In “From Pilgrim to Tourist,” Zygmut Bauman traces a line from the Christian concept of the pilgrim to the contemporary scheme of self-definition.  That line gets traced (metaphorically and historically) right through the desert.

‘We are pilgrims through time’ was, under the pen of St. Augustine not an exhortation, but a statement of fact.  We are pilgrims whatever we do, and there is little we can do about it even if we wished.  Earthly life is but a brief overture to the eternal persistence of the soul.  Only few would wish, and have the ability, to composes that overture themselves, in tune with the music of the heavenly spheres- to make their fate into a consciously embraced destiny.  These few would need to escape the distractions of the town.  The desert is the habitat they must choose.

And so many Christians in earlier times took to the desert for an intense kind of formation (a group that includes the likes of Saint Anthony in the image to the right).

The desert of the Christian hermit was set at a distance from the hurly-burly of family life, away from the town and the village, from the mundane, from the polis.  The desert meant putting a distance between oneself and one’s duties and obligations, the warmth and the agony of being with others, being looked at by others, being framed and moulded by their scrutiny, demands and expectations.  Here, in mundane quotidianity, one’s hands were tied, and so were one’t thoughts.  Here, horizon was tightly packed with huts, barns, copses, groves and church towers.  Here, wherever one moved, one was in a place, and being in a place meant staying put, doing what the place needed to be done.  The desert, on the contrary, was a land not yet sliced into places, and for that reason it was the land of self-creation.

A wonderfully rendered paragraph, for sure.  And it rings true, a reminder even of times that Jesus went to desolate places in the gospel stories.  In Bauman’s argument, though, the picture of the Desert Fathers ultimately (and perhaps inadvertently) leads to the Protestant approach to self-understanding, who “accomplished a feat unthinkable for the lonely hermits of yore: [the Protestants] became inner-worldly pilgrims.”  They did this by turning all of the world outside of the home into a kind of desert.  Bauman asserts that the language of Protestant pilgrimmage

is the kind of language in which one speaks of the desert: of nothingness waiting to become something, if only for a while; of meaninglessness waiting to be given meaning, if only a passing one; of the space without contours, ready to accept any contour offered, if only until other contours are offered; of a space not scarred with past furrows, yet fertile with expectations of sharp blades; of virgin land yet to be plowed and tilled; of the and of the perpetual beginning; of the place-no-place whose name and identity is not-yet.  In such a land, the trails are blazed by the destination of the pilgrim, and there are few other tracks to reckon with.

It’s a brave new world that ignores its ancient existence.  I can’t help but think of scenes from The Lord of the Rings where Frodo and company (whether the Nine or with Sam alone) where stone reminders of an earlier age stand out in stark landscapes as reminders of a deeper, older story.  For Frodo and company, those markers are more than sentimentality; they are a cause for hope and for courage.  Not so, though, in the land of modern pilgrimage.

In such a land, commonly called modern society, pilgrimage is no longer a choice of the mode of life; less still is it a heroic or saintly choice.  Living one’s life as pilgrimage is no longer the kind of ethical wisdom revealed to, or initiated by, the chosen and the righteous.  Pilgrimage is what one does of necessity, to avoid being lost in a desert; to invest the walking with a purpose while wandering the land with no destination.

This of course, is a dangerous land to walk through, certainly more dangerous than a fearful slog through the land of Mordor.

(image of Anthony and Paul from reproarte.com)