Why Pilgrimage Still Matters
An ancient practice for lives that rarely stop moving.
Pilgrimage is one of the oldest practices we have, and one of the strangest to modern ears. Why would anyone travel a long way to a place, slowly and deliberately, when the point is supposedly that God is everywhere?
The body knows things
Because we are not minds being carried around by bodies. We are creatures who learn through walking, waiting, being cold, being tired, being fed. A truth we have decided is important often stays theoretical until something physical happens to it.
Pilgrimage takes an idea (that we are not in charge, that we are accompanied, that attention is a form of love) and makes us live inside it for a few days. That is a very different thing from agreeing with it.
Leaving is part of it
There is also the matter of leaving. Ordinary life is held in place by a thousand small structures, and most of them are good. But they make it very difficult to see ourselves clearly. Step out of them for three days and things become visible that were invisible the week before.
We do not journey to find a distant God. We journey to become attentive to the God who is already here.
None of this requires a pilgrimage to be long, difficult or far away. It requires only that it be deliberate, and that we actually stop.
