Note: This article originally appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of CRUX (Vol. 56, No. 3).

A Google search on “Life’s a . . . ” yields various metaphors, only some of which I can repeat here. A common one is “Life’s a beach.” More common is a metaphor that sounds like that and is followed by “and then you die.” Since I started to think about this expression of what life is, I’ve heard people say that life’s a circus, a rat race, and a ladder going nowhere.

“Life’s a journey” is a cultural metaphor, trite and true, present in human history at least since the time of the philosopher Confucius (d. 479 BCE). The saying “Life’s a journey, not a destination” is often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century, and captures something of the new country’s adventuresome spirit. Today, journey imagery expresses the reality of worldwide, radical geographical and virtual mobility. 

Life can be seen as a journey, and a journey is a storied form of travel. The life of spiritual growth maps onto journey imagery, but the life of faith is a particular kind of journey—a pilgrimage. Pilgrimage offers a distinctively spiritual story. As I listen to people in spiritual direction, I hear lives narrated in pilgrimage language: the sense of destination and progress toward it; the hills and valleys, highways and byways which mirror the soul’s interior topography; the weather and the struggle; human solitude and the pilgrim’s companions, actual and imagined. Like Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, people aim to leave their Cities of Destruction and find the Celestial City, and in doing so traverse Sloughs of Despond, Vanity Fairs, Hills of Difficulty, and Valleys of Humiliation, en route discovering their inner burden relieved at the place of God’s redeeming grace.¹

After offering some comments about contemporary pilgrimage, I will focus in this article on pilgrimage as a communal spiritual discipline in both its geographical and metaphorical forms, asking what it is and why we might engage in it.

A Culture Enamored with Pilgrimage

By my reckoning, pilgrimage is a narrative-shaping, communally understood, and often communally exercised spiritual discipline of ancient origin and significance, evident in many religions. It involves journeying toward a destination in the hope of being transformed, while identity is liberated from the conventions of daily life at the same time that it is grounded in something larger than the self and society. For many people, that larger, enveloping something is God and God’s story. The desire for pilgrimage is deeply embedded in the human heart, and its popularity has waxed and waned across cultures and periods. 

In our time, pilgrimage’s popularity has waxed enormous. Labyrinths and daily lectionaries are taken up by people who see these practices as helping them along their pilgrim paths. More and more Christians are discovering the pilgrimage of the thirty-week Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, which commit the retreatant to walking with Jesus through the Gospel narratives. These are metaphorical pilgrimages. 

More publicly, millions of people are choosing to be geographical pilgrims by traveling to sacred places. Pilgrimage today has become big business as people of faith and people of adventure flock to ancient pilgrim trails, walking sticks in hand and packs loaded on their backs. In 2014 the United Nations released a study finding that one in three of tourists worldwide is a pilgrim.² The president of a luxury travel company said that as recently as 2012, tour operators “were using terms like ‘heritage’ and ‘culture,’ but today [2015] our programs are inundated with the words ‘spiritual’ and ‘enlightenment’ and ‘pilgrimage.’ . . . A lot of our clients are definitely more self-aware, looking for more self-discovery, thinking that there’s something bigger than them. . . . We’re finding that people really want to be immersed in this.”³ 

Pilgrimage is growing dramatically and is a sought-after, immersive experience. People have adopted the term to describe secular yet spiritual journeys, such as to Burning Man, an annual event in the Nevada desert; Elvis Presley’s home Graceland in Tennessee; Robben Island in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for eighteen years; Holocaust camps and memorials; and even Prince Edward Island to see the Anne of Green Gables locations. 

Many faith-based travelers eagerly embrace the word “pilgrimage” in the Global North, where organized Christian religious participation has declined. One journalist marveled that “travel companies report that the number of people taking ‘faith-based’ vacations is up as much as 164 percent in the last five years, even at a time when surveys show that the fastest-growing religious category in the United States is no religious affiliation at all, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.”⁴ It’s been estimated that, as of 2012, more than 155 million religious pilgrims were traveling each year, most of them on annual pilgrimages to thirty-two Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Muslim, Jewish, and Daoist sites. Of those religious pilgrims, one-third (about forty million), were Christians traveling to Christian shrines.⁵ 

Writing in 2014, the founder of the Institute for Pilgrimage Studies at William and Mary College, George Greenia, claimed that “Christian pilgrimage . . . is experiencing almost convulsive growth across the world.”⁶ Many Christians make religious pilgrimages to the Holy Land, while others visit places such as the Scottish island of Iona to pray in the ancient Celtic tradition. More and more people are walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and in 2017 many visited Reformation sites in Europe in celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s famous Wittenberg posting. Some Christians I know planned to travel to Spain and walk the Camino Ignaciano from Loyola to Manresa in 2021, commemorating the five-hundredth anniversary of Ignatius of Loyola’s pilgrimage following his conversion experience. 

In May 2014 I had just sent my editor a completed draft of a book about how spiritual disciplines help to cultivate our lives, by God’s grace. When I told her I’d be out of touch for a few weeks while walking one of the routes of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, she said, “You’re walking the pilgrim trail? You have to put that in the book.” “But it doesn’t fit in the book,” I said, “and the chapters are completed.” Undeterred by my resistance, she insisted, and I’m glad she did. That conversation led to the little bit in The Cultivated Life about pilgrimage as akin to Sabbath in allowing a spiritual fallowness, a time of emptying our minds and hands with the hope of spiritual replenishment. It has also drawn my attention to the phenomenon of pilgrimage in our day and age and the possibility of engaging in it as a spiritual discipline, which helps us discover our own particular stories within the grand story of the gospel. 

Pilgrimage as a Spiritual Discipline

Spiritual disciplines are activities we take up in order to know and love God more fully, and to follow Christ more nearly every day by loving our neighbour and ourselves.⁷ Some practices that for centuries were seen as necessary—like fasting and Sabbath-keeping—have come to be viewed as optional, while other practices are enjoying a renaissance, pilgrimage being one of them.⁸

Pilgrimage studies began as a formal field of study in the 1990s, in part related to scholars’ growing interest in human mobility and their awareness of the upsurge in pilgrimage activities. Now there are institutes of pilgrimage studies in several countries, and there is also an international Consortium on Pilgrimage Studies. Pilgrimage has become an increasingly popular academic discipline as well as Christian spiritual discipline, especially in the Anglophone Global North, and many of the scholars are also practitioners of pilgrimage.⁹

Let’s look more closely at the spiritual discipline of pilgrimage. Simply, a pilgrimage is a journey imbued with spiritual hope. In this it differs from travel for commerce, sightseeing, philanthropic work, evangelism, scholarly endeavour, relaxation, and military advancement or governance—and it’s never a race. Pilgrimage engages a particular imaginary that constitutes a journey of inner change as one progresses toward a meaningful destination. 

Journeying with Jesus

Literal pilgrimages today and in earlier centuries are understood as geographical representations of the ultimate pilgrimage of the soul. For Christians these journeys are symbolic expressions of following Jesus. The imagery of pilgrimage may be appropriated in daily life as well, and some pilgrims journey in a vicarious way by walking labyrinths or stations of the cross at local churches. 

Many people also keep spiritual journals of their pilgrimages, a practice similar to the logs kept by sea captains. A person on a Spanish pilgrim trail wrote in his journal, “[I have] a sense of Jesus’ presence near me, and I feel that this has been the point of the Camino for me. Jesus is real; he is near; he is present.”¹⁰

For a number of years, usually with another spiritual director, I've led groups of people through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a 500-year-old practice of prayer and Scripture reading for the sake of better noticing God's presence in all of life. The retreatants offer anonymous reflections at the completion of the thirty weeks of coming together for this special pilgrimage, and, with permission, I draw on their insights here. One retreatant in the Spiritual Exercises wrote:

I literally grew up in the church. My parents were Southern Baptist missionaries and ministers. I knew scripture well and believed, yet I did not have the kind of personal friendship with God, Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Spirit that I now have, thanks to the Exercises. This has been a profound and unique experience beyond others, because it has provided the opportunity to directly relate with God and Jesus in particular as we weekly met in a small group and also individually daily attuned to scripture, beginning with the annunciation and through Christ’s life to his resurrection.

On the trail and in the Spiritual Exercises, pilgrims journey with Jesus.

Extracted from Normal Social Structures

A classic and exceedingly influential study of Christian pilgrimage was conducted by the anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner in the 1970s. Their earlier work among the Ndembu in Zambia sparked their own sense of the sacred, and, on their return to England in the late 1950s, they converted to Catholicism and became scholar-practitioners of Christian pilgrimage. Their book Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978) is a work of academic anthropology and practical theology, and all subsequent books on pilgrimage have been in conversation—sometimes critically—with it.

All scholars of pilgrimage write about the hope for transformation, the search for identity, and the sense of unity with humankind as part of pilgrimage. Indirectly, all mention storytelling. Victor and Edith Turner, drawing on their work in symbolic anthropology and inspired by their Christian vision, emphasize (1) the experience of liminality in voluntarily stepping outside of ordinary social structures, and (2) communitas—the spontaneous community among pilgrims that occurs on pilgrimage, free of the usual comparative markers among people in a society.¹¹ A recently returned Camino pilgrim said to me, “It felt so freeing not to know anyone’s job!” 

The Turners write:

A pilgrim is one who divests himself of the mundane concomitants of religion—which become entangled with its practice in the local situation—to confront, in a special “far” milieu, the basic elements and structures of his faith in their unshielded, virgin radiance. It is true that the pilgrim returns to his former mundane existence, but it is commonly believed that he has made a spiritual step forward.¹² 

The Turners conclude the book saying, “Catholic and Protestant faithful alike seek retreat from quotidian preoccupations and sins by making a pilgrimage movement of some kind, bringing them renewal of faith and heart.”¹³ 

This definition invites geographical and metaphorical understandings of pilgrimage and resonates with the New Testament pilgrim who is a stranger in this land. It can apply to retreatants in the Spiritual Exercises and to the pilgrim with blistered feet walking an ancient trail in a distant land. Transformation is expected through actually or imaginatively stepping out of the social structures of one’s ordinary life. It is a volitional, episodic spiritual discipline.¹⁴ The Turners refer to this as anti-structural, as the pilgrim is extracted from his or her ordinary preoccupations, sins, and structures of practicing faith.

Embedded in Metastructure

In contrast to the anti-scructuralist view of the Turners, the contemporary anthropologist Joy McCorriston sees pilgrimage as a culturally transmitted, foundational practice that is metastructural. She writes, “Pilgrimage is a journey to a sacred place to participate in a system of sacred beliefs.”¹⁵ It’s a human metastructure that has existed in certain places for millennia (about 6,500 years in Arabia) and persisted despite cultural change. In this view, pilgrimage is a socially innate habitus that many people are born into. The ancient Hebrew people were pilgrimage-making people, as Muslims continue to be. Though she doesn’t write about metaphorical pilgrimages, McCorriston argues that people are shaped by being part of a pilgrimage culture, whether or not a particular individual makes a pilgrimage. Certainly, Jewish religious services involve mention of going to Jerusalem, whether or not the particular worshipers ever have done or intend to do that. But the people commemorate pilgrimage and speak of it, much as we sing of the road on which we follow Jesus to our homeland.

Transformation is expected through actually or imaginatively stepping out of the social structures of one’s ordinary life.According to McCorriston, the other fundamental human metastructure is that of household, and both pilgrimage and household endure though civilizations rise and fall, providing a practical framework for social life throughout times of massive social change to such a degree that some say they stand “outside history.”¹⁶

McCorriston’s two metastructures of pilgrimage and household are helpful when thinking about the identity of the church, as the social structure of the church is deeply embedded in both. According to Scripture, we are both “strangers and pilgrims,” people on the way, as our souls progress toward their final destiny, but we are also part of the “household of God” (Eph 2:19). In Psalm 1 the people of God tell their story of faith in the language of dwelling and journeying. Psalm 84 extolls the joys of being in God’s dwelling place, courts, and house, and at the same time the psalmist writes of the faithful person “in whose heart are the highways to Zion.” Indeed, those “whose hearts are set on pilgrimage” (Ps 84:5, NIV) are blessed. 

The language of the way or highway is in some English translations rendered “pilgrimage.” In his contemporary translation of Scripture, Eugene Peterson titles fifteen of the psalms, “Pilgrim Songs” (120–134). We are planted and rooted in God (see 2 Esdras 8:30–41; Ps 1), and we are on the way. In the Greek of Colossians 2:6–7, we are peripatetic rhizomes, walking trees, embedded in the twin, ancient metastructures.

The innateness of household and pilgrimage does not extract these metastructures from the realm of practice. Households rely on bodily habituation, the repetition of work, and the coordination of roles on a daily basis. We might think about which Christian spiritual disciplines are of the household variety (e.g., family devotions, grace prayers at meals, Sabbath-keeping). Maintaining church communities by extended practices of households creates social structure undergirded by metastructure.

The practices of pilgrimage, unlike those of household, rely on a large time-space stretch.¹⁷ Unlike daily devotions or prayers at meals, pilgrimage does not make year-round daily demands and so is transmitted and maintained in more metaphorical ways. We make annual, metaphorical pilgrimages through the long church seasons of Advent and Lent. The metastructure of pilgrimage may cleanse and refresh life within the society.

We each must consider our own spiritual practices. (1) Do we sometimes “journey to a sacred place to participate in a system of sacred beliefs” (McCorriston), whether that place be far away or near at hand? (2) Does a spiritual discipline involve a circuitous journey that involves reaching “new states of spiritual awareness” (Barush)? (3) Does this practice enable us to be divested “of the mundane concomitants of religion [in order] . . . to confront . . . the basic elements and structures of . . . faith in their unshielded, virgin radiance” (Turner and Turner)? 

Why Pilgrimage?

There are many spiritual disciplines one can practice. Why would one take up pilgrimage, in particular? I’ll focus on four reasons. 

Forging Faith Narratives

Pilgrimage forges and burnishes our faith narrative. It offers a narrative of transformation, identity, and encounter that engages the body, mind, imagination, soul, and community. 

Pilgrimage scholar George Greenia claims that “being on pilgrimage is one of our most tenacious images, and once we agree that ‘life is a pilgrimage’ we cling to the chance to work our untidy temporal arc of human existence into a narrative.”¹⁸

Some argue for a deep connection between embodied action and narrative formation: “We’re not just organically bipedal, we’re hard pressed to think clearly without walking ourselves through our thinking process as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau and even the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey recognized.”¹⁹  Perhaps this is even more true for spiritual thinking, for as a French philosopher claimed, “Psalms . . . should be actualized in the body.”²⁰ Solvitur ambulando—it’s solved by walking.

On a symbolic level of thinking about pilgrimage, narrative psychologist Dan McAdams writes that highly generative people see themselves as having a special destiny, and they pursue it through trials and tribulations. They see how they’ve been refined, strengthened, and formed through a journey of suffering that yields post-traumatic transformation and growth. Like those who understand pilgrimage as an ordeal that leads to transformation, more and more people see that suffering, properly storied, may serve a purpose and even have benefits. People whose narrative has been forged in suffering tend to be generative, displaying “concern for and commitment to promoting the welfare and development of future generations.”²¹

Social scientists claim that to discover our stories we need adventure, restful reflection, and conversation. The philosopher Donald Polkinghorne writes, “One’s life story needs to include a series of progressive and regressive periods repeating over time—that is, it needs adventures followed by a return to repose.”²² We need experiences, too, that shape our memories, as Freud has pointed out and Oliver Sachs, the neurologist, affirms: “Freud used the word nachträglich—‘retranscription’—to describe the brain’s action of calling up a memory and revising it in response to fresh circumstances.”²³ In healthy minds memories are revised as we grow. 

There is significance in telling our story to others, in speech or writing. William Shakespeare captured this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, writing:

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.²⁴ 

On the pilgrim trail, our imagination bodies forth, and we discover who we are in the process, sometimes when we tell stories around the table in the evening.

The Christian religion has long embraced pilgrimage as a practice of spiritual formation engaged in by stepping outside the structures of society and church, orienting toward a sacred place, and journeying with other pilgrims in an egalitarian fellowship. The conviction is that, whether the pilgrimage is interior or geographical, we discover our true story by stepping out of our socially constructed one. The process changes us.²⁵

Transformation

This idea of change brings us to a primary answer people give to the question, “Why pilgrimage?” The common response, offered by religious and secular pilgrims alike, is, “The hope of transformation.”²⁶

Contemporary scholars understand today's secular journeys to places like Graceland, Robben Island, and other nonreligious "meccas" as "travel for transformation"—that is, pilgrimage.²⁷  These are countercultural experiences, increasingly sought after by people who have grown weary of the circus of contemporary life.On the pilgrim trail, our imagination bodies forth, and we discover who we are in the process.

The transformation that takes place on pilgrimage may be moral. Bruce Feiler, who wrote Walking the Bible, encountered two Americans, recent medical school graduates, on a secular pilgrimage walk to Buddhist shrines in Japan. One told Feiler that he was a man of science, not religion, but that “now we’re at a turning point in our lives, when we’re about to have responsibilities to actually take care of people. . . . It’s a good time to reflect on how we want to conduct ourselves.”²⁸ He was hoping for an ethical confirmation or transformation that would inform his future narrative as a physician. 

Scholars write that the transformative effects of pilgrimage are biopsychosociospiritual. For religious pilgrims, the hope is clarified and shaped by faith, tradition, texts, and community. Whether one enters into Lent as a forty-day pilgrimage or walks dusty trails to sacred places of Christian history, pilgrims hope to be transformed by Jesus Christ.

Reflecting on a pilgrimage to visit the places walked by Ignatius of Loyola, one student wrote:

In little moments, when I paid attention to the grace around me instead of the pain of my feet and exhaustion, it was evident how the Spirit was at work. The interior work, along with the great consolation at Montserrat, brought me inner peace. I became in tune with my deepest desires and was graced with interior freedom. I was reminded through this transformation, that the Christian vocation is about love. I am grateful for the grace of freedom that will enable me to love more deeply and healthily, beginning with myself.²⁹

Many people undertake pilgrimage for the sake of healing. Some pilgrims seek physical healing at shrines; for example, six million people go to Lourdes each year, most of them hoping for their health to be restored. Pilgrimage is sometimes undertaken for emotional healing, too. In a poignant article called “Highway Therapy,” a father writes about his family’s road trip months after their five-year-old son died of a complicated heart condition.³⁰ Father, mother, and the two brothers of the boy who died took to the road because, as the father wrote, “all I wanted was to get away.”³¹ The month-long, seventeen-state trip laid down new family memories, enabled them to grieve openly and in symbolic ways, like collecting stones at each stop which they later placed on their son’s grave, in the Jewish tradition.³⁰ Their son’s absence was “distracting and disorienting,” but during the trip they slowly were transformed into the family they now are, with new memories, and, always, an absence as a part of them.

When I walked one of the trails of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in 2014, I experienced a variety of graces, including a kind of transformation that was primarily spiritual. Here’s what I wrote:

Free of any mental project while I walked five or six hours at a stretch, thoughts and feelings which find little space in daily life at home were able to surface in the openness of my mind. The usual barrier between unconscious and conscious thinned as my walking sticks rhythmically pierced the ground. 

Some thoughts were triggered by the physical experience itself. In a whole body way I remembered being a child with sun on my legs and dirt crunching under my shoes. College backpacking trips sprang to mind. My younger self was a companion on the road, and she doesn’t often get much conscious air time. I thought, too, about Jesus’ body, and how, long before his feet were anointed or pierced, they were dirty and calloused.

Relationships moved in and out of my awareness, especially as I was accompanied by people I love. Some days we spread out along the road making progress out of sight of one another, the way we ordinarily journey through our interlocking yet separate lives. My imagination went to others who have been my companions through the years, some of them—like my parents—no longer reachable, yet still so intimately a part of me. And, treading in ancient footsteps, my heart expanded toward the whole Communion of Saints.

As the days wore on I also felt regret for some paths not taken, relationships that cooled or broke, and for paying so little attention to the earth, my body, the steady movements of seasons and years, and to feelings within me that deserve to be given attention. As I walked, those regrets rose up in a poignant mingling of confession and acceptance. It felt like God’s cultivation of my soul.³³

The long, contemplative times of walking enabled me to confess sins that had submerged into unconsciousness. Parts of our story can become trapped outside of awareness, which in no way means they aren’t affecting us. Bringing them into awareness before God allowed me to receive God’s healing forgiveness. Cleansing takes place on pilgrimage, restoring us to our deeper, fuller narrative. A holy retranscription took place in me as I received God’s forgiving grace. That was a healing transformation. 

Imagining Jesus walking the earth with companions was an experience that transformed my conception of Jesus, too, just as the Spiritual Exercises do. Pilgrimage may release submerged memories in the larger structure of Scripture and the history of the faithful. This is the metastructure, if you will, that provides a container for our self-discovery. The gifts from that long walk in Spain suffuse my daily walks, which are small, constant disciplines of prayer and narrative formation in my life.

Identity

A third reason for undertaking a pilgrimage has to do with identity, and people often speak about finding their true self while on pilgrimage. Finding identity happens in a number of ways. 

A few years ago a Greek student of medicine went to the holy mountain of Athos in northern Greece and found himself. He wrote:

Walking was incredible, first of all tiring, physically very tiring. We walked from Megisti Lavra to Karakallou for about twelve hours. The eye could see a long way—the sky, virgin nature, the mountain, the valleys. The spirit soars in these parts. You get a splendid feeling. We had many rests. Drank only water. We climbed about 1,000 meters. . . . I felt there, at 1,000 meters on Athos, between the trees—it is impossible for me to translate my thoughts into words, it was the kind of experience you can live, not explain—I found myself there, I returned to my roots as a human being. My mind became peaceful. I found myself as a human being.³⁴ 

Pilgrimage can also affect our identity by reorienting us. People sometimes engage in pilgrimage when they are burned out, depleted, or feeling empty spiritually. For instance, in 2010 Jim Blecher was exhausted from years of church planting and ministry, the same years during which he and his wife had four children. He needed to recuperate, but “was not interested in just physical and emotional rest. . . . What I really needed was spiritual rest. I needed to take stock of my life, rediscover where I came from and where I may be going.”³⁵ Quitting their jobs, renting their house, and clearing their calendar for a year, the Belchers went to Europe and were pilgrims to places where Christians had stood strong in their faith. The pilgrimage strengthened Belcher’s faith identity by association with saints who had suffered for their faith.

Pilgrimage also may foster a resilient identity, and there is a metaphorical component to this, even if the pilgrimage is geographical. People who walk a pilgrimage will discover they can do what they hadn’t known they could do. Slaves in the United States did not undertake geographical pilgrimages in a freely chosen way. Yet they embraced the metastructure of pilgrimage in such a way that they were anchored in faith and strengthened in identity. The Christian pilgrim narrative was a holdfast for many of them. One narrative scholar, Dan McAdams, writes:

African American slaves identified themselves as a chosen people, like the enslaved Israelites in the book of Exodus. Like the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, and like the Puritans crossing the Atlantic, they were on a pilgrimage. Writes one scholar, “The central metaphor of the Black spiritual autobiographer of the late 18th and early 19th centuries might be summarized as ‘I am as Mr. Christian [of Pilgrim’s Progress] was, a spiritual pilgrim in an unredeemed world.’ They also identified with Jesus, whose suffering was necessary if the world was to be redeemed.”³⁶ 

Transmitting the faith through song and storytelling about pilgrimage provided an anchoring identity for uprooted, enslaved people. Such storytelling is crucial for forging resiliency in people groups and also in young people.

Developmental psychologists have studied the significance of intergenerational narratives for children’s identity-formation and resiliency. Children who have the most self-confidence have a strong “intergenerational self.” They know that they’re part of something bigger. The most healthy family narrative tells of the family’s strengths, even through times of loss and suffering, setbacks, failures, and more. “We kept persevering,” “We stuck together,” “We survived.” These stories of having been pilgrims on challenging trails cultivate in children a sense of hope, control over their lives, and better self-esteem.³⁷ 

Though most of us are neither slaves nor children, we live in a world in which resiliently holding onto our identity as Christians is not easy. The gifts of pilgrimage—separation from our ordinary routines and structures, companionship, and days of slow and attentive movement—might strengthen us all.

Encounter

The “why” of pilgrimage has to do with narrative, transformation, identity, and—last on this list—encounter. It could be argued that encounter should have been mentioned first, for Christian pilgrimage is about journeying with Jesus. 

Before mentioning that mystical encounter, however, let’s consider a couple of other forms of encounter. First, we encounter nature, including our bodily selves. Describing my experience on pilgrimage in Spain, I wrote:

The pilgrimage kept me in the landscape, on rainy days and hot, sunny ones. I noticed the texture of the dirt and stones on the road. I noticed my body, instead of just what was on my mind. Usually technology allows us to be effectively bionic—traversing territory while encased in steel, contacting people at a distance via devices, and cooking food in minutes without employing visible fuel. On the trail, we were merely human: all biology, no electronics. Occasionally my biological self cried out in blistering protest, but, on the whole, my body was my friend, cooperating with the task before it and carrying me ever forward.³⁸

I experienced and appreciated incarnation—mine and Jesus’s.

Pilgrimages in place—like walking a labyrinth, observing Lent, and undertaking the Spiritual Exercises—may seem to offer little encounter with nature, but that’s not the case. They don’t expose us to the same dangers of the world, but walking the labyrinth focuses attention on pace, breath, balance, and movement through space. Observing Lent often involves fasting, and one’s embodiment becomes conscious in that practice. The Spiritual Exercises ask that the retreatant pray for an hour a day with particular Scripture passages. Wakefulness and focus become issues, as does the phenomenon of mindfulness, as the mind reaches for distraction. Humility is a grace conferred by the encounter with nature, including our own human nature.

Companions are a crucial component of the encounter we experience on pilgrimage, even if they are imagined as past, future, or around the next bend in the road. Often the visible companions are strangers, but they form the communitas the Turners describe. The distinctions of class vanish, while personal tastes, mannerisms, and even forms of piety co-exist on the trail and around the table. As with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, there is a leveling, and on that even ground, stories take shape. Contemporary sociologists of religion, like Danièle Hervieu-Léger, conceive of pilgrims as on individualized spiritual paths (unlike converts who join religious societies), yet companionship is integral to pilgrimage. 

With the concept of communitas, the Turners emphasize that the encounter of pilgrimage is not only mystical. It’s also interpersonal, for the road is shared. The pilgrim not only leaves a particular house and place of work for a season, but also steps out of the Shire and the Matrix with their penetrating, engulfing narratives and roles. On their journeys, Frodo and Neo encountered others with whom they shared the adventure. They heard other narratives and discovered their own.

One retreatant in the Spiritual Exercises wrote:

The fact that the exercises are experienced in community means that although they invite a very intimate individual daily interaction with God, they also offer the support of the pilgrim presence of others. By meeting together and hearing about others’ journeys, we may learn, for example, that others may be having fallow weeks. Good to know that I’m not alone. We also may learn that others have been surprised by an unexpected experience of grace. Encouraging to see the specificity of God’s interactions with my fellow pilgrims, and that His deep understanding of and love for them means that is possible for me as well. . . . [This is a] fulfillment of Jesus’s promise of Matthew 18:20 regarding the sure blessings of Christian community—specifically, a deeper experience of Jesus Christ himself and all the grace that attends that. 

Most importantly, we seek to encounter the Holy One as we travel pilgrim trails, and nature (including our own embodiment) and companions amplify our experience of God. Addressing the holy encounters of pilgrimage, Victor and Edith Turner write that Christian pilgrimage is “exteriorized mysticism,” characterized by “emphasis on transcendental, rather than mundane, ends and means; its generation of communitas; its search for the roots of ancient, almost vanishing virtues as the underpinning of social life.”³⁹ 

Core to mysticism is the encounter with the holy, and those who undertake the pilgrimage of the Spiritual Exercises certainly experience themselves as journeying with Jesus. Another retreatant wrote:

My tired imagination was revitalized. Ignatius invites us to “enter into the vision of God,” and imagine what our life and world might look like from the Divine Author’s perspective. He also gives us permission to place ourselves fully within a story from the Gospel, using all five senses to become immersed in the scene. Through the power of imagination, the Scripture came alive to our group as we traveled with Jesus along the dusty streets of ancient Israel. Freedom to imagine in my spiritual life spilled over into my creative work as well. . . . No matter how out of shape we feel spiritually, spending a year with St. Ignatius is bound to make us more fit for the journey of faith.

So, too, Christians on a pilgrim trail encounter the holy. A student who completed a pilgrimage in Spain wrote:

I continue to have a sense of Jesus’ presence near me, and I feel that this has been the point of the Camino for me. Jesus is real; he is near; he is present. . . . In a genuine way, the Camino continues, and I have been assured by Jesus that he is with me. I am reminded of the words of the resurrected Jesus to [his] disciples: “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt 28:20, NRSV).⁴⁰ 

The mystical encounters are anchored in the larger narratives of faith and the communion of saints that have preceded us on the trail. 

Conclusion

When we embark on a pilgrimage, we leave our mundane routines for a time in the hope of being connected to the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28, NIV), as well as to those who share the path. The pilgrimage is an outer manifestation of the inner journey of our souls to God. As we progress, we encounter our histories and what’s deepest in our hearts. The water of our lives becomes still, and we can see more than is usually visible during our busy, ordinary days. Our companions listen to what we see. We confess, lament, hope, and love. We may just be transformed.

One pilgrimage scholar wrote eloquently about pilgrimage as a form of conversion:

A pilgrimage is the outer manifestation of an inner journey, often referred to as an allegory of the soul’s journey to God. Thus it is cosmologically meaningful. The height of the journey is the arrival at the pilgrimage centre and the encounter with the divine. There the pilgrim perceives the gap between what he should be (according to the religious tradition) and what he really is, i.e., he suddenly realizes the discrepancy between the precept and the practice. . . . The old man is dead, a new man is born. The world is seen through newly opened eyes. . . . The mundane values of the previous life-style are abandoned and replaced by values that enhance spiritual development. The pilgrimage is complete.⁴¹ 

There is a contemplative quality to pilgrimage that converts us. That has been my experience of pilgrimage, as I’ve slowed down, moved from distraction, allowed the pace and trail to hold me in a space free of the normal structures of social, and even religious, life. My story grows and deepens. Grace received.