[Vwoolf] A pilgrimage of Virginia Woolf readers | The Christian Century

[amy smith]

What a lovely article, Kristin. Thank you for sharing it. I'd love to go on
one of these pilgrimages.
Amy

On Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 2:18 PM Kristin Czarnecki via Vwoolf <
vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

> Perhaps of interest:
>
>
> https://www.christiancentury.org/article/faith-matters/pilgrimage-virginia-woolf-readers
>
> A pilgrimage of Virginia Woolf readers
> [image: lighthouse in Sussex]
>
> Some readers of this column will remember Vanessa Zoltan, who, as a
> divinity student, experimented with reading Charlotte Brontë’s novel *Jane
> Eyre* as if it were a sacred text
> <https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2014-04/praying-jane-eyre>:
> praying with it, listening for how it spoke to the world around her,
> wrestling with it until it gave her a blessing. These days, Vanessa hosts
> the popular *Harry Potter and the Sacred Text* podcast, in which she and
> her friend Casper ter Kuile explore the Harry Potter series
> <https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2016-10/harry-potter-holy-writ>,
> chapter by chapter, using sacred reading practices from the Jewish and
> Christian traditions. To read a sentence of these books with them, using*
> lectio divina*, or *Pardes*, or *havruta*, is to feel the joy of
> following meaning as it unfolds and expands. It is to remember what it felt
> like the first time you experienced a book as a passageway to the vast
> world around you and the hidden world inside you.
>
> Vanessa continues to imagine ways to help us live more consciously and
> fully by reading more deeply. What if, she asked me more than a year ago,
> we organized a reading and walking pilgrimage around Virginia Woolf’s novel *To
> the Lighthouse*? What if we gathered a group of pilgrims for a journey
> through the novel and through the Sussex countryside Woolf loved? What if
> we used sacred reading practices to deepen our understanding of her novel
> and created rituals to help us draw closer to the significance of our
> experience?
>
> She had me at “Virginia Woolf.” So, in partnership with Liz Slade—a
> brilliant Londoner animated by a quiet confidence in the holiness of books,
> landscape, and community—we made a plan. And in early June, we found
> ourselves on the porch of St. Paul’s Cathedral, nervously waiting for our
> pilgrims to arrive.
>
> We spent seven days together in the South Downs National Park, discussing
> the novel for an hour or two in the morning and spending the rest of the
> day walking through that ancient landscape, following in Woolf’s footsteps.
> Each day, one hour of this walking time we spent in silence, listening to
> the skylarks, meditating on a phrase or a sentence from the novel, quietly
> cherishing each other’s company.
>
> We integrated other rituals into our days as well. We learned a sacred
> reading practice each morning and lowered it like a ladder into Woolf’s
> novel. We organized one of the many meals we shared together as a ritual
> meal, with structured conversation about the table practices that have
> shaped and sustained us. We walked together to the bank of the river where
> Woolf died, read her final letter to her husband, and built a small cairn
> of treasures we had picked up on our walks. Mourning her death opened space
> for the grieving of other losses. “I finally buried my mother this
> morning,” one pilgrim told me as we walked home at the end of the day.
>
> Our favorite sacred reading practice was the creation of *flori­legia*,
> which is what medieval monks called the collections they created out of
> fragments from their reading, the “sparklets” that had shone out of the
> page. Vanessa gave us each a notebook in which to collect our own
> sparklets, and, at the end of every day, we each shared one—sentences from
> Woolf’s novel, things we’d heard each other say, images we’d seen, sounds
> we’d heard. These ranged from the sublime to the deeply silly. Some
> sparklets captured something so true that we fell still and silent as we
> listened, while others made us laugh so hard that tears ran down our faces.
>
> On our last morning together, everyone shared a sparklet for the week—a
> sparklet of sparklets, as it were. Vanessa wrote them all down and then
> read them aloud as a single text, everyone’s contribution made even more
> meaningful by being set down next to everyone else’s. Many people
> contributed a line or two from the novel, but one pilgrim—a middle-school
> Latin teacher—offered a line from a psalm to express what the week had
> meant: *Abyssus abyssum vocat*. Deep calls to deep.
>
> That felt right, to have created a * florilegium* in which a fragment of
> the Bible sat alongside Virginia Woolf’s sentences, each illuminating the
> other, each interpreting the other, together troubling the boundaries
> between “religious” and “secular.” Deep calls to deep without regard for
> such categories.
>
> Pilgrimages draw their power from the wisdom that religious traditions
> have passed down through the generations: how walking together can create a
> community out of strangers; how a book can become a portable, generative
> sacred space; how a shared meal can express our desire to know and to be
> known. Surely this is wisdom that belongs to all of us, wisdom to be
> shared, part of our human inheritance.
>
> We had begun our pilgrimage on the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in honor
> of a scene from Woolf’s novel *Mrs. Dalloway*, in which an unemployed man
> holding a bag of pamphlets stands on those same steps and thinks about
> going inside. There’s company inside, he thinks, a place to belong. But he
> doesn’t enter, perhaps because he believes it would mean setting down not
> only his pamphlets but “seeking and questing” as well.
>
> We didn’t enter either but stayed on the threshold as we introduced
> ourselves to each other for the first time. And then, bringing along with
> us practices of seeking and questing that have been passed back and forth
> across such thresholds for centuries, we walked together into the city.
>
> *A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title
> “A pilgrimage of readers.”*
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
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