Sacred Roads: Adventures from the Pilgrimage Trail

Nicholas Shrady's Sacred Roads: Adventures from the Pilgrimage Trail is the best kind of personal essay. Shrady's subject is determined by his own experience, but his perception of that experience always pays homage to the many men and women who have gone before him--and it paves the way for those who will follow. That particular strength is exceptionally well suited to a book about pilgrimage, because a pilgrim's movements are always at least as socially conditioned as they are individually elected. The driving question of Sacred Roads is this: how does the act of walking a pilgrim's path lead to spiritual insight? This Mississippi-River-size question is fed by smaller tributaries: Do danger and adventure make the rewards of pilgrimage greater? How should a pilgrim cope with obstacles in his or her path? Should obstacles be interpreted as providential or accidental? What do you do when a so-called holy man threatens your life?

A skeptical Catholic, Shrady is blessed with faith and doubt in equal measure, which imbues his stories of pilgrimages to Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu holy places with authentic suspense. To extract from this book a succinct lesson is impossible; to try would be an injustice. Suffice it to say that Shrady is an ideal companion--simultaneously erudite, easygoing, intense, and blissfully ignorant. And best of all, he's a tenacious guardian of the solitude he finds on the pilgrimage trail, so as to be more fully present to his fellow pilgrims and readers:

I came to regard the conventional world from which I was at least temporarily removed as chaotic and aimless; the world of pilgrimage, by contrast, was, despite often precarious conditions, marked by a purity of focus. If I felt somehow blessed, it was because the pilgrimage brought me closest to Man's first condition.

--Michael Joseph Gross