In adult Sunday School was on movement, with reference to how good it is for you, citing the only mildly evidenced but very popular claim that it produces cool brain chemicals and treats depression as well as CBT and better than SSRI's. BTW, whenever you see posted evidence on how good exercise is for depression and it has "dancing" on the top of the chart, almost an outlier because it is so much better than the other choices, you will know that you have come across a meta-analysis that doesn't care too much about the quality of studies it includes. The dancing one has a small sample size, poor controls, and is unclear in its definitions. Dancing may indeed be a very good treatment for depression, but that study is not evidence.
I like walking. I have a theory (for which I have no scientific evidence) that it promotes a different kind of thinking and wisdom than does meditation or other spiritual exercises. I wrote about this twice last year:
I have nothing against those other forms. I just think walking has been neglected as something good for more than your body and feelings in our culture. Mountain climbing is more invigorating, but I find the good feelings it produces are in a narrow range of general well-being. Though in the long run, maybe that's better for overall thinking. I have no opinion.
Yet it occurred to me that the chapter in The Good and Beautiful You did not anywhere mention pilgrimage. I was annoyed that the author had overlooked such an historically important Christian practice - until I noticed that I had also been overlooking it for fifty years and wasn't in much position to criticise. It was much more a European tradition and a Roman Catholic one; we don't think of it here.
My wife immediately mentioned the festivals in Jerusalem and the Sopngs of Ascent (Psalms 120-134) that were sung during the long climb, so I have become a bit fascinated by those since Sunday and also with the general idea of pilgrimage. We have people here of wide knowledge and experience. What do you know about the subject?
Something you might be interested in is the use of medieval labyrinths in churches as a form of pilgrimage.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.medievalists.net/2011/05/the-labyrinthine-path-of-pilgrimage/
At the bottom of that short article is a link to a roughly 8-page journal article on the topic at Peregrinations.
Yes, labyrinths are a cool device for introducing a purposeful-yet-not-cognitively-demanding movement so that the mind could slip into certain kinds of contemplation more easily.
ReplyDeleteAnd here's a chapter on it: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32018-8_7
ReplyDeleteI think you can read the whole thing online if you have access to Springer journals. In case not, I've pasted in the abstract below:
Labyrinths as an Embodied Pilgrimage Experience: an Ignatian Case Study
Kathryn Barush
Chapter | First Online: 27 February 2020
294 Accesses | 1 Citations
Part of the Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures book series (SCPT,volume 32)
Abstract
In the Middle Ages as in today, pilgrimages in the form of maps, manuscripts, and pavement labyrinths engendered an experience of embodied pilgrimage for those who could not travel physically to far-away sites and shrines for a variety of reasons. This essay shifts the focus to the present through a focused study of the recently-commissioned outdoor labyrinth at the Jesuit Retreat Center of Los Altos—El Retiro San Iñigo, California. It will be examined within the context of Ignatian spirituality and through the lens of the experiences of pilgrims, retreatants, and the designer/creator of the labyrinth himself who have described a sense of divine presence while perambulating within the space. The study of the visual and material culture of religion has brought forth a new and powerful awareness within the field of art history of the ways in which viewers can engage with devotional objects (both ‘officialized’ and also stemming from practices which emerged from popular piety). The continuity of religious context that undergirds both the experiences of medieval embodied viewing and contemporary labyrinth-walking provides a lens through which to examine an anagogic and prayerful practice that is facilitated through a visual and material aid; in this case, a built environment.
A version of this essay will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming book, Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience (Bloomsbury Visual Culture, 2020) ...
I went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was helpful for establishing a felt connection to the place, which I’d always had trouble imagining. Having sat in Gethsemane and watched the birds fly up over the city, I feel more like I have a sense of what was going on.
ReplyDeleteBut it also imparted a sense of how long the tradition was. I attended a Latin Mass and an Armenian one, and visited the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher which is formally controlled by several denominations. The architecture of the city included Crusader embellishments and Turkish stonework walls. You definitely come away with the sense that this has all been important to people for a long time.