Lunenburg is so pretty, but so is Mahone Bay: colourful frame buildings, bright sky, sunlight on the harbour. Lunenburg has the Bluenose II and other tall ships, and excellent falafel. Mahone Bay might have falafel, too, but I’ll never know, because we’re all eating together tonight at the United Church, where we’re staying.
We left the United Church in Lunenburg about 1:30 this afternoon. There are 14 of us, plus half a dozen students from the Atlantic School of Theology who are getting credit for a graduate course on leadership and pilgrimage by acting as guides for this walk. We spent the next three hours or so walking along a rail trail, passing through thick second- or third-growth forest, with blue flag iris in bloom where there’s standing water beside the path. I saw a pair of pink lady’s-slippers, too, shy blossoms among spruce seedlings.
I came here to walk with other people, to experience what the anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, in their study of pilgrimage, called “communitas.” That’s the temporary community that forms among people engaged in a pilgrimage, outside their typical routines, in what the Turners described as a “liminal” space, between one place and another. On the road, somewhere, neither here nor there, connections form, however temporary, between participants in the ritual of pilgrimage, however attenuated that ritual is in the 20th century. The organizers of this walk are doing their best to create a sense of ritual, but as a person without any kind of religious faith, for me the ritual is the steady beat of my footsteps—especially when I’m hearing the footsteps of my companions. That’s what I came for; that’s what I’m getting.
The conversations on the trail were rich: work and its meaning; footwear and foot care; the plants we were looking at, especially the ones nobody recognized. I spend too much time alone, and walking with the others, words tumbled out of me. Am I talking too much, I wondered, engaged in a monologue instead of a dialogue, overwhelmed by the feeling of walking with others, of community? I thought of Marianne, the friend I walked with in Spain almost 12 years ago, and the way she sometimes asked that we walk in silence.
Towards the end of today’s walk, I found myself reflecting on the connections between community and conversation, between community and silence. I listened to the crunch of my steps, birds, distant traffic. The toad into Mahone Bay was paved, narrow, quiet. I walked into the town, alone, listening to the sweet music of a hermit thrush. Far ahead of me, the sight of a pair of pilgrims provided reassurance that I had taken the right path.
