The Power of Pilgrimage

ACROSS the country and across every denomination there is a growing distance between the religious fare that we are off ering in our churches and the spiritual experience that people are craving.

When will we tumble to the fact the hymn/prayer sandwich on a Sunday morning is simply not ticking the empty boxes of people’s lives? Faith for most people who are still holding on to the possibility of God is much more fluid and exploratory than most of our dogmas and creeds permit, so, the churches continue to lose ground and continue to distance themselves from a culture that is finding new ways to explore meaning and purpose.

One of those ‘new ways’ is, in fact, an old way, that has found a new significance – it is the practice of pilgrimage and for those who participate, it is a holistic approach to self-examination, reflection and the exploration of mystery.

Pilgrim Ways are being restored and opened up all over the world. One of the latest to be mapped and opened is the Fife Pilgrim Way and like all the others, from Canterbury to the Camino, it provides a wonderful opportunity for walkers to experience a journey of self-discovery and an exploration of that which lies beyond what the ear can hear and the eye can see. I recommend it; it is 70 miles of opportunity to connect with nature, with fellow travellers and, who knows, even with God.

In the Book of Hebrews (chap 11), the writer describes Abraham’s journey as not simply being about the search for better grazing or richer farm land; it is also described as “a desire for a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” The power of pilgrimage is that it is able to combine all the reality of the earth beneath our feet and all the mystery of the search that goes on within the heart and soul and mind. Frédéric Gros, in his book A Philosophy of Walking, says: “Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills…you are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings.

But the walker who marvels while walking has no past, no plans, no experience. They have within them the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.”

Walking pilgrim ways takes people to the tombs of the martyrs, to the Abbeys which were home to the monks and nuns of another age and to the Holy Places where the sacraments have been carried unbroken through the centuries. Walking, you may absorb a sense of the history which such places invoke and you may even be moved to feel that sense of “otherness” which is missing from so much of our modern life.

Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills.

When Jesus said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the materially rich to enter the kingdom of God; he was really saying there is good cause in life to find out who we are when we have left behind the weight of all the stuff that we spend so much of our energy accumulating, insuring and guarding. Leave your mobile device behind and take to one of the pilgrim paths and you will have no other choice but to look inside – even as you look around. These paths are populated by people of faith and of doubt, by people challenging themselves spiritually and by others setting themselves physical goals. They have swapped their Sunday best for hiking boots and they are finding inspiration, encouragement and faith. It may be time for some of us in the churches to don our running shoes to catch up with them.