ABSTRACT
In seeking to account for the revival of pilgrimage in our contemporary culture, the Oxford Dominican Timothy Radcliffe has characterized this form of spiritual seeking as particularly attractive to young people as it may be ‘expressive of deep conviction, but also give space for the unsure, those who travel hoping to find something on the way or [even] at the end’ (2005, 10). This form of contemporary spiritual journeying and communal gathering can take a variety of guises across Christian religious traditions – from the unprecedented numbers of young people attending events like Spring Harvest or World Youth Day, through to the revival of more ‘traditional’ pilgrimage paths traversing Europe and popularized within literary and youth culture such as Częstochowa and Santiago de Compostela, (Galbraith 2000; Coleman and Elsner, 1995; Coleman and Eade, 2004; Badone and Roseman, 2004). This chapter will examine one specific example of this growing global phenomenon, namely the increasing numbers of British youth travelling to the Marian shrine at Lourdes in France to assist sick or elderly pilgrims and to explore their own spirituality (see Lamb and Siedlecka 2006; Lambert, 2004; Vayne et al., 2007, 44–5). Stemming from a larger study of motives for and experiences of pilgrimage across Christian and New Age/Pagan sites, this chapter draws upon extensive fieldwork, detailed questionnaire data and in-depth interviews with youth travelling with the (Arch)Dioceses of Westminster and Salford and as an independent group from Limerick. It contends that through prayer and ritual, socializing and the establishment of interpersonal relationships, as well as through acts of self-abnegation and service, twenty-first century pilgrims to this nineteenth-century shrine in the Pyrenees are offered, as one young Mancunian expressed it, a space ‘to develop my faith and to grow spiritually and socially’ [Pilgrim #12, 2007]. This chapter will explore the implications of these dimensions of pilgrimage for understandings of the ways in which some young people are choosing to interrogate their spirituality within a traditional, but also profoundly modern, transformed and customized context.
