Alabama Pilgrimage
Journey into Remembrance
The Rev. William King, an Episcopal priest in Birmingham, Ala., had traveled the world in search of the holy and the sacred. Beginning in the early 1990s, he made a series of pilgrimages to such places as Jerusalem, Rome, Assisi, and Canterbury. From the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Gethsemane, from St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican to Canterbury Cathedral, he walked in the footsteps of saints, and visited and prayed at some of the most hallowed sites in church history.
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As the years passed, however, he began to wonder if the sacred could also be found closer to home. Was it possible that pilgrimage could be made and the holy found even in his home state of Alabama?
The answer, he discovered, was a resounding “yes.” With support from the Resource Center for Pastoral Excellence at Samford University—a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project funded by Lilly Endowment Inc.—King used a previously scheduled sabbatical in 2004 to search for the holy in Alabama. Immersing himself in the subject, he first studied the history and theology of pilgrimage and then researched and put together a series of pilgrimages to sites throughout the state.
Stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Appalachian Mountains in northeast Alabama, the 12 sites include historic churches, key civil rights battlegrounds, and ancient Native American burial mounds.
To share the results with others, King created a Website, “Places of Secret Prayer: Pilgrimage to 12 Sacred Places in Alabama,” which contains a brief guide to the Alabama pilgrimage sites, tips for successful pilgrimage, links and other information. He also wrote a small book, Places of Secret Prayer: Pilgrimage in Alabama, with more extensive descriptions of the pilgrimage sites and background information about pilgrimage.
To King, pilgrimage is about more than just visiting holy sites. Instead, it is a spiritual discipline, one that he believes Christians in the U.S. need desperately to recover.
“Pilgrimage is one more spiritual discipline in our bag of spiritual disciplines,” he says. “My hope is that we can reclaim it as part of our faith experience.”
Historically, pilgrimage was an important and widely practiced discipline in the early church, but became much less prominent, particularly in Protestant churches, after the Reformation. According to leading scholars, classic spiritual pilgrimages were taken for variety of reasons. Some, for example, were made to visit sites associated either with a religion’s beginnings, such as Jerusalem, or to sites believed to be linked with certain symbols, such as the Holy Grail. Other pilgrimages were penitential in tone and were made to shrines associated with saints. More modern pilgrimages of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as to Lourdes, France, or Fatima, Portugal, were typically undertaken to express the pilgrim’s personal piety and devotion.
Today, a new form of pilgrimage is emerging, King says, one that he likes to call “Re-Membering Pilgrimage.” As the name suggests, this contemporary version of pilgrimage is essentially about remembering and reconnecting to the Christian story.
“We live in an age that has the spiritual symbols but doesn’t necessarily have command of the sacred story or the truths behind the story,” he says.
For example, many people today have some vague understanding of the cross as an important symbol and the role of Baptism, but they don’t really understand how it all fits together into the broader Christian narrative and the stories of those who have gone before. Christians today, he says, are like a family that has lost its family history.
“We simply do not know or have forgotten our family history and sacred home sites,” he says. “We no longer remember the stories of family members from ages past.”
Pilgrimage is a journey into remembrance and prayer, King says. Indeed, one scholar has described pilgrimage as “prayer with the feet.” The destinations are typically sacred because of specific events that happened there or certain people, saints of the church, who lived or visited there. They are often places of healing, revelation, or martyrdom.
In selecting the sites for his Alabama pilgrimage, King first wrote 30 religious leaders throughout the state, asking for their suggestions of the most meaningful, spiritual places in Alabama. From those, he chose and visited the final 12, including several places that were scenes of major events in the struggles of the Civil Rights era.
“We’re very blessed in Alabama and cursed at the same time,” he says. “The Civil Rights era was a very tragic time in the life of our state, but one of the things it left us was sacred ground, the same way the early church was left with places of martyrdom.”
The Cash Grocery Store in Hayneville, where an Episcopal seminary student was shot and killed in 1965 after working to register African-American voters; the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, where the Rev. Martin Luther King served as pastor in the late 1950s, and the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four girls died in a bombing in 1963 are among King’s Alabama pilgrimage destinations.
While he visited and is deeply attached to all the sites, King was particularly moved by his pilgrimage to Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma. A 100-year-old church, Brown Chapel was supposed to have been the starting point on March 7, 1965, for a protest march to the state Capitol in Montgomery. But instead, the small crowd of worshippers and civil rights activists had barely started on their trek, when they were clubbed and beaten back by state troopers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge a few blocks away.
A few days later, a larger crowd, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., successfully crossed the bridge, and later that month, more than 10,000 marchers crossed the bridge and made the journey to Montgomery.
During his pilgrimage to the church in July 2004, King’s understanding of what came to be called “Bloody Sunday” was forever transformed. Visiting the church, he learned that in the AME tradition, the first Sunday of every month is communion Sunday. For the first time, King realized that the original group of marchers had received communion only moments before walking into the maelstrom on the Pettus Bridge.
“Once I heard that story, it blew me away,” says King. “It so touched me and moved me. It changed my whole understanding of that event.”
As he did at all the pilgrimage sites, King spent considerable time at Brown Chapel, sitting alone in the sanctuary for hours that July afternoon. As he sat and prayed, his gaze fell upon the back of the pew in front of him, and he noticed how well-worn it was, the wood burnished by the touch of thousands of hands over more than a century.
“I realized that the sweat of hands from the last 100 years were on those pews,” he says. “I felt as though I was touching their hands. I felt as though I was touching their sweat and leaving an imprint of my own hand as I touched theirs. That is the communion of saints. And that’s how we connect with each other and our story. In Brown Chapel Church, the living martyrs of that church are still in those pews.”
Those kinds of “connection” moments don’t always happen on a pilgrimage, King says: “But if we don’t pause, relax and take time and become reflective, we’re never going to get it.”
A pilgrimage, he insists, is not a vacation. It’s not about rushing from one place to the next, stopping perhaps to snap a photo and take a few seconds of video. Pilgrimage requires that the pilgrim pause and be still. It is an intentional act of walking and traveling, focusing on the spiritual and sacred.
In his studies about pilgrimage, King read about a famous woodcut of a pilgrim astronomer. Carved in the 1600s, the woodcut depicts the pilgrim putting his head through a slit in the dome of the sky so that he could see the machinery of the sun and stars and witness the mystery of creation.
“That’s what pilgrimage is,” says King. “It’s about putting your head through a thin slit of a place and seeing the mystery of a creation. And that takes time. It’s not something you can do sitting in an office all day, talking on the phone and answering e-mails.”
Like prayer and practicing Sabbath, pilgrimage is one more discipline that busy pastors can use to keep their spiritual life vital, says King.
Although he presides at Sunday worship at a small church in Clanton, Ala., King works primarily in the diocesan office in Birmingham as deputy for ministry development and clergy deployment. His day-to-day work life is spent dealing with the church bureaucracy, working with pastors and congregations throughout the state, often intervening to help settle their disputes.
“I don’t get to visit people in the hospital,” he says. “I don’t get to do the sacramental life of the church as much as I would like. This job sometimes feels very distant from the pastoral life and core spirituality of the church.”
When he heard about the Sabbatical Leave Program at Samford’s Resource Center for Pastoral Excellence, King saw a chance to re-establish some balance in his own life by using his regular sabbatical leave to learn more about pilgrimage. More than a year later, that spiritual quest continues to make a difference in his life, leading to new links and connections he had never thought possible, he says.
“It has restored something in my spiritual DNA,” he says. “I can just feel it. I know it. I can touch it. It has helped me reestablish a spiritual balance in my own life. I’ve told the people at Samford more than once, ‘Thank you.’”
Since completing the project last year, King continues to read and study about pilgrimage and goes on pilgrimages, both in Alabama and elsewhere, several times a year. He also receives frequent inquiries from people who have visited his Website and want to know more about the Alabama pilgrimage and has led several group pilgrimages to those sites. In addition, the School of Theology at Sewanee-The University of the South has invited him to spend two weeks next spring as a fellow-in-residence, studying and teaching about pilgrimage.
King is convinced that the sacred is all around us. But usually we don’t see it because we’re always running rather than walking, hurrying about, rather than being still.
“Every state has its holy places, its sacred places,” he says. “We just have to discover them.”
