2011/03/02 Communion Poem by Margaret Alice

What is the point of pilgrimage?

Detachment from familiar things and domestic
routine, submitting to hardship and uncertainty
in foreign lands, throwing pilgrims into intense
introspection, prayer and reflection

Though pilgrims traverse a physical landscape, it
is the inner spiritual journey that counts because
the quest for holy sites is an existential question,
when Nicholas Shrady knelt before a holy relic

He felt at a loss, as if he had come to the wrong
place and in the end Nicholas agreed with Rumi,
the Sufi Mevalana or Master - communion with
God supersedes the dogmatic doctrines

Of all organised religion – as I lay in the bright
autumn sun, staring at the brilliant blue dome
of the sky, listening to green fir tree boughs
softly sigh in a breeze, I felt like

A pilgrim on earth, life a pilgrimage towards
sacred insights; moments of understanding
the deeper meaning of life…


“Sacred Roads” by Nicholas Shrady; Penguin
Books 2000 - Quotes from pp126,155 & 199