By Robert Royal
This is the first summer in quite some time when circumstances have prevented me from making a walking pilgrimage, usually something like the Camino de Santiago or the Via Francigena (which nearly killed me a few years ago between the heat and the distance). My favorite, however, remains St. Cuthbert’s Way, which runs from Melrose in Scotland, through the mountains of the English border, and down to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.
I am deeply convinced that a walking pilgrimage—in its combination of the spiritual and the physical over God’s green earth—holds far greater human and religious value than anything we have seen so far in the endlessly bureaucratic synodal “walking together.”
But it must be a true pilgrimage, and there are troubling signs that many people are turning even some of the most sacred pilgrimage routes, walked by great saints and penitent sinners over centuries, into just another self-absorbed path toward “personal self-realization.” There are even pilgrimage influencers, and those who venture onto classic trails in search of “wellness” (Lord, have mercy).
To be clear: a pilgrimage does not have to be a perfect ascetic or spiritual exercise, or anything perfect. Already in the Middle Ages, Chaucer (realistically) included the uninhibited Wife of Bath and the tipsy Miller in The Canterbury Tales, his poetic account of a group of pilgrims—sinners like the rest of us—on their way to the shrine of the great martyr St. Thomas Becket.
Anyone who makes a walking pilgrimage today will find that there are days of hard work and distraction amid others of lightness and purpose. Sometimes even a single day will take you through many combinations and permutations of ups and downs. In all of that, the walking resembles life in general, except that you have chosen—if you have chosen wisely—to follow a particular path toward a definite end, something not usually done every day. And if you are also fortunate, it will make other paths clearer and more bearable.
There is a kind of “personal self-realization” in all this, but it is a realization that comes from being less centered on oneself and more centered on the Way. I think this is one of the reasons why the first Christians were often described as followers of ἡ ὁδός (hē hodós), “the Way” (Acts 9:2, etc.). That Way would be the very One who told us that He was the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
It is worth reflecting on that historical fact. Later, of course, perhaps a decade after the Crucifixion, the name changed: “it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians” (Acts 11:26). Which seems to suggest that, at least at the beginning, it was as important to preach by example as to speak of the faith.
As the disciples discovered on the road to Emmaus and St. Paul on the road to Damascus, moving things can happen when you leave what is familiar and are “on the way.”
The apostles traveled far, most of the time on foot: Paul, of course, throughout the eastern Mediterranean; Peter to various places and, together with Paul, finally to Rome; James, perhaps (according to later records) to Spain and then back to martyrdom in Jerusalem; Andrew to Russia; Philip to Turkey; Matthew to Ethiopia; Thomas to India, etc.
Where and how they died in various cases is now, like many ancient things, uncertain in the mists of time. But we can be sure that they all took seriously the great command of Jesus to preach the Gospel to all nations. That is why their tombs have themselves become places of pilgrimage.
There is something comforting about getting up in the morning and, instead of following your usual routine or getting into the car, tying on your walking shoes and setting out toward you know not what.
I have friends and family who like the predictable and resist the idea of taking unknown paths. To some extent I understand. It is good and necessary to have some predictability in the days, but it is also an illusion. Even if you are sitting at home today (which may not be such a bad idea given the current heat wave), you do not really know what will happen on the way or where you will be at sunset.
It is a cliché, which is to say it is a known and tested truth that should be dusted off and reappropriated, but life is a pilgrimage, whether you know it or not. Not knowing it is to condemn yourself to the path not taken.
Allow me to ask the readers’ indulgence and direct them, once again, to the words of the sommo poeta, Dante Alighieri, in the Inferno, because he has given us a very vivid synthesis of so many truths about the Christian life.
As you know, or should know if you do yourself the favor of returning to or turning to the opening pages of that supreme poem, Dante himself (the pilgrim of the story) hesitates before setting out on the way. I am not Paul or Aeneas, he says (both of whom visited the other world while still alive in this one), I am not on the level of the great Apostle of the Gentiles or the mythical founder of Rome.
But in fact, as the first lines of the poem make clear, it is precisely because la verace via era smarrita—“the true way had been lost”—that we all must set ourselves again on the right path. Not doing so, as we soon learn, is to join a sorry group of people who are not even worthy of condemnation, but who wander in their chosen lack of meaning:
Fame of them the world does not preserve;
mercy and justice disdain them:
let us not speak of them, look and pass by.
(Inf. III)
So, however you manage it, dear reader, flee today from this, the worst of all destinies. It is summer, but walk toward the light by whatever means you can. Avoid the path not taken. Walk in truth.
About the author
Robert Royal is executive director of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are “The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century,” “Columbus and the Crisis of the West,” and “A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.”