The Pilgrimage is Not What You Think It Is
Going on pilgrimage is a familiar practice for me…here’s what I would like pilgrims far and wide to know.
Waiting for a friend to come in from Dublin, I stood in the arrivals hall at the Dubrovnik airport in Croatia and knew exactly what I was seeing. Yes, there were scores of American tourists coming through the door, no doubt here to behold the sites of “Kings Landing” made famous by the series Game of Thrones. There was also a group of folks wearing yellow lanyards that were even more familiar to me. They looked exactly the same as they did twenty-five years ago: Medjugorje pilgrims. A priest wearing a collar stood amongst them. When people come in from around the world to visit Medjugorje, a village in Bosnia-Hercegovina and the site of reported apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary that have been happening in some form since 1981, their groups fly into the major Croatian cities of either Split or Dubrovnik. Soon these pilgrims, most of whom look to be comfortably middle class in their dress and appearance, would be boarding the bus for the 2 ½ hour drive through the mountains to get to Medjugorje.
I smiled and said to myself, “Do I run over there and tell them?”
There are a lot of things I could tell them—that I lived in the village of Medjugorje from the end of 2000 when I fled the United States in a desperate attempt to heal from my mental health problems and addiction crisis…until 2003. That I worked with the parish in many capacities, as an English language musical director and as an English and music tutor at the parish-run children’s home. That after leaving Medjugorje, a place that was transformational to me, I ended up studying mental health counseling at a Catholic university where the holes in everything that I thought I believed started revealing themselves to me. That I now exist as an openly bisexual, feminist voice working to help people heal from spiritual abuse and religious trauma. That even though I detest so much of what institutional religion stands for, especially within the Catholic Church, I am still a person of faith and wouldn’t change my experience in Medjugorje for anything.
That the pilgrimage is not what you think it is.
There are many ways that we can define pilgrimage. The English language word pilgrim comes from the Latin root “peregrini,” which means stranger. As one of my teachers, Benedictine Oblate Christine Valters Painter shares in her book The Soul of a Pilgrim, “the journey to become a pilgrim means becoming a stranger in the service of transformation.” Many of us think of pilgrimage as the act of crossing a threshold, of stepping into an unknown, unfamiliar terrain, often with the intention of finding something. Some of us make pilgrimage out of obligation or holy devotion. And others don’t realize why we’re making pilgrimage. Although we traditionally conceptualize pilgrimage as embarking on some kind of physical travel, away from the familiarity of our daily life, you can truly make pilgrimage and cross thresholds whether or not you can physically travel. Beginning a therapeutic or healing process can be a form of pilgrimage.
I’ve had the occasion to reflect a great deal about pilgrimage and its role in my life and in my healing as I wrote You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir. Pilgrimage sites are important to me, as I’ve had the privilege to visit many of them in the Catholic world—Częstochowa, Knock, Fatima, Lourdes, St. Anthony’s shrine in Padua, and the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago de Compostela (which I reached after having walked a portion of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain). I also visited many sites of spiritual importance to me in other faith traditions that touched me greatly, like several holy Jewish sites in Israel, and sacred sites in India connected to yogic lineages that impacted me. And of course the 2 ½ years that I spent living and working in Medjugorje after the experience I had stumbling into the village on a backpacking trip in the summer of 2000. “Stumbling into town” is one way to look at it. Of course I know that it was the working of the Holy Spirit, or some force greater than myself that led me there.
Here’s the summary version of the story that you can read about more fully in the memoir: While exploring Eastern Europe in 2000, which included venturing into Bosnia-Hercegovina much to the chagrin of my mother and even my own cousins in Croatia, I decided to stay overnight in Medjugorje. Traveling from Sarajevo, a city still very much recovering from being battered by war just a few years prior, I found a small pansion (bed and breakfast) to stay at near the bus stop in Medjugorje. My intention in visiting was to honor my grandmother, who passed away in 1995, and had a devotion to our Lady of Medjugorje. I went there knowing very little about what actually happened with the apparitions, yet I experienced something quite profound at the English language Mass the following morning. An Australian priest issued the invitation for wandering young people to “come home” to the church, and it felt like he was speaking directly to me.
Although returning to the Catholic Church would be an important phase of my journey, the ultimate call I experienced was to come home to myself. To the truth of who I am as a child of God who is uniquely human and connected to others in our shared Divinity. And after having returned to the United States where I flunked out of a graduate program in the Fall of 2000 due to my struggles with addiction and trauma-related mental illness, I somehow knew that spending some time in Medjugorje would be what I needed. So I left the United States rather dramatically just after Thanksgiving 2000 and decided to pitch my metaphorical tent in one of the major sites of Catholic pilgrimage in the modern world. Something inside me told us that we would find the answers there.
We initially began our experience doing the church thing fully and waiting for some kind of healing miracle, which many pilgrims go there to find. There are reports of pilgrims having their rosaries turn gold, seeing the sun spin, witnessing statues cry, all of those things that are the stuff of Catholic, mystical lore. None of those things happened to me. I experienced something greater: meeting the people who would change my life as pilgrims themselves passing through this small village that became a place of great importance. One of my best friends, Claire Taylor, an Irish woman who first came to Medjugorje on pilgrimage with her mother then ended up coming on her own to work on several aid projects, remains a close connection to this day. Fr. Svetozar Kraljević, who worked with English language pilgrims at the time and served as a mentor helped me through a great deal of pain in those early years of my recovery, even if he didn’t fully understand me.
He and Janet Leff, my first sponsor who brought me the gift of 12-step recovery, would encourage me to pursue a graduate degree in counseling—even though I didn’t much care for psychology courses when I was an undergraduate. Janet gave me so much more than my career though; she was the first person to validate my lived experiences as traumatic and to show me that getting well by first embracing sobriety was possible. Janet lived less than an hour from where I did in the United States. Yet we met in this pilgrim haven half a world away where the God of her understanding led her to spend time in her retirement, helping to establish some aid programs and work with recovery in the region. We continued a relationship even after she moved back to the United States. She passed away in 2017. During one of our dinner meetings at some Bob Evans or Yours Truly restaurant in the Cleveland area, she would say, “If the reason I ended up doing what I did over there was to meet you, it was worth it.”
While that statement still brings me to tears, it represents what I’ve come to learn—the pilgrimage may end up being something totally different than we expect it to be. When she made the decision to move her life there in retirement, she had this vision of helping scores of local people with addiction concerns, perhaps some pilgrims. Her direct intention wasn’t to meet a young, searching American who was also there for the long haul. Yet she met me exactly where I was at and planted the seeds of recovery that blossomed into the life I have today. Janet lived by the 11th step in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, especially the part about praying only for the knowledge of God’s will for our lives and the power to carry it out. She didn’t ask a lot of questions of this will, she just “turned it over,” as she often said, and let the Divine flow take her where she was supposed to go.
You might expect that after having lived and worked in a major site of Catholic pilgrimage for so long that I became a nun or a devout Catholic mother with a van full of children. At one point I felt that either of those paths could have been mine, yet Our Lady of Medjugorje and the Divine flow she represents showed me other plans. Today we are very far removed from institutional church and embrace an ecumenical worldview whilst keeping one foot rooted in Catholicism. We are proudly queer and fiercely pro-choice. We advocate for destigmatizing mental health care and changing how we even talk about mental health and trauma in larger society, even if this means criticizing sacred institutions for the harm they’ve caused. Our life remains one of pilgrimage where we are still learning and constantly growing.
Although we could have an admittedly shitty inner tendency to tell those pilgrims we saw in Dubrovnik, “Don’t go, it’s all a holy farce,” of course we would never do that. Because we cherish the time that we spent in Medjugorje and all it ended up revealing for us. Medjugorje, like the source of all great spiritual journeys, planted the seeds. The real growth happened afterwards. And I truly hope that those pilgrims with the yellow lanyards end up getting what they need, either there or at some point onward in their pilgrimage of life.