Pilgrim Ways

2000 that one of the significant features of the year in Italy had been a return to this Sacrament. Confession and purgation of the soul are an indispensable part of the pilgrim way.

In 1932 Shane Leslie, in Saint Patrick‟s Purgatory (Burns Oates & Washbourne) captured the atmosphere at the end of purgation: Lastly when the twenty-four hours are expired, for now we are come to the last Act, they are revisited by the overseer of the pilgrims, by whom they are brought to the waterside where they duck themselves overhead in the water and by their expiation they are purged as new soldiers of Christ and by the bath of repentance being born again, they go into the Church, according to the custom being thereby renewed to go forward boldly in their Christian warfare and courageously to carry the Cross of Christ. And thus is the great work finished.

There may be up to 800 pilgrims bound together in penance at any one time at Lough Derg.

There are few material comforts and the whole emphasis is on performing penance for sins committed and for the sins of others. Here is the sentiment expressed in Bunyan‟s seventeenth century Pilgrim‟s Progress: Thus far did I come laden with my sin, Nor could aught ease the grief that I was in, Till I came hither. What a place is this!

Must here be the beginning of my bliss?

Must here the burden fall off my back?

Must here the strings that bound it to me crack?

Blest Cross! blest Sepulchure! blest, rather, be The Man that there was put to shame for me!

Michael Willis says that, as well as being a place for the shedding of burdens, the pilgrimage has brought his family “many blessings.” Over the years it has provided “the opportunity to walk with Our Lord and to share in His Calvary. Just as we share the symbolic locking into the tomb as the night vigil begins, so we share the electrifying joy of the symbolic sharing in Our Lord‟s Resurrection as the sun comes up the next morning.”

Along with others who have experienced the rigors of this pilgrimage I was struck by this family‟s testimony that the intensive denial of comfort allied to the physical form of prayer brought huge personal spiritual rewards. Perhaps it is the ultimate antidote to a world which measures us by what we own rather than who we are. Materialism and consumerism - “I shop, therefore I am” - have tended to become a new religion.

Lough Derg is a penitential pilgrimage; a shaking off of all the things which the world holds dear and which too frequently capture and hold us. On this pilgrimage we take stock of our inner life and perform penance, even if the penance is not explicitly linked to a particular act of wrongdoing.

Perhaps we begin to appreciate that a filled filofax doesn‟t represent a fulfilled life, and that no man, on his death bed, was ever heard to utter the despairing cry that he wished that he had spent more time at the office.

Laurence of Pasz Lough Derg appeals to that part of us which we dislike intensely and would seek to amend.

The man or woman who has never made a mistake has never made anything. The only issue which arises is what we are going to do about the mistakes of their lives. That, in essence, is