Sharing stories
The Commonwealth Honors Academy (CHA) is an exciting, challenging three-week academic, social and personal growth program for outstanding high school students who have completed their junior year. Each summer CHA has a theme around which the various activities and academic curricula are planned.
The 2015 theme was “The Road Ahead: Making Your Way”
In our course, we focused on religious pilgrimage journeys. Pilgrimage is a religious phenomenon virtually ubiquitous among faith traditions worldwide. A handful of major destinations like Rome, Jerusalem, and Mecca attract pilgrims from all corners of the globe, but the act of physically traversing a space in order to arrive somewhere sacred is an act that takes many forms and exhibits divergent characters. By nature, pilgrimage is a complex phenomenon whose study brings together a wide range of academic disciplines.
We explored a few key questions: How do we define pilgrimage? How is this definition made manifest in various cultures? What types of non-religious movements can fit into a pilgrimage framework? What connections can we draw between widely recognized pilgrimage journeys and experiences quite close to home? How important is place? What is the relationship between places near and far? What kinds of tangible objects hold meaning in these journeys? What symbolic meaning do they have?
In addition to a number of readings, class discussions, films, presentations, mini-pilgrimages, and guest speakers, we collaborated with the Murray Calloway Senior Citizens Center to share stories of important places and journeys from the lives of some of their community members.
We’d like to share those stories with you here.