This place is as alive and energized as any of the greatest pilgrimage shrines of the world. I have been to many hundreds of these sites around the planet and feel I can speak about this subject with some authority. Similar to a few shrines in the southern Indian states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnatika, San Juan de los Lagos is a veritable well spring of joy, festivity, and passionate spiritual devotion all woven together in a most intoxicating way.
By nine o’clock in the morning the hundreds of stalls were buzzing with business, multiple bands of musicians were performing around the church square, and at least five thousand singing pilgrims were tightly packed within the soaring, golden interior of the great basilica. We have a certain word in the English language, epiphany, seldom able to be accurately used because the experience it describes is so very rare a thing in most people’s lives. A true epiphany is an unexpected and stunningly powerful experience of spiritual revelation and glory that touches and forever changes the heart, mind, and soul. Entering the cathedral, I was swept into such a state and carried along by the presence or field of devotional energy generated by the thousands of pilgrims worshipping at the shrine.
A pilgrim at San Juan de los Lagos
I have mentioned a few times in previous paragraphs this matter of a field or presence of energy existing at the great pilgrimage shrines. What exactly do I mean by these words, "presence" and "field?" Paul Devereux, a learned scholar of the re-emerging Earth Mysteries tradition, has given a wonderful definition of these gatherings and intensifications of various presences. They are "non-material fields of influence extending in space and continuing in time." We can more easily conceptualize these fields by mentally visualizing the behavior of magnetic filings around a powerful magnet. There is a force here that we cannot directly see but whose presence we can certainly feel (sometimes naturally, sometimes only after a bit of training). This is what I mean when I write such words as the power, or presence, or field, of the sacred sites. A density of holiness saturates and surrounds these types of places. This field of energy exerts a tremendous spiritual magnetism on the hearts and minds of billions of people, giving rise to the planet-wide social phenomena of pilgrimage.
This concept may be new, even revolutionary to many people in the United States but it is commonly understood (though expressed in different ways) by peoples of every other culture of the world. The United States is the only large country on the planet not having an ongoing and long-standing pilgrimage tradition. Relatively few non-native and/or non-indigenous people living in the US understand the concept of a spiritual presence existing at the sacred sites. This ignorance of something so very beautiful is, too me, one of the saddest statements of condition of the American mindset. By my writings and slide shows I hope to be able to assist in the changing of this mindset to one much more in conscious relationship with the living Earth.
