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Second, I have certain scenes fully formed in my imagination as the backdrop to Jesus' story. The sight of contemporary Israel, with its resort hotels and parasailing concessions on the Sea of Galilee, might irreparably damage the historically pristine Palestinian landscapes I behold with my inner eye. At best, a trip to Israel now would be like seeing the movie after reading the book, an almost guaranteed disappointment.

And even if I resigned myself to Israel's inevitable modernization, what about the hordes of other gawking tourists shuffling along the Via Dolorosa in fluorescent windsuits and neck-slung cameras? My friends have already warned me that no one gets to meditate at these shrines in peace and quiet. I feared that, instead of inspiring devotion, bridging the distance between the physical present and the spiritual past might prove the ultimate demythologizing experience for me.

Finally, there was the question of motive. Are postmodern pilgrims actually driven by devotion? Isn't our consciousness already perverted by celebrity TV? The line between veneration and sheer curiosity looked awfully fine to me from this side of the Atlantic.

My husband, however, has no such misgivings. For years he had longed to sign up as a paying volunteer on an archaeological dig in Israel. But he is wily, and rather than suggest such a radical plunge into pilgrimage, he campaigned for a spiritual destination on an easy entry level—C. S. Lewis's England.

Such a trip would circumvent at least one of my objections to pilgrimages—the present's assault on the imagined past. The time gap between Lewis's life and our own was not so wide as to disturb the scenes in my imagination. Oxford, at least the University, still looks pretty much the same as it did in Lewis's day—or Cranmer's, for that matter, though they no longer burn heretics on Broad Street. Also, both Oxford and Cambridge, where Lewis taught during the last years of his life, are now thoroughly secularized; thus, neither was likely to be overrun with spiritual pilgrims. Moreover, the tour brochure my husband brought home promised a cousin, a biographer, and a Cambridge colleague of Lewis's as guides on various segments of the tour.

My one remaining qualm concerned the rest of the people who had signed up for the trip. Our ages ranged from 16 to 78. Several in the group had never actually read a book by Lewis. Half were students, some of whom had never ventured far from home. Another quarter came from that vast pool which forms the backbone of the American tourist industry—well-heeled widows and divorcées. One of the widows announced at the airport that her primary objective would be snapping up as many Britannia Beanie Babies as she could get her hands on. Several young women showed up with suitcases large enough to hold two full-grown Texans. Inwardly I groaned. We were beginning to look a lot like Chaucer's companions on the road to Canterbury—a mixed bag representing the rich and the poor, the lascivious and the chaste, the learned and the ignorant, the pious and the petty.

The Bible doesn't record whether Adam and Eve ever felt the urge to revisit the locked gates of Paradise, but the impulse to pilgrimage appears early in human history. Hindus flocked to Benares to bathe in the Ganges for millennia before the first Christian tour bus cruised Jerusalem. And pious Muslims traveled to Mecca centuries prior to Pope Urban II sending Crusaders to battle the Seljuk Turks for the shrine of the Holy Sepulcher.

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February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2