Making meaning while Steeping in the Camino Cauldron (sin and absolution)

 Making meaning while Steeping in the Camino Cauldron is an essay by Dr. Kip Redick assigned as a required reading for the class.  To quote his own biography "Dr. Kip Redick is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and religion at Christopher Newport university." in addition he is also spiritual journey, spirituality of place, aesthetics, media ecology; visual, religious, and environmental rhetoric; and film studies. He makes specific study of wilderness trails as sites of spiritual journey and

practice.

In this writing he seeks to draw attention to the differences between modern pilgrims and historic pilgrims on el Camino de Santiago, specifically in their motivation and the definitions of those motivations. This in particular is what I want to focus on. Sin, alienation, separation, a primary motivation for undertaking a pilgrimage. What is sin? What does it do to us? Why is it so relevant to the discussion of pilgrimage?

The idea of sin is a deeply religious in most cases. It implies a wrong done, a slight against the rules, orthodoxy, or ideas of some God. Dr. Redick points out that the feeling of alienation gained from "occasions of sin" are present in medieval, contemporary, cultural, and religious pilgrims, and undertaking such a journey can bring relief to those feelings. But this idea of sin extends further in the modern age. Sin is some slight which oneself knows and that weighs upon the spirit, it is a wounding which separates one from their relationships, it puts distance between people. Therefore, sin can be extrapolated to mean alienation, and its influence breaks up relationships, personal, professional, even those between one and their pursuits and even the world around them.

Pilgrimage is a journey with a strong spiritual component, and as sin is a spiritual wound, a pilgrimage helps to alleviate sin. as Turner writes and is quoted by Dr. Redick here, "the weariness of the body is submitted to hard, voluntary discipline, loosening the bonds of matter to liberate the spirit.". In the undertaking of a proper pilgrimage, the body is subjected to longe periods of increased strain and dicipline. The pilgrim must have discipline in order to make such a journey, as it requires much effort consistently over a very long period of time, and as Turner asserts, pilgrimage is meant as a way to relieve the spirit of incurred sins, easing the breaking of relationships and allowing for the pilgrim to become less alienated and closer to the world around them. 

Pilgrimage is a method of healing alienating sin.





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