Pilgrim's Path: Egeria

We at the seminary are finally done with finals, which means I have no excuse not to update our blog.  I wanted to post something about packing, but I haven't even come close to starting.

Instead I thought I would post about a (possible) Saint who has made the pilgrimage that we'll be making in 11 days.  Egeria (also known as Aetheria or Etheria or somehow Sylvia) was a Galician matron (Galicia is the Roman province that composed most of Spain and matrons were wealthy, usually landowning women with a certain status in the Roman Empire) who wrote about her experiences on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early 380's.

Livia, the wife of Caesar Augustus, dressed as a Roman
 matron.  Though the official clothing of Roman matrons didn't change
 much in the 4 centuries between Livia and Egeria, Roman society did.

 This is important because she wrote the first travelogue of the holy sites, and much of what she wrote about tells us about how Christians in the holy land were living just after the legalization of Christianity, especially how they prayed and conducted liturgy.  She also tells us about how Christians in the early Church were preserving various holy sites, which helps confirm their pedigree and even mentions some relics that were eventually removed by St. Helena to Constantinople (St. Helena will be another one of these posts) and then somehow ended up in Rome (relic theft wasn't against canon law at the time).

Roman matron from about 80 years before Egeria.

Unfortunately only fragments of her letters back to her community in Spain survive, but she still is a valuable primary source for what life was like in Christian Palestine.  You can go to a interactive website tracing her writings by clicking this sentence.

My borrowed copy of Egeria' writings. The
student worker was not happy that I tried to
check out 10 minutes before they closed for Christmas.

I hope everyone has a very blessed and merry Christmas!

-JP