Returning Home
Perhaps the deepest movement of pilgrimage is not going somewhere new, but returning differently.
The road ends. Everyone gets back in their cars, and within a day or two the inbox looks exactly as it did before. This is the part of pilgrimage nobody puts in the photographs, and it is arguably the most important part.
The re-entry
There is often a small grief in it. You have spent days at a pace that suited you, among people who were paying attention, and now you are back among the noise. It can feel as though the whole thing evaporated on the drive home.
It hasn’t. But it does need somewhere to land.
Giving it somewhere to land
The pilgrims who carry the most home are usually the ones who decided, before they left the western shore, on one small thing they would actually do. Not a programme. One thing.
A walk on a Sunday without headphones. Ten minutes with the door shut before the house wakes up. A standing meal with someone you have been meaning to see.
The destination of pilgrimage is not another place. It is a deeper way of being present where we already are.
That is the whole movement, really. We go out in order to come back, and the place we come back to has not changed at all.
