Matthew 10.8
“As you go proclaim the good news”
When Jesus summoned the 12 disciples to follow him, the invitation was actually to walk with him and learn from him on the road, as kind of apprentices, so that those who followed could also be sent out.
Pilgrim Places, Holy Lives invites us to do something similar, visiting places up and down the country associated with the saints who brought the Christian faith to these islands and shaped the church and nation we are part of. But not as an end in itself. In order that we might be sent out too.
And one of the best ways of doing this, is to visit these holy places, to go on pilgrimage ourselves. Pilgrimage is good for you.
As a curate, I twice walked with crowds of young people to the shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham. In my first incumbency, and unsure how to kick start youth ministry in a church without any youth, I invited the few I knew to walk with me to Canterbury. On those walks - and in the following summers when we pilgrimed to Glastonbury, Durham, Ripon and York - faith came alive in those young people's lives and it was beautiful to see it happening on the road.
Just the other day, one of those young pilgrims whom I am still in touch with remembered the conversation we had when at the end of the pilgrimage, she had talked reluctantly about getting back to the real world, ie the world back home after the pilgrimage had concluded. ‘But,’ I said to her,’ This is the real world!’ On pilgrimage, walking with Jesus, called by him and sent out by him, this is reality, much more real than the so called real world back home – and as our reading from the letter to the Romans makes clear, we are set free by him and have ‘peace with God’ (Romans 5.1) – we discover how life is meant to be. Travelling light. Bound together as disciples of Christ. Seeking his way.
And pilgrimage is now very popular in our society. Therefore, going on pilgrimage, encouraging pilgrimage as we do through the Faith in the North movement, and particularly the Pilgrim Places initiative, is a great way, as I discovered with those young people, to invite people to consider and experience the way of Jesus Christ.
Of course, the great walking pilgrimage of the world is to Santiago to Compostela in northern Spain.
You might be interested to know that in 1986, just over 1,800 people walked the ancient, 1000-year-old pilgrimage way. We know this, because when you complete the journey, you get what’s called a Compostela from the Pilgrims’ Bureau. They check the stamps on your ‘pilgrim passport,’ verifying that you have walked at least 100km.
In 2016 – just forty years later – 300,000 people walked the Camino. Again, we know the figure from the compostelas issued. That year, I was one of them.
Enjoying the sabbatical leave that stipendiary clergy get every ten years or so, I said Mass in my chapel at Bishsopscourt, outside Chelmsford where I was living at the time. I walked to the station. I got the train to Plymouth, the overnight ferry to Santander, and then walked a large part of the Camino del Norte, the less-travelled northern route from Irun to Santiago. I walked about 700km, roughly 400 miles. It took a month. It was a glorious thing. I learnt a lot about myself but also a lot about the Christian life.
The little book of poems and stories I wrote when I got home reflecting on my pilgrimage, begins with these words:
“We must be the first generation of Christians who think pilgrimage is about arriving rather than travelling.”
Moreover, the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where we are told that to “pass the long journey (the pilgrims) told each other stories” concludes:
“I wouldn’t like you to think that I was looking forward more to the stories than to visiting the shrine of holy St Thomas but there is more to be said for pilgrimage than just seeing a holy place. You often meet such extraordinary people on the way.”
This is the great gift of pilgrimage. Discovering God. Discovering yourself and then also discovering others, your fellow travellers on the way, and all this whilst walking.
In the 1960s, a Japanese theologian called Kosuke Koyama, wrote a book, Three Mile an Hour God (SCM Press). He observed that the average speed that human beings walk is three miles per hour. Jesus, therefore, who is the Son of God, must have walked at three miles per hour. In other words says Koyama, love has a speed and that speed is slow. That speed is gentle. That speed is tender.
Rebecca Solnit, a more secular pilgrim, makes a similar observation in her fantastic book Wunderlust:
“I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought…” Or as we might say, faster than the speed of love.
And it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said:
“I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”
And again we might add, my prayer, my heart can only work wit h my legs.
Pilgrimage – or any walking journey for that matter - requires us to slow down to God’s pace.
And so we learn to be pilgrims in the whole of life. This is what pilgrimage brings us.
And let's remember, the first Christians were called ‘followers of the way.’
It is in this way of Christ that we are called to lead and follow.
