Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cycling, Environment, green pilgrimage network, pilgrimage, walking
The Green Pilgrimage Network site gives the following information about pilgrim numbers.
I find this fascinating, not least to see how low down the list Santiago is. I would assume that most pilgrims in this list, unlike Santiago, travel for religious reasons. There is also an interesting train of thought about how people travel to their destination; presumably most people fly or use train or coach. How many walk or cycle (bearing in mind very few walking to Santiago have walked from home to their starting point)?
Pilgrim numbers
More than 100 million people go on pilgrimage every year – sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, and some leave home for many months. Here are some figures.
• 20 million pilgrims – Mexico, Our Lady of Guadalupe (Christian)
• 13 million pilgrims – Amritsar (Sikh)
• 10 million pilgrims – Kumbh Mela (takes place every three years, with some festivals attracting 10 million and others 50, 60 or 70 million – see below for notes) (Hindu)
• 8 million pilgrims – Lourdes (Christian)
• 8 million visitors – Brazil, Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida (Christian)
• 8 million pilgrims – Western Wall in 2009 (Jewish)
• 5 Million pilgrims – Dwarka (Hindu)
• 4-5 million pilgrims – Portugal, Fátima (Christian)
• 2 to 3 million pilgrims – Hajj (Islam) (including 1.8 million from overseas)
• 2.1 million pilgrims – Wutai Shan (Daoist)
• 1.7 million – World Youth Day (Roman Catholic), 4 million pilgrims every two to three years
• 1 million pilgrims – Varanasi (Hindu)
• 1.5 million pilgrims to the Qadiriyyah shrine in Kano
• Over 500,000 pilgrims – Taishan (Daoist)
• 500,000 pilgrims – Vrindavan, Braj (Hindu)
• Over 0.3 million pilgrims – Hua Shan (Daoist)
• Around 0.3 million pilgrims – Oingcheng Shan (Daoist)
• 250,000 pilgrims – Emei Shan (Daoist)
• 250,000 pilgrims – Iona (Christian)
• 250,000 pilgrims – Taize (Christian)
• 200,000 pilgrims – Santiago de Compostelo (Christian)
• 100,000 pilgrims – St Bishoy Monastery, Wadi El Natroun (Coptic Christian)
• 100,000 pilgrims – Walsingham Shrine of Our Lady (Christian)
• 43,000 (roughly) pilgrims – Lumbhini (Buddhist)
• 20-25,000 pilgrims – Etchmiadzin (Armenian Apostolic Christian)
• 8,000 pilgrims – Lough Derg (Roman Catholic)
Total
There are around 90 million pilgrimages a year to these 25 destinations alone.
Note
To reach the 100 million we calculated a modest extra 10 percent to account for all other pilgrimages (including short day visits to shrines and pilgrim places all around the world including Africa, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Russia, Greece, many Indian shrines and Australia). We believe the total figure to be substantially higher.
Calculating numbers for the Kumbh Mela is complicated. The normal Kumbh Mela is celebrated every three years, the Ardh (half) Kumbh Mela is celebrated every six years at Haridwar and Prayag, the Maha (complete) Kumbh takes place every 12 years at four places (Prayag (Allahabad), Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nashik).
The special Maha Kumbh Mela which comes every 144 years, is held at Allahabad. The most recent Maha Kumbh Mela, held in 2001, was one of these, and was attended by around 60 million people, making it at the time the largest gathering anywhere in the world in recorded history.
The 1998 Kumbh Mela saw over 10 million pilgrims visiting Hardwar, to take a dip in the holy Ganges river. So we calculated that every three and nine years there are up to 10 million, then every six and 12 years there are up to 50 million. Adding to 120 million every 12 years means average 10 million a year.
I spent last week in Derbyshire at the Bishop of Birmingham’s Conference for Clergy.
I am pondering how this fits in with this blog’s theme of pilgrimage. Two physical elements stand out. A couple of us cycled there and back, starting from Birmingham Cathedral at 5.30am on Monday. As one of the voluntary workshops on Wednesday afternoon, I took ten colleagues for a four mile walk into the countryside. This fitted the need to get outside and away from a very full programme of talks and discussions. We agreed to walk for about half an hour while talking, then to have half an hour’s silence, and then to talk again. The silence was profound. It is interesting (and I suppose obvious) that we pay far more attention to our surroundings when we are not listening to each other. At first, people spread out to be alone but, as time went on, we bunched up close in quiet and attentive companionship.
Here is a handout I gave everyone:
A Four Mile Walk from Swanwick
Directions
- From the entrance to the Hayes, walk down the drive. Climb the stile on the right and walk through field.
- Turn right onto track.
- Follow track round to right and take path signposted to Golden Valley.
- Walk under the first railway bridge and then turn right under the second.
- Keep ahead to cross railway track.
- Take the left fork uphill.
- At farm, bear left through wood, following Path 4.
- Turn left onto road.
- Turn right at t-junction along quiet lane.
- After 3/4 of a mile, take Footpath 18 on the right (opposite road junction and past transport depot).
- Bear left.
- Cross railway line and fork right.
- Cross the tracks next to Butterley Signal Box and follow path to right.
- (There is supposed to be a path to the left leading directly to the Hayes – if it is obvious and I missed it, follow it to the Hayes!).
- Follow railway to Swanwick Junction.
- Descend and cross tracks. Go up steps and through station.
- Head for tin chapel, passing to its right.
- Climb gate to cross tracks and pick up path back to the Hayes.
What might God be trying to say to you on and through this walk?
What are you thankful for?
What thoughts and prayers does the walk prompt?
Does the walking make you pray? How?
How do you engage with the beauty of the countryside and with the stark industrial impact upon it?
How are you grateful?
How are you one of God’s pilgrim people?
Sing Alleluia and keep in walking (Augustine)
Put on your travelling shoes and jump into the arms of God (Meister Eckhart)
The meaning is in the waiting (RS Thomas)
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil ;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod ?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod ;
And all is seared with trade ; bleared, smeared with toil ;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell : the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent ;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things ;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah ! bright wings.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
On the Camino in Spain, I gradually discovered that the walking becomes the praying. Alan Ecclestone describes the pilgrimages of Charles Peguy to Chartres: A pilgrimage gets to the holy place at last but what gives it its part in prayer is the slamming down of ones feet to complete the journey while praying the while for all its features. In putting one foot in front of another, in the tiredness, in the blisters, in the being at one with myself, the landscape and God, in the mind quietening, in all this, walking, pilgrimage itself, became prayer.
Happy are the ones who are able to tread transitional paths, scarcely looking to left or right and without distinguishing an end.
Patrick White
For everything I felt a love
The weeds below, the birds above
John Clare
If you wish to be sure of the road you are travelling,
close your eyes and walk in the dark.
- John of the Cross
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cycling, gratitude, Lent, pilgrimage, prayer, St Francis
St Mary at the Cross Monastery, Glasshampton
I had a good day planned yesterday. A cycle ride of 25 or 26 miles from home to Glasshampton, the Franciscan Monastery in rural Worcestershire. Once there I would meet with my spiritual director, pray and reflect, and then cycle home after breakfast this morning. I enjoy the journey there. It is testing with a lot of hills, but I have found routes that, for the most part, are very quiet.
After forty minutes yesterday, my plans unravelled. My bike broke, not too badly, but more than I could repair at the roadside. Fortunately, Bharti was working from home and came in the car to pick me and the bike up. I drove to Glasshampton for my meeting in the afternoon, but had to come home straight away as the car was needed by the rest of my family. At least I was able to see the funny side of it all. I wasn’t injured; I can fix my bike; I didn’t have to push it home.
Since I returned home from the pilgrimage through Spain last autumn, I have been reflecting on the gifts it has given me. I have written on this blog about praying while engaged in that intensive and tough walking. One of the things that has very much stuck in my mind is that being engaged in the Camino is also a School of Charity. There is all that opportunity for space, silence, reflection and prayer. One of the ways in which we can see if our prayer is true is in the School of Charity, that is, in how we treat the other people who we meet and who are around us. If prayer is true, have our hearts been enlarged so that we can love others, especially when things are difficult.
On the Camino de Santiago, this can perhaps be most seen in the albergues, the pilgrim hostels. These are simple buildings, usually with a dormitory crammed with bunks, shower and clothes washing facilities, sometimes a kitchen. Most pilgrims want to get to sleep early; some snore loudly – ‘ronquidoras’ being the wonderfully descriptive Spanish word for this; some decide to get up noisily in order to start walking hours before dawn. This is all testing, especially when you are very tired. I won’t pretend I passed the exams at the School of Charity – especially the night where one pilgrim spent the night sounding like Shrek, only noisier, but perhaps I am more patient, more able to laugh at myself. Perhaps I can pray that my heart is that little more open.
And continuing in this School may well be the best Lenten discipline.
The question I am asked the most often at the moment is whether I have adjusted to being home. I think I am. Fortunately I still have a few more weeks of Sabbatical so I can take it gently. I’m doing some reflecting and writing about the future of ministry in Anglican parishes on housing estates, but I’ve also got time to reflect on the Pilgrimage. I managed a long cycle ride to and from a conference at Cropthorne in Worcestershire last week (although my body remembered on the way home that I hadn’t been on a bike for a couple of months). I’m spending time looking at my photos and the stamps in my Pilgrim’s Record; I’m re-reading my journal and Walter Starkie’s The Road to Santiago. I’m starting to prepare a talk which I’ll give at St Bede’s and the Deaf Church (and elsewhere if invited) in January, and I’ve been asked to write an article on it for the Fairacres Chronicle, so there is much prayerful reflection being done and much more to do. I am relaxed about it, but I also know that God has given me a great deal through the Camino that I want to discover and share.
The Pilgrimage was both extremely good and extremely hard. It has made me realize how much I appreciate home and my life and work here (and sleeping in the same bed each night!). While I was walking, I could not imagine wanting to do it again. Now I have finished, I miss it like anything. Meenakshi, my daughter, wants to walk it, so we are beginning to plan walking the Camino Ingles, which is 110km from Ferrol to Santiago, probably in 2011. That gives us a great focus for planning and training and dreaming.
One of the battered poetry books I often carry with me when I walk in this country is TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. Here are the final lines from Little Gidding, which give such a wealth for reflecting on and speak, to me at least, of Pilgrimage and coming home.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Just a very quick post from Zamora, as I suspect I won´t be able to get on the internet for a few days (much to your relief I hear you say). I´m having a rest day here as it is a Romanesque gem. Arriving here, the extraordinarily solitary Camino de Levante has met the Via de la Plata, the pilgrim route that goes to Santiago from Sevilla. Suddenly there are other pilgrims about and already the atmosphere of the pilgrimage becomes incredibly different; I suppose I am now in Part III.
I met a couple of Deaf people in the street yeaterday. They said there are only about 20 Deaf peple in the city, but that there are many more in Santiago. If anyone knows anything about this, please leave a comment as it would be good for me to meet up with them (not least because my ability in Spanish Sign Language appears to be much better than in Spanish).
You know when you complain about the magnitude of what you are doing and then are brought down to earth? I was having breakfast this morning when a long-distance cyclist walked into the cafe. I asked if he was doing the Camino. No. He had followed the route from his home in Burgos to Astorga, but then south. He is going to Sevilla, on to the south coast and then into Africa. Fantastic! and makes me feel like a wimp, especially now the end seems to be in sight. It´s taken me 24 hours but I´m really looking forward to walking again. About 280 miles and I´m there. Well over half way. Keep commenting, I appreciate it.
Buen Camino and speak to you later.
