Lent Practice 4: Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage isn’t well known as a Christian discipline, but it deserves a resurgence.
One of the most popular descriptions of Christian life — really, life— is “journey.” My father’s Jeep has a wheel cover with the oft quoted sentence from J.R.R. Tolkien, “Not all who wander are lost.” I regularly hear someone say, “It’s about the journey, not the destination.” Even my favorite poem (yes, favorite of all time, numero uno), titled “Letter from the Mountains” by James Baxter, begins, “There was a message. I have forgotten it. / There was a journey to make. It did not come to anything.”
Journey and pilgrimage are similar with two important differences. Pilgrimages have destinations while journeys—the modern versions—tend not to. Second, journeys seem far more interesting than pilgrimages. There are exceptions, but pilgrimages can sound flat, boring. The path is obvious, and seems populated by religious tourists looking for a way to boost their spirituality.
So why should we be thinking about pilgrimage? One reason is because I’m not convinced the “life as a journey” metaphor is as helpful as we think. Getting lost in life, wandering, is genuinely terrifying. And not having an actual destination is at best depressing because life can be very, very hard. Brutal for many. I find few people, in the midst of immense suffering, find it helpful to imagine that they are merely wandering. They want safety, rest. They want to be home.
Celtic Christians were practitioners of a form of pilgrimage that looks a lot like getting lost. Famously, St. Columba hopped into a rudderless boat called a coracle off the coast of Ireland and let God (i.e., the wind and currents) take him away into the “wilderness” of the sea. (Coracles are ridiculous vessels. Look one up online; they are still used today.) Like the Israelites wandering the desert, Columba’s pilgrimage took him through storm and exposure. He eventually disembarked on an island, Iona, after he could no longer spot Ireland on the horizon. Clearly this is not some mundane pilgrimage for the religious tourist. And yet for the Celts, pilgrimage (or, pregrinatio) was precisely the name for it.
Like any pilgrimage, the Celtic one had a clear conception of home. But it wasn’t the same geographic location for everyone. They called it, “the place of one’s resurrection.” It could only be sought by getting lost, because in getting lost, leaving home (Celtic culture was well known for its tight-knit communities), and wandering the “wilderness,” one becomes completely vulnerable with only the care of God for protection.
Wandering was not the goal. The genuine risk inherent in wandering was a way of finding the place of resurrection. There’s good evidence that Columba did not choose to leave Ireland, that he was forced out. It would have been immensely painful to leave his homeland. But that difficult moment became central to his pilgrimage, to finding his place of resurrection, his home in God.
As the Celtic notion of peregrinatio developed, physical travel became less and less important. What mattered was whether Christ was at home in one’s heart. A saying developed that went something like this: if you set out to seek Christ, you’ll never find him if you don’t take him with you in your heart.
The Celtic vision of pilgrimage offers a helpful correction to both our modern idea of journey and the flat idea of pilgrimage. First, we can stop romanticizing wandering. It happens to all of us whenever we lose our way, and it’s painful and disorienting. But it need not be sheer loss. Our long stretches of wilderness wandering are precisely what God uses to bring us home.
And second: home. There is one. Our true home is in God. He is our destination, but he is far too impatient to wait for us at the end of some well-trodden path. In finding our home in God, we discover that he makes his home with us, wherever we happen to wander.
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For further reading:
Living Between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality, Philip Sheldrake
Columba: Pilgrim and Penitent, Ian Bradley