This pilgrim’s progress

Sydney
9 December 2001

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This pilgrim’s progress

By Marilyn Kerjean

Mary Wilkie could not seem more ordinary – a grand-mother and retired sociologist in Armidale.

It’s hard to imagine that she was obsessively focused on a notion for 15 years after glancing at an article one day.

“On the feast of St James, pilgrims meet at St James in Paris and walk to Santiago de Compostela,” she read and, although she wasn’t sure what she believed about God anymore, she felt it was a personal invitation to take up the challenge of her life.

Mary was 59 when she walked 1,769kms from Paris to Santiago in Spain. Sometimes she followed the well-worn pilgrim route, Camino de Santiago; at other times she did it completely alone. She was not an experienced hiker.

It took her three months.

Her book Walking to Santiago: Diary of a Pilgrimage is a day-by-day account of her solitary pilgrimage to the shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostela.

“It just wouldn’t leave me alone,” she says. “It’s just an idea that got hold and wouldn’t give me any peace until I did it.”

Mary took an early retirement from her work as a sociologist, and lost no time in preparing for the trip, joining a local walking group to improve her fitness.

Pilgrimages were popular in medieval times and are enjoying a renaissance today largely as a “reflection of the leisure society”, says Mary.

“A lot of people have the time to travel and don’t want to go to tourist high spots,” she says.

“Many people I met were quite vague about why they were doing the walk, but did feel the need for something spiritual, the need for time out. People need to experience the spiritual, that’s why I feel there’s something of a vocation or a call in it.”

As Mary prepared to travel to Paris, she felt like any other tourist, but she soon began to feel “changed by the experience of pilgrimage”, mainly because the solitude and nomadic existence forced her to

live simply moment by moment.

“I felt I was somehow becoming less and less, and I wanted to explore that feeling and not feel afraid of this emptiness,” she says.

“I think the sense of emptiness I had is possibly a way of stripping down to the essentials of who you really are.”

As she walked along, Mary felt a real sense of community with those medieval pilgrims who had travelled the same path and seen the same vistas centuries before – “although it would have been less difficult for them to walk 10 or 15kms a day than for us with our sedentary lifestyles”.

Mary hit the library again back home in Armidale, this time to assuage her new interest in medieval history.

She says she will be very careful about what ideas she lets “grab hold of her” again.

Since returning Mary has given talks to her Catholic parish, at Country Women’s Association, Rotoract and Anglican mothers’ union meetings and a Methodist congregation about her experience.

She tells people she has no major revelation to share, but simply “the sense of a miracle in everyday things, of being protected and supported all along the way”.

“Even at the beginning before I started on the pilgrimage things sort of fell into place for me,” Mary says.

Mary hopes her book will inspire other ‘normal’ people like herself to do something extraordinary.

“It’s for those people who might one day want to do it themselves. They might read it and think if she can do that I can do something like that too.”

Mary’s diary – a journey of soul

Walking to Santiago: Diary of a Pilgrimage is the result of condensing the detailed daily diary Mary Wilkes kept throughout her walk from Paris to Santiago in north-west Spain.

She writes of the other pilgrims, the places where she sought shelter along the way, the loneliness, the physical discomfort and the humdrum of trudging along quietly for days on end and the little surprises experienced at different times.

Only eight pages of photographs in 248 pages of diary entries is a bit disappointing but the epilogue recommending a couple of guide books and websites and a list of Mary’s travelling gear with notes on the usefulness of each item should be helpful to anyone contemplating the trip.

Readers looking for a philosophical or spiritual insight will have to turn to the final paragraph: “We need little to live on the earth; we can travel light. If you see with the eyes of faith you will live in a world where everything conspires for good, where little miracles happen daily – where all is, indeed, well. This is not a world devoid of pain and sorrow, malice and evil, but a world through which the pilgrim passes protected to the end.”

The book costs $24 plus $4 postage and handling from Cranleigh House, PO Box 567, Armidale NSW 2350 or by calling Mary Wilkie on (02) 6772 6359.