A pilgrimage of Virginia Woolf readers

Some readers of this column will remember Vanessa Zoltan, who, as a divinity student, experimented with reading Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre as if it were a sacred text: praying with it, listening for how it spoke to the world around her, wrestling with it until it gave her a blessing. These days, Vanessa hosts the popular Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, in which she and her friend Casper ter Kuile explore the Harry Potter series, chapter by chapter, using sacred reading practices from the Jewish and Christian traditions. To read a sentence of these books with them, using lectio divina, or Pardes, or havruta, is to feel the joy of following meaning as it unfolds and expands. It is to remember what it felt like the first time you experienced a book as a passageway to the vast world around you and the hidden world inside you.

Vanessa continues to imagine ways to help us live more consciously and fully by reading more deeply. What if, she asked me more than a year ago, we organized a reading and walking pilgrimage around Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse? What if we gathered a group of pilgrims for a journey through the novel and through the Sussex countryside Woolf loved? What if we used sacred reading practices to deepen our understanding of her novel and created rituals to help us draw closer to the significance of our experience?

She had me at “Virginia Woolf.” So, in partnership with Liz Slade—a brilliant Londoner animated by a quiet confidence in the holiness of books, landscape, and community—we made a plan. And in early June, we found ourselves on the porch of St. Paul’s Cathedral, nervously waiting for our pilgrims to arrive.