19/04/2025
Archbishop Stephen writes in today's Yorkshire Post about the joy of walking. The article follows in full...
I wonder, what are your plans for the bank holiday weekend?
Are you taking time to be with family and friends, withdrawing for some much-needed R&R, or maybe even a trip to the seaside?
Perhaps you’ll go to church for tonight’s Easter Vigil, or tomorrow morning’s Easter celebrations. But whether you’re someone of faith or not, there’s one thing I’d like to suggest.
If you’re able to, go for a walk.
Of course, a walk has benefits that none of us should ignore. But there is more to it than physical exercise – it can be at least as much a mental, and spiritual, exercise.
Walks give us time to think, to spend time with thoughts that ordinarily get shut out in the busyness of our daily lives, allowing us to press pause, and take a step back and see more clearly what’s really important.
More than that, many of us are looking for something beyond ourselves, something spiritual – and walking has, since time immemorial, been a way to encounter God. This spiritual longing is reflected in a recently published report by the Bible Society, The Quiet Revival, which reveals a growing openness to Christianity and churchgoing particularly among young people.
People of faith throughout history, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or of almost any other tradition, have gone on journeys – pilgrimages – in order to find God. It’s what the men and women of Yorkshire have done for generations – and it’s what I’ve found too.
I’m something of a diehard pilgrim. I’ve walked pilgrimage routes to Lindisfarne, Durham, Walsingham, Canterbury, and of course to York. I’ve also twice walked the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, once about 400 miles along the northern coast of Spain, and once the shorter English Camino from Ferrol.
Though they were difficult journeys, what I gained most was a tremendous joy.
I hope I wasn’t a miserable person before I set off – but the effect of all that walking, thinking and praying, was a new sense of my place in the world. And this made me happy. I belonged. There were other people walking with me and countless others who had walked before me.
And the new people I met were fellow pilgrims on the way, and we were all connected with each other on this journey and experiencing afresh new things about ourselves, and each other and the expansive beauty of God’s creation. All at about three miles an hour. And these things – people, company, slowness and beauty experienced first-hand - are all things it is so easy to be estranged from in the chattering obsessions and endless demands of our digital age. On the road, I discover I belong in my own skin. In the constant, steady movement of walking, I find a way to be still. I don’t need my phone so much. I can concentrate on the heartbeat rhythm of each step. I can even learn to pray. Life is lived differently. Stripped back. Simpler and more essential. More noticed. More keenly felt.
Many of the people I encountered on the way, would not describe themselves as religious. But they too were there, like me, to find a connection with something else, with something ‘other’.
Today, people across Yorkshire are making pilgrimages to find this connection with God. Just this March, a group of over 100 pilgrims walked the new St Aelred’s Pilgrim Trail across the beauty of the North Yorkshire Moors.
This was part of Faith in the North, a movement that is taking inspiration from our Anglo-Saxon past to encourage a reconnection with faith, and providing resources for churches, schools and individuals across the North.
150-strong by the end, the St Aelred pilgrims reflected on the words of the Lord’s Prayer throughout the day. Through walking and reflection, they found connection with Christ, and also with faith of their forebears, who walked these roads before them.
This Easter weekend, why not choose a path that works for you. It could be as small as making a journey to your local parish church (www.achurchnearyou.com), or to your nearest Anglo-Saxon church – you don’t know what you might find on your way.
Or you could follow a section of one of the burgeoning number of pilgrim trails across our county, whether that be St Aelred’s pilgrim trail across the Moors; St Alkelda’s Way, crossing the Dales; St Wilfrid’s Way, from Leeds to Ripon; the Way of St Hild, from Danby to Whitby; or the Paulinus Way, beginning at Todmorden and ending at York Minster.
Of course, not everyone is able to walk – but you can often journey further without walking at all. Stephen Need’s book, Following Jesus in the Holy Land, allows us to make a pilgrimage across the world from the comfort of our armchair.
Whatever you choose, however long or short, you will be following in the steps of Yorkshiremen and women past, and in the steps of saints, everyone a pilgrim on a shared path.
Exploring the wild beauty of our county, its dales, moors and wolds, we can find ourselves exploring the unknown spaces within ourselves. As Rebecca Solnit says, ‘pilgrimage makes it possible to move physically, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp.’
And if you like, take with you a copy of the Lord’s Prayer. If you’re unsure how to pray, with these words Jesus teaches us how to do it. And even if you know it off by heart, I find myself continually surprised – challenged – by it. For it doesn’t just teach us how to pray, but how to live. It asks us to be part of God’s movement of change, of bringing God’s heaven to earth. Reading it on my way, I find myself walking, step by step, not only towards a destination, but towards our risen lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.
Go on a journey this Easter – you don’t know what surprises you’ll find along the way.