On Pilgrimage

the long version

"After twenty-eight years of family life, seven children raised, fifteen house moves and an operation for cancer, Jennifer Lash suddenly had the urge to go on a pilgrimage." "This book is a journey. She set out in bitter cold at the beginning of April and returned in the intense heat of summer. The places are as various as the people: places of contemporary Christian pilgrimage such as Lourdes, Lisieux and Taize. As well as the great gatherings of pilgrims there are numerous stops made alone: Vezelay, Le Puy, La Chaise-Dieu high in the forests of the Auvergne, Saint-Gilles. Finally there is the incredible celebratory phenomenon of Santiago de Compostela in the far north-west of Spain." "The variety of myths, legends, bones, springs, saints and images, the spaces of silence and the sounds that complement them, are found to be as present and powerful in the 1990s as they would have been to the medieval pilgrim in the twelfth or thirteenth century."--BOOK JACKET