Product Description

In an increasingly secular age of high-speed travel and advanced technology, it is surprising to learn that the ancient tradition of religious pilgrimage is on the rise. Charting this phenomenon from Ireland to India, Rosemary Mahoney turns her sharp eye and discerning ear on the pilgrims she meets in the course of six extraordinary journeys. Never a passive observer, Mahoney is a full participant, soldiering barefoot through the three-day penitential Catholic pilgrimage on Irelands Station Island, walking the five-hundred-mile Camino de Santiago in Spain, braving the icy bathwater at Lourdes, where pilgrims beseech the Blessed Virgin for miraculous cures. In Varanasi, Indias holiest city, Mahoney befriends a curious young boy whose intelligence and sensitivity provide startling insights into this ancient culture, with its public cremations and elaborate prayer rituals. And in the Holy Land, she rows alone across the Sea of Galilee to spend an unnerving, hilarious night camped below the Golan Heights in search of the essence of Jesus, a vigil punctuated by a pack of howling cats and a bad case of the jitters. What Mahoney discovers among the true believers and charlatans, the holy and the profane, is the single thread that binds all religions: the desire for a relationship with God. "If I was struck by anything," she writes, "it was the shared human struggle to find reason, to confront the natural fear of uncertainty and obscurity." The Singular Pilgrim is a book less about religion than about belief. "An affecting visit to the ancient, humbling act of pilgrimage... [Mahoney] conveys a genuine sense of spiritual mindfulness on the road, and there is no denying that these pilgrimages paid her back in full" (Kirkus Reviews).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #834326 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

From Amazon.com
Sometimes purposeful, sometimes footloose, the act of undertaking a pilgrimage is "both a preparation for death and a hedge against it." So writes Rosemary Mahoney, who knows well whereof she speaks. A reluctant churchgoer, and less interested in religion per se than in the faith that underlies it, she travels in this absorbing narrative to some of the world’s great pilgrimage sites: Ireland’s Croagh Patrick, Lourdes, Santiago de Compostela, Canterbury, the banks of the Ganges. "As I got into the rhythm of it," she writes, "I found that the more I walked, the more I wanted to walk." Walk she does, over hundreds of miles, observing and recording along the way, talking with ascetics and skeptics, joining the multitude whose physical beings wander in order that their minds might turn toward the divine. And to what end is all this hard slogging? "Dunno, really," one of Mahoney’s fellow travelers shrugs. "When it’s done, you feel very good about it." Fans of travel narratives and religious memoirs alike will find much pleasure, and much on which to reflect, in Mahoney’s pages. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
Most pilgrims are on a very personal quest in which they hope to encounter God, whether it be at a roadside shrine or under the soaring arches of a medieval cathedral. In this reflection on her experiences in Christian and Hindu holy places, the critically acclaimed author of previous books on Lillian Hellman and Ireland is deeply skeptical, occasionally biting and sporadically hopeful about the possibility that a transcendent God might exist. As she encounters anti-Catholic protesters in Walsingham, England, or shares trail chat and blisters with an impressive multinational array of eccentric comrades on the way to Santiago de Compostela, Mahoney's objective is both to understand the nature of belief and to grapple with the remnants of her own Irish Catholic heritage. The bulk of this compelling and evocative memoir recounts time spent in places redolent with Christian history. Yet it is in the ancient Hindu sacred city of Varanasi, India, that Mahoney seems to drop her guard. In her wise and resigned teenage guide, Jaga, she finds a kindred spirit. "I wanted to hug him for his cleverness. His faith, I knew, was similar in nature to mine-faded, worn, resentful, and stubbornly evasive. And yet it was there." At book's end, Mahoney emerges from another pilgrimage incrementally more peaceful but with her singularity intact. Readers seeking small marvels, instead of life-changing miracles, will find this a provocative and illuminating armchair adventure.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
How to follow up the acclaimed Whoredom in Kimmage? Mahoney walks the world from Bethlehem to Varanasi to Santa Fe in search of enlightenment.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.