space is Our Journey; Being Here in the Future: The Australia Connection; Shared Images as Building Blocks of Peace; The Spark of Inspiration: Pilgrimage and Peacebuilding; A Pilgrimage Groupie; The Anthropological Lens; The Religious Lens

Chapter 1 My Journey Within a Journey

Pilgrimage to the Dazhai Commune, China, 1977

Chapter 2 In Search of the Dreaming

Emerging from Silence; Heading to Australia’s North; Becoming an Activist; Seeking the Shaman; Meeting the Shaman; Burrumarra’s Sacred Journey; The Journey to Heaven

Chapter 3 Learning from Indigenous Peoples

Pilgrimage and Indigenous Rights; Maasai Journeys; Elizabeth Penashue: A Pilgrimage for the Future

Chapter 4 Walking Solutions

Mt Ararat: A Beacon of Hope

Chapter 5 Discovering the Third Side

Envisioning a Pilgrimage of Peace in the Gaza Strip

Chapter 6 Living in Community

To the Top Together. Pilgrimage and Peacebuilding on Sri Lanka’s Holy Mountain

Chapter 7 Transforming Worlds

Xuanzang and Bodhidharma in Buddhist India and China

Chapter 8 Interfaith and Intercultural Pilgrimage and Peacebuilding

The Pilgrim Paradox in Xinjiang Province, China

Chapter 9 The Inspired Search for Peace

Peace Pilgrims; Radical Forgiveness

Chapter 10 Journeys of Transformation

Communities of the Heart

Chapter 11 Justice and Atonement

Social Activism for the Greater Common Good

Chapter 12 At Home with Ourselves

Something Significant Happened Here

Conclusion: The Story is the Vision

Bibliography

Prelude

THE CONTEXT FOR AN EXPLORATION

OF PILGRIMAGE AND VISIONING

The Journey to Space is Our Journey

Since 1977, this question—and it is an extremely difficult one—has been the topic of discussion in hundreds of classrooms. In August and September of 1977, NASA attached an interstellar message in a bottle to the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes headed to the outer reaches of the universe. The anticipated lifetime of the mission was billions of years. Like an old-fashioned vinyl LP with a stylus but made of gold-plated copper, the golden record had a message about humanity to share with other intelligent lifeforms. The record had a very limited recording capacity. There were only 116 images of the natural and built environment, obscure scientific symbols and equations, messages of greetings in 55 languages (including an Australian diplomat speaking Esperanto), and 90 minutes of world music and the sounds of Earth, including whale songs, traffic noises, lightning, rain and frogs croaking, a baby’s cry and a human kiss. The question posed to schoolchildren as an exercise in global thinking was this: If you had a chance to add an image to the recording, what would it be and why?

The golden record project, which was orchestrated by the inspired astrophysicist Carl Sagan, well-known for his TV series Cosmos, did not refer to ongoing global problems like war, famine, oppression, or disease, and there was no mention of religion or gods except in one short prayer from a Ugandan elder. In his written greeting, US President Jimmy Carter referred to the immense challenges facing humankind in the 1970s, but he also envisioned a brighter future where the Earth would someday join a community of galactic civilizations.

The $64,000 question is whether humanity will still be around to witness that glorious future.

A similar golden record today, in the form of a silicon chip, could contain vast quantities of data, enough perhaps to mention a name and description of all living things. But in this new iteration, we must be very selective, with each sound bite or segment chosen not on a whim but for reasons that resonate across cultures, ethnicities and religions, saying something profound about the human condition and our unique world. This is not an easy task. What are those cherished characteristics that define us? Would we have an image of Mother Theresa, for example, as she administered care to the dying? Would we include the sound of laughter, which English raconteur Peter Ustinov described as the most civilized ‘music’ in the universe. What would you choose?

When I conducted this experiment to a class of perplexed students at Indiana University in 2019, I framed the task in terms of Richard Dawkins’ view of the entire evolutionary journey of humankind and all other species as a sacred journey or pilgrimage. In that light, the new message had to confirm our understanding that what got us here, to this point in human history, will not necessarily get us there i.e. to live hand in hand with our interstellar friends. We had to show in these sounds and images that we knew what it takes to be at peace with ourselves and to celebrate the interconnected nature of life. The emphasis in the message, therefore, was not just to be about our proven strengths in the pure sciences and their practical applications. That would be obvious from the fact that the recording even exists and is being catapulted through space. We needed a deeper message, one that showed that we were on top of things. We knew how to survive and thrive.

This is a serious task, and a very challenging one. In the twenty-first century, with human and planetary survival hanging in the balance, the message that we include is as much for our own benefit as for the enlightenment of any beings who might find the time capsule in the future. For that reason, I strongly believe that this question should be asked in every classroom in every nation in the hope of one day building a planetary consensus around the importance of being here in the future. What we include in our ‘message in a bottle’—and the answers that we come up with must speak to Earth’s population as a whole and not be driven by the canon or creed of any particular group—will encapsulate our collective vision and help us work towards its realization.

With its tiny pool of ideas and images, sounds, and voices, the 1977 Voyager greeting card provided the barest of glimpses into who we are as a people and where we stand on the evolutionary ladder. Fifty plus years on, with our enormous developments in technology, huge population increases, the emergence of pandemics like HIV/AIDS, Ebola and the Coronavirus, and global terrorism, what else needs saying to our intergalactic comrades? What truths do we need to affirm to ourselves?

Being Here in the Future: The Australia Connection

A visit in 2018 to Australia’s isolated northern coastline rekindled my interest in the golden record. One of the musical offerings inscribed on the LP was the Morning Star (Venus) song performed by members of my extended Aboriginal family on Elcho Island. (In the mid-1980s I was adopted into an Aboriginal clan and I lived in the Outback for several years). A melodious yet haunting tune featuring the digeridoo and clapsticks with a vocal accompaniment, this song was a perfect complement to the contributions of legends like Beethoven and Chuck Berry to demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of the world’s musical offerings. Humpback whale songs were also included on the record and they are also sacred to the Aboriginal people, and together they set a powerfully mystical tone to the interstellar enterprise.

As with other First Peoples, the twentieth century had taken a vicious toll on indigenous Australians. The destruction of Aboriginal culture and language, the theft of tribal lands, and the desecration of sacred sites, spelled extinction for many groups, especially for those ‘in the way of progress.’ From 1986 to 1992, I worked closely with Aboriginal leaders from Australia’s remote ‘Top End’ on land and sea rights, and on justice and reconciliation projects designed to ameliorate the impacts of two hundred years of brutal injustice. The expressed goal of Aboriginal activism in those days was so that they could be here in the future. The Aboriginal people that I lived with would not die out like so many other indigenous groups before them. Their culture and language would survive just as it had done for more than 50,000 years.

The idea of sharing with aliens in some distant galaxy the unique Aboriginal land-centered philosophy through song, digeridoo and clapsticks provided some degree of assurance and even encouragement that their struggle would not be in vain. As I describe in the pages ahead, indigenous Australians have much to teach us about treading softly upon the earth. Like them, we need to educate our children to see planetary concerns as their own concerns, and have them recognize the vital role all must play in setting things on a proper course.

Despite its limitations, the original Voyager golden record said something profound about the human story. Sent into the outer reaches of intergalactic space, we now await the audience’s response, which may of course never come. If indeed the golden record is ever played by aliens millions of years into the future, what is the takeaway? Would the aliens conclude that there was once a curious species living on a little blue planet who had developed strong technological skills and sought communion with their counterparts in the cosmos, but lacked the skills to save themselves from destruction?

Alternatively, do we already possess those skills or have the capability of developing them? This has been the subject of countless science fiction books, television series and films. The message is often posed thus: As a civilization, are we just a flash in the pan and soon to enter into another great cycle of annihilation and regeneration, as predicted in Hindu philosophy, or does this iteration of life on earth have staying power? As Carl Sagan was quick to remind us, our future is not assured. In a billion years, the sun may have exhausted itself, and humans may have evolved in entirely new an unexpected ways. However, the fight for survival, which has occupied our species since the very beginning, will undoubtedly continue.

The very act of sending a rocket into space to advance our understanding of the meaning of life gets to the very heart of the human experience. This endless search evokes the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, the Greek Armenian mystic and philosopher who was in search of a knowledge that he was certain had existed in the past but of which all traces seemed to have disappeared in the modern world. It is a widely held belief that an original harmony or perfection must exist somewhere in the swirling galaxies, for such excellence presents itself to us in the astonishing symmetry of a snowflake or the towering accomplishment of the builders of the pyramids of Egypt.

This search for knowledge is fundamental to the human story. As the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, we strive to seek to find and not to yield. Sending the Voyager into space was the strongest statement yet that as a species we are driven to know, to understand, and pass on our unique story to new generations. It is the hallmark of our species, as essential to us as the opposable thumb was to our ancestors in coming down out of the trees at the dawn of time.

The golden record said a lot about who we are as a species but not much about whether we have what it takes to be here in the future. All of our actions, including the choices we make right now regarding climate change or waging peace, for example, must be measured against, or considered in the light of a philosophy of endurance that we will develop and proudly share with aliens in a new golden record.

Shared Images as Building Blocks of Peace

So what images would I choose to be on a future space mission? Here are four for consideration.

My first image is that of a storyteller, speaking with love and affection to his audience about the deep mysteries that enchant our lives and drive us forwards in the search for truth.

I have known many great storytellers, but none quite like the famous African American street poet Brother Blue of Cambridge, Massachusetts, often described as the John Coltrane of storytelling. In the 1990s, I was a regular at his storytelling gigs where he used to say in his opening bit Climb the mountain! Climb the mountain! The mountain is inside you! Climb to that place where the higher self is!

For Brother Blue, street poetry was both a sacred duty and a path to universal harmony. He once said to me, When you tell a story, tell it to all creation. At the beginning of his sessions, he would perform a small ceremony where his audience had to visualize all the storytellers who ever were or will be, like the little girl who falls off her bike and scrapes her knee and runs to her mother to tell her the story.

Philosopher Marshall McLuhan is well known for his dictum the medium is the message. The Voyager rocket was itself a message, a story. Packaged on the space probe were not just images and sounds, but an implied narrative saying, among other things, that human beings are storytellers. We have an important story to tell about who we are. Human beings are so many things. They are scientists and tradespeople, but also entertainers and the creators of illusions. As various experts have told us, the study of our stories is a study of the way we experience our world. By some accounts, we are hotwired for stories and they have been indispensable to human life since the very beginning. As William Schneider says in Living with Stories. Telling, Retelling and Remembering, people remember more than just the words of a good story. They remember how they were invited into the story itself, into a relationship with the narrator and the events of the past and their meaning for the present and future.

According to Jonathan Gottschall in The Storytelling Animal, we are the stories that we tell ourselves. We live in landscapes of make-believe, spinning fantasies left, right and center that help us to navigate life’s complexities. According to Gottschall, we are averse to explanatory vacuums. If we cannot find a meaningful pattern in the vicissitudes of life, then we will try to impose one, with religion being the ultimate expression of story’s dominion over our thinking. Religion provides multiple benefits to individuals, societies and civilizations. It not only defines them, but it also coordinates behavior through rules, norms, punishments and rewards. However, while causing people to behave more decently towards members of the in-group, this is usually at the expense of the out-group. Hence, our need for new stories that transcend the artificial but very real boundaries between us.

Consider also the impact of religion’s prevailing meta-narratives on the environment. The Book of Genesis, for instance, says: Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Do such narratives work in the interests of planetary survival or against sustainability?

Human beings have long imposed upon the Earth ideologies that severely limit our chances of survival. However, ecologists and eco-theologians in most of the world religions are now actively promoting a new mindset by telling stories that inspire a sense of unity and friendship with all living things. Aldo Leopold, the author of the influential The Sand County Almanac, for instance says:

We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

I singled out storytellers for inclusion on the new golden record not only because they frame the way that we understand things, but also because they can inspire us to dream about, and realize, the aforementioned higher place within. Superman actor Christopher Reeves said it best. At first dreams seem impossible, then improbable, then finally inevitable. The storyteller invites us to travel with them into this separate realm of dreams, where all is possible, including our deeply held wish for the future.

My second image is that of the Earth and all its interrelated systems as an object of worship.

I initially thought of including a picture of a Whirling Dervish given that this sacred Sufi Islamic dance imitates the motion of planets in our solar system—an appropriate image for the interstellar travel of a new golden record. These Sufis whirl as a way of seeking the source of all perfection. They abandon their desires and focus only on the teachings of Rumi, their prophet. Travel writer Rick Steves, in his book Travel as a Political Act, tells the story of his encounter with a Dervish in Turkey. The Dervish explained to him that five times a day he would plant one foot in his home, his family and his community, while:

…the other foot goes around and celebrates the diversity in all god’s great creation. One arm goes up to accept the love of our maker and the other arm—like the spout of a teakettle—goes down showering love on his creation. And as I whirl I lose myself in that beautiful idea endeavoring to become a conduit of god’s love.

The main reason why this might not be an appropriate choice for the golden record is that it is but one iteration of the Earth’s vast religious diversity. This was the challenge for Carl Sagan in 1977. If one religion was to be included on the record, then they all needed to be included, and given the limited storage space, that was an impossible task. The same was true of art. How could they include one piece of sculpture, pottery or art as opposed to another when so much depends on what might be termed taste? What is significant or aesthetically pleasing in one culture might be meaningless in another, and even contested within a specific culture.

Apart from the teacher, the one indispensable item in any classroom is the world map. From the earliest age, children learn from the very basics of world geography from maps, including the land, seas, mountains, rivers and deserts and how they support life on earth. One of the images in the 1977 golden record was of kids at the United Nations school in New York gleefully embracing a world globe. They were all members of different ethnicities, a picture of the world’s diversity in miniature, just as in Joe Miller’s famous poem If the earth were only a few feet in diameter.

This is the spirit that I would want to convey in the second image, for in the Anthropocene era, human beings are in the ascendency and they are having major and perhaps irreversible negative impacts on the planet. The image I choose, however, will have to show us well integrated into the universal web of life. This choice is both aspirational and inspirational. The key words are interdependency, balance, and sustainability, as in the philosophies developed in the 19th century by the Transcendentalists of New England, or in the ancient nature-focused religions of the indigenous peoples like the Australian Aborigines. Like them, we need to see ourselves as being autochthonous, or born of the soil.

My third image is a photograph of a person or group of people showing the resolve that it takes for us to be here in the future.

It is difficult to represent in visual form the impact of those brave whistleblowers calling out injustices, often against severe odds, and speaking truth to power, like Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or, more recently, the powerhouse climate activist, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. To depict the struggle for justice and reconciliation at the planetary level, I am inspired by the image of the young boy or girl throwing a starfish into the sea as in the famous starfish story drawn from anthropologist Loren Eiseley’s classic text The Unexpected Universe, that mantra of so many NGOs and motivational speakers.

In the commonly espoused version of this story, a starfish that was tossed onto the sand by a tumultuous sea is now thrown back (and presumably saved) by a teenager like Greta. But there are tens of thousands of starfish drying up on the beach and the child can’t save them all, and when told by a world-weary critic that such efforts are making no difference at all, the child picks up a starfish and says But it makes a difference to this one, and throws it back into the sea. Saving the world one starfish at a time, one child or one house at a time—the power of one—all draw inspiration from this classic tale. You do what you can and if others follow your example, then change will surely follow from the ripple of hope, to use R.F. Kennedy’s affirmation.

This was the philosophical framework of President G.H.W. Bush’s 1988 Thousand points of light speech on community organizations spread like stars across the United States. However, the story has always troubled me. Is it too much to expect that the child and the saved starfish can be a harbinger of meaningful change? We know they can be, because we believe in miracles. The starfish provides us with a wonderful metaphor. If you cut it into equal pieces through the center, new starfish will grow from each piece, inspiring us to think of how the one saved life can save many others. And they do, but on the whole, the most that we can expect is first order change, which occurs within a system that remains unchanged, and not second order change, where the system itself is transformed.

How do we prevent these starfish from being thrown onto the beach in the first place? How do we save humankind from itself?

In exploring the origins of the starfish story, a more profound message emerges in Eiseley’s mystical chapter, The Star Thrower, in the above-mentioned book, which is the basis of the parable. The key elements are the same; death is winning on every beach so the child’s actions are deemed to be meaningless, however as Gandhi said, no matter how insignificant your effort might seem, it is very important that you do it. Indeed, the child in the story knows that he or she is not alone in this work and that others will follow and try to complete the work, which they do, including the aforementioned world-weary critic.

In the text, however, Eiseley’s emphasis is not on saving the individual starfish’s life, important though that is. Rather, his focus is on the bigger picture; creating a social movement for change. Building on the words of Margaret Mead on the importance of small-scale interventions, his interest is in the very question of how people come together in pursuit of a greater goal. Second order structural or systemic change arises from these momentum-building initiatives, and Eiseley is inspiring us all to think in terms of both identifying targets and working systematically towards their achievement.

My fourth image might be linked to any of a hundred or more essential ingredients or building blocks of peace, like hope, trust, love, reconciliation, forgiveness, or compassion, but I choose pilgrimage. I will show pilgrims of various faiths engaged in peace building through their sacred journeys. On their long trek, the pilgrims are walking side by side with others to a common destination. It is a vision of cooperation. It is where we want to be in the future.

The Spark of Inspiration: Pilgrimage and Peacebuilding

Optimism is the only thing that makes sense. We will find solutions to the world’s problems if we can free ourselves from Plato’s cave of deception and ignorance. Other living creatures have no need for shadows cast upon a