To Walk with Saints and Scholars

March 4, 2026

St. Brigid’s, Crosshaven Photo by LKV Walsh

Poet RS Thomas speculates that pilgrimage into the land and onto the land offers us an opportunity to know more…about life, ourselves, and the Divine.

Pilgrimages

There is an island there is no going

to but in a small boat the way

the saints went, travelling the gallery

of the frightened faces of

the long-drowned, munching the gravel

of its beaches. So I have gone

up the salt lane to the building

with the stone altar and the candles

gone out, and kneeled and lifted

my eyes to the furious gargoyle

of the owl that is like a god

gone small and resentful. There

is no body in the stained window

of the sky now. Am I too late?

Were they too late also, those

first pilgrims? He is such a fast

God, always before us and

leaving as we arrive.

There are those here

not given to prayer, whose office

is the blank sea that they say daily.

What they listen to is not

hymns but the slow chemistry of the soil

that turns saints’ bones to dust,

dust to an irritant of the nostril.

There is no time on this island.

The swinging pendulum of the tide

has no clock: the events

are dateless. These people are not

late or soon: they are just

here with only the one question

to ask, which life answers

by being in them. It is I

who ask. Was the pilgrimage

I made to come to my own

self, to learn that in times

like these and for one like me

God will never be plain and

out there, but dark rather and

inexplicable, as though he were in here?

For Thomas, the point of pilgrimage is…“Something to bring back to show you have been there; a lock of God’s hair, stolen from him while he was asleep; a photograph of the garden of the spirit.”