Mapping Pilgrimage – stitched cartography as spiritual practice and sacred reading

Setting out on a pilgrimage is language that signifies an intentional spiritual journey. For those immersed in spiritual traditions the whole of life may be considered a kind of pilgrimage that takes place in physical embodied and spiritual unseen ways. The language of pilgrimage contains a conviction that journey and place are shaping aspects of spirituality, and that humanness is inherently movement oriented in which growth and connection are happening at all times. From a Judeo-Christian perspective narratives of journey and pilgrimage are woven into the heart of the text. From the exile of Eden right through to the letters sent from a variety of locations that form the major part of the second testament people are constantly on the move in God’s sight and as part of their vocation. Indeed Jesus Christ becomes and “earthroamer”(Hamman, 2022, p. 680) and the geography of journey is a place of frequent encounter with the Divine and messengers of such. Hagar meets God in a desert, Jacob wrestles by a river on the way home, two disciples on the way to Emmaus meet the risen Christ, the people of Israel follow cloud and fire divinely provided as navigational way makers. Exile, return, longing for place and mission all concern journeys that take people from one place to another with a sense of spiritual impetus, and these places are often marked by significant events. Jesus before ascension casts a vision for a revolution that will take place through the ordinary, intentional, and forced acts of journey and exile.

These narratives are handed down through traditions of journeys. Literal maps are drawn, letters that include descriptors of new locations, journals of significant events and the locations they take place in, become ways of recording who we are. We are people with ancestors who moved. In contemporary ways the language of pilgrimage is still used to describe religious journeys to places of significance, and inner journeys of personal development. People memorialise and visit places of communal memory – cairns, war memorials, altars. People set out on journeys of mission and migrants makes their homes in geographies completely different from those where they set out. These are journeys of expected transformation. In Aotearoa/ New Zealand appropriate introductions, *pepeha*, include acknowledgements of ancestral landmarks and journeys that tribes and ancestors took to make their home on this land.

In a similar way stitching as spiritual practice requires journey. A vision must be cast for the journey the thread will take. This requires an impetus to set out, a casting into the mystery, a sense that cloud and fire are the guides but the journey will not be linear. This kind of stitching contains no pre-made pattern and will say more than the artist expected (Alves, 1990).To create a stitched cartography of pilgrimage necessitates a re-membering of the spiritual journey (Carr, 1998). The stitcher must consider interior and exterior movements that have shaped the landscape of formation and been especially meaningful. In what places has God been as obvious as a ram in the thickets and a conversation by a well, in what places has God been present or absent in silence and or derelict cry from the cross? What journeys through death’s valley and Easter Saturday must also be witnessed to? How is the leaving of nets to follow Jesus and the triumphal journey into Jerusalem important in the cartography? The creation of a stitched cartography is a way of creating a spiritual text, in continuity and discontinuity with other maps and records of sacred journey. It is a physical enactment of spiritual meaning making that is itself a pilgrimage and journey. The whole body is involved in creating the stitched map seeking to express geographical, topographical, metaphorical and spiritual dimensions of embodied experience. A stitched cartography presents a picture of journey in a physically and visually stimulating way for viewer and maker. The map can be touched as well as seen, it is dimensional.

Stitch as a practice for spiritual communication is a marginal voice. It records in a voice not often heard in scholarly discourses, and as a domain of ‘feminine arts and craft’ it is often disdained in the art world too. Similarly, maps made with specialised equipment and a focus on precision have been viewed as superior to those created from embodied memory with a focus on landmarks, food, or communal gathering. This is evident when exploring the *taonga* [treasure] of indigenous maps created and communicated through picture, song, and incantation. Maps that sought to empirically record and colonise lands contain a limited view of journey, one confined to discovery, accurate records, and ownership. Maps of memory, that were offered to others on a similar pilgrimage cast a vision for journey that is in tune with location, need and communion. A stitched cartography of spiritual pilgrimage is in harmony with the latter. Each stitch is a witness to the myriad of ways people travel in the world and the ways in which these journeys shape and define them in relation to land, community and faith.

This paper is presented out of a conviction for the value of pilgrimage as an analogy for the spiritual journey of life and a record of this in map form. It is in harmony with many spiritual traditions, arises from a Christian continuity with the journeys of the biblical text and enacts a contemporary, contemplative spirituality that creates a type of sacred text through stitching. The presentation will include especially created cartographies that map 3 figures – Elijah, the Prodigal Son, and the presenter’s spiritual pilgrimage to date. Each will offer a cartography, cast in stitch, of geographical and spiritual longing and journey. Ultimately, through enacted arts-based research the paper asks and demonstrates how exploration of landscape, topography and pilgrimage might coalesce into a stitched map. It leaves the listener/viewer to consider the divine and human cartography of their own life as a way of understanding pilgrimage, relationship to spaces and relationships to others including the divine.