Journey
JOURNEY as an image of the voyage of life is universal; and pilgrimage, a consecrated journey, is found in all faiths. This programme brings together diverse elements to form a themed narrative. This set of Laudes Regiae, triumphant acclamations used to welcome and dignify important guests, comes from Worcester, where Anglo-Saxon influence remained into the twelfth century. Among the saints can be heard English names; Edmund, Etheldreda, Dunstan. Isaac’s famous song laments his leaving Innsbruck; Vaughan Williams’ sets George Herbert’s poem on the ‘Way’ of Christ; Palestrina’s ‘As the hart desires the waterbrooks’, Psalm 42, is the journey of the soul seeking God. Judith Bingham sets an ecstatic poem by one of the ‘Pilgrim’ seekers of religious freedom in America, hailing its ‘happy land’. ‘I went down to the river’ and ‘Simple Gifts’ are later fruits of that American Puritan tradition; the first asks to be shown ‘the way’, and the other has found the secret of the journey, being ‘in the place just right’. For Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Song Vaughan Williams uses a folktune whose original text is ‘Our Captain calls all hands; we’re away tomorrow’, and so speaks doubly of the journey. ‘In exitu Israel de Egypto’ describes the miraculous journey of Israel from slavery. This version from the Easter afternoon procession, itself a symbolic journey, is sung to the psalm tone ‘Peregrinus’: ‘pilgrim’ or journeying’.
The Navy Prayer may be read as a paradigm of the journey of life: dangers, fights, being part of a greater whole, the wish to return home. Basho describes the preparation, including rubbing ‘moxa’ into his legs, taking leave of friends, and departure. Chaucer describes the desire for journeying which awakens in springtime. Eliot dwells on the travellers, in parenthesis between fixed modes of life, and of the change wrought in them by travelling. Belloc amusingly tells of a pragmatic decision taken on a walked pilgrimage to Rome, and Robert Frost’s mysterious and haunting poem hints at the life-long journey. Agi Ruben in a verbatim text from a taped interview, describes enforced exile and the horrors of Auchwitz. It is followed by the words of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah bewailing the exile of the people of Israel, in the setting by Tallis. St Columba’s journey prayer is followed by a Gaelic song of exile from the western isles, and by the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, an endless weary journey across ice-cold seas. Walt Whitman’s journey is exuberant and hopeful, treating the road as the path of life and experiences met along it as treasured possessions. Bunyan’s fable tells of the end of the Pilgrim’s journey and his entry into the holy city. Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’ draws these threads together; the journey is life itself, the destination is the journey itself.
