Morgan Pritchard- Chapter 5 Reflection

 Chapter 5 of American Camino discusses wilderness as a sacred place. It says that these places serve as conduits between people and Holy beings. Pilgrims traveling through sacred places “encounter the holy through images, icons, social relations, architecture, landforms, wildlife, and other varieties of symbolic communication rooted in concrete experience” (pg 187). In a religion class I took last year, we learned that sacred places have no rules as to what constitutes one. As long as it holds value to you then it is sacred. I thought this chapter of the book was very interesting because it does a good job of showing how sacred places mean different things to everyone and there are no rules for what makes a place sacred. Nature and the wilderness are often seen as sacred places and I think a main reason for that is because it has natural beauty and can do incredible things. When looking at landscapes such as the Grand Canyon or the northern lights, it is easy to have a connection to the scenery because of its beauty. The wilderness also encapsulates life and death with the circle of life of many plants and animals. The book goes into detail about how wilderness has played a part in history. Mythology, religion, and past encounters have influenced pilgrimages to sacred places. Many people go into the wilderness to seek out a cultural experience in nature because of its history of impacting so many people.

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