About Pilgrimage: Some views

Bardsey – The Pilgrim’s Paradise

“ I took a boat for Bardsey Island……. The Mariners seemed tinctured with the piety of the place; for they had not rowed far, but they made a full stop, pulled off their hats, and offered up a short prayer.” So writes Pennant in 1781. He makes no mention of angry seas and mountainous waves or of the furious coiling and recoiling of currents in the sound of Bardsey, but the dean of Bangor and his fellow pilgrims could add all this to their description of the crossing on August 2, 1950. For this very reason the sequestered handful were soon “tinctures with the piety of the place”. Then, as if to make it more pronounced still, they saw on entering the precinct of the old monastery, a huge Celtic cross bearing the inscription, Is it nothing to you, all ye who pass by.” Close to the crumbling ruins of the monastery the Dean planted the Pilgrim’s  Cross  and gave thanks to God for the witness of the Saints.

In Wales, as in many countries, Christianity found its first champions among hermits who settled in secluded spots and attracted many followers both by their teaching of the Faith and by the example of their own saintly lives. Bardsey Island ranks foremost among the sites chosen by such hermits in the early days of the Celtic Church. The same was true of Bardsey when the hermit cell gave place to the monastery, for we are told that there was a monastic settlement there long before Saint David started his religious revival in the sixth century. Bardsey was also the last stronghold of the Celtic Church in Britain, for its monastery was a Celtic institution well onto the 12th century. Bardsey has also been the burial place of Saints. The faithful and devout have all long desired a last resting place in this sanctuary. Cut off from the world of haste and hurry and undisturbed by the clatter and clang of modern civilisation, they lie embalmed in the hallowed past of Bardsey. It stands to the eternal credit of the Celt that he failed not in his homage to these holy man of old but made his habitual pilgrimage to their relics and shrines. Well on to the 17th century pilgrims from distant lands trudged across the Llyn Peninsula to this veritable “ Rome of Britten” and it was a red-letter day in the history of the diocese of Bangor when the Lord Bishop decided to keep tryst with the past and lead thousands of pilgrims along the old Pilgrims’ Way on Saint Peter’s Day 1950. On that day in Llyn and on August 2 in Bardsey, in an atmosphere hallowed by centuries of prayer and piety, the curtain was raised on lives that had been spent in the best tradition of the Christian Faith.

 In Christianity, the practise of going on pilgrimage began in the early church and achieved great popularity in the Middle Ages. The first goal of Christian pilgrimage was the Holy Land, and especially Jerusalem. As the focus of Christendom shifted from Jerusalem to Rome, the presence in Rome of the tombs of Peter and Paul, and the catacombs, caused a corresponding shift in pilgrimage to these more specifically Christian sites. At the same time the development of the doctrine of purgatory, and the belief that the individual's time in purgatory (or that of his relatives) could be lessened by acquiring merit, caused the growing practise of the granting of indulgences as a reward for faithful pilgrimage. Thus when the Papal Jubilee was celebrated in 1300, the indulgences offered on that occasion are said to have drawn more than 20,000 pilgrims to Rome.

Healing

Pilgrimage for the purpose of healing was common in the Middle Ages. The Venerable Bede told of the place where Oswald, King of Northumbria fell in battle against the Mercians: “Many people took away earth from the place where his body fell, and put it in water, from which sick folk who drank it received great benefit. This practise became so popular that as the earth was gradually removed, a pit was left in which a man could stand.”

Although Protestantism has always looked with disfavour on the custom of pilgrimage and the religious views on which the practise was based, the Roman Catholic world has continued to believe in the efficacy of holy places. Many of the old shrines have disappeared beyond recall: but others have been reopened and new shrines have arisen. The most celebrated of these is certainly that at Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, where in 1858 a peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, saw visions of the Blessed Virgin. All the classical features of the pilgrimage centre are there: manifestations of holy power, a sacred spring, and healing miracles. There are also similar centres of pilgrimage on the American continent for example at Saint Anne de Beaupre, near Quebec.

It seems that it is only the sceptical Western mind that is unable to accept the premises on which the case for pilgrimages rests. The intuitive religious mind believes implicitly in all things “Holy” and in their manifestations in the world of time and space. Wherever these manifestations take place, man and woman may profitably come to worship and pray and receive strength.

 There's no discouragement

shall make him once relent

his first avowed intent

to be a pilgrim

To such a man or woman the words of the great allegorizer of pilgrimage, John Bunyan,

 express part of the assured order of things.

Extracts taken from information boards at St Beuno’s Church  Clynnog Fawr