From the bulletin for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (Jan 26, 2025)
Parish School of Prayer, Pt 14: Pilgrimage
Don’t just vacate: peregrinate!
Making pilgrimage is praying with your feet. The Rosary pulls us closer to Our Lady’s motherly heart, one bead and breath at a time. In adoration, each minute before the Blessed Sacrament draws us closer to Heaven. But on pilgrimage, each step becomes the syllable of a prolonged prayer. The trip itself is a type of our Christian life: a journey of transformation with God as its destination and faith, hope, and love giving supernatural value to the most ordinary acts.
Pilgrimage is as old as the People of God. One thinks of Abraham being called to go out of his native place to a land which the Lord would show him. Or Joseph trudging down into Egypt. Or Israel streaming out of it. In Our Lord’s day pious Jews would make pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year for the feasts, travelling in caravans and singing Psalms 120-134 as they drew near the Holy City. God’s people have never stopped making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, now with the added motive of revering the places Our Lord hallowed with His footsteps and His Blood. But very early in the history of the Church Christians also started setting off on foot to the tombs of the martyrs and later churches in which hallowed relics or miraculous images resided.
Culturally speaking, it seems American Catholics are historical outliers in the sense that we are pilgrimage poor when it comes to pious customs. (Perhaps because we are poor in martyrs and native relics, or maybe because the so-called “pilgrims” that helped to found the nation were really just migrants?) But “wherever the Catholic sun doth shine” bright enough, the practice seems to reappear spontaneously. Deciding to go on pilgrimage is as natural to those of faith as the invitation of the Psalm, “Let us go to house of the Lord!’” (Ps 122:1).
Tourism, sightseeing, pleasure-travel: these can all be well and good, provided they are done with a good intention. But pilgrimage surpasses them all on account of its supernatural intention. Pilgrimage is a work of faith, hope, and charity: faith, because its motives are based in our Christian beliefs; hope, because it looks to blessings from Above; and charity, because the very nature of pilgrimage involves making “the house of the Lord” as one’s last end, and Him the Good we seek above all others.
A pilgrimage can be made for all the same reasons as prayer. It can be penitential. In Peru, every so often I would see a lone figure walking carrying a wooden cross along the side of a highway. These were pilgrims journeying to some far-off shrine to make their confession and receive Holy Communion for the first time in a while. Pilgrimages can also be acts of thanksgiving. In the Christendom age, it was not uncommon for someone to vow to make a pilgrimage if some asked-for favor was granted. Pilgrimage is perhaps most often a petition. Think of the millions who flock to Lourdes each year seeking healing. And pilgrimages can be acts of pure love, instigated by devotion to one saint or another, or–as in St. Ignatius’ desire to go to Jerusalem–one’s love for the Lord.
“But Father,” someone might object, “can’t we pray from home? What holier destination can we select than Jesus exposed in the Blessed Sacrament?” True. And were we holier than we are, a single prayer, one well-made communion, would suffice to obtain unspeakable graces from God.
But our hearts are hard. Though God’s grace is not lacking, a good disposition often is. The power of a pilgrimage lies precisely in its capacity–exerted over the course of hours or days plodding along as the scenery and weather and thoughts, memories, and fellow travellers pass by–to bring about a change of heart in us, tilling our soul’s soil one step at a time until we are more receptive to the working of grace. Those who travel to church in cars rarely experience tears on arrival. But pilgrims often do!
This is why I recommend that, as much as possible, pilgrimages be made on foot. Prayer is a journey of transformation, and ease and convenience cut that journey short. But however you are able to make one (perhaps this spring break or summer?), I encourage you in this Jubilee of Hope to discover the power of pilgrimage for yourselves.
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