A pilgrimage is not like going for a hike or being a tourist. It is a journey that derives its meaning from the destination, writes David Schütz, an ‘accidental pilgrim’.
In the novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the hero finds himself on a pilgrimage that he did not plan, walking the length of England to visit a dying friend. I myself am an accidental pilgrim.
In 2007, I had been sent on a study tour to Turkey for my work in interfaith relations. On the day of our arrival in Istanbul, we were taken to see the ancient 6th Century church Hagia Sophia. The moment I walked through the door, I realised I had fulfilled a long-cherished dream. I could have gone home there and then and been satisfied. I had made my first pilgrimage.
One of my companions on that trip had a different destination. She had joined the tour because it was going to Gallipoli, and she planned to lay a flower on the grave of a great-uncle who had died as a young man in that conflict. She too was a pilgrim.
So, what is a pilgrimage? In my experience, one can only answer that through the experience of being a pilgrim. Pilgrimages can be done alone or with companions (both have their richness). It can be a sacred or secular journey; the destination simply has to be a place that has some significance for you. A pilgrimage can be short or long. Hilaire Belloc famously wrote that a pilgrimage may even be just “a little walk uphill to a neighbouring and beloved grave”.
In 2016, I set off on a “little walk” from St Mary MacKillop’s birthplace in Melbourne to her tomb and shrine in North Sydney. It was necessary for me to complete the pilgrimage in stages over a number of years. A critic suggested that I was just going for a series of long walks.
But a pilgrimage is not like going for a hike or travelling as a tourist. Hikers and tourists move in and around a place to explore it. A pilgrim passes through places in order to arrive at a special place. A pilgrimage is a journey that derives its meaning from the destination.
The original Latin word for a pilgrim, peregrinus, seems to come from the words per ager, meaning “across fields”. A pilgrim is one who crosses boundaries, both literally and figuratively.
Anthropologists have constructed two basic models to explain pilgrimage. Mircea Eliade suggested it was about travelling to a “Sacred Centre”. Victor and Edith Turner, on the other hand, drew upon Arnold Van Gennep’s idea of rites de passage.
In a rite of passage, such as an initiation or a coming of age, there is a three-stage movement: separation from familiar society, crossing the limen (threshold or boundary), and returning back into society once more, but changed by the experience.
In this model, the three stages of pilgrimage are:
1. departure from home;
2. the journey to the destination by crossing local and personal boundaries (an experience that can be described as “liminal”); and, finally
3. the homecoming.
All my pilgrimages, here in Australia and overseas, have begun by putting on my hat and my backpack, picking up my hiking stocks, going out the front door and turning left. At first, my path follows the same route as it does every day when heading to the train station for work, but this time I have a new destination, beyond the familiar horizons of the everyday.
On the Via Francigena in Italy in 2023. Image: David Schütz.
On the first day of a pilgrimage, I am like Abraham heading off in the simple trust that God will take me to the place that he will show me (Gen 12:1).
As a pilgrim, I pass through many places. Each day, my horizon shifts with me. I remain strangely at the centre, while hills, valleys, rivers and towns pass into my horizon in front of me and then out of it again behind me.
Along the way I experience hospitality from local people: something to eat or drink, somewhere to sleep for the night, always someone new to meet.
Great blessing comes from these encounters, but my hosts’ horizon and their boundaries are fixed to their homes and their daily lives. As I move on, their centre passes out of my horizon, and I continue crossing new boundaries.
After a while, the pilgrim path itself becomes a “place” that I inhabit. Every morning, I wake up on the trail and every night I go to sleep on it. A sameness and a routine develops. There is a singleness of purpose.
In daily life, when we get up, we have a list of things to do. At the end of the day, we may have done half of them, leaving us discontented with our achievement. But on pilgrimage, you have just one job each day: to get to your destination by nightfall.
Each day becomes a microcosm of the whole pilgrimage. You get up, shoulder your pack and walk until you arrive at your lodging. Having done that, you have done all that the day asked of you. If there is a “philosophy of life” that I have learned through being a pilgrim, it is that I must reduce my expectations for every day down to just one thing and do that. The sense of achievement at the end of the day increases!
“We are but travellers here”, said St Mary MacKillop. A pilgrim is not a tourist or even a wandering monk. Ultimately, there is something “eschatological” about pilgrimage. The pilgrimage has an end, and the end will come, and when it does the pilgrimage will be over and it will be time to go home.
Famously, pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago find themselves feeling both unfulfilled and unfinished when they reach the tomb of St James. After 800 kilometres of daily walking, it has become an addiction. And so, they keep on walking until they come to Finis Terrae, quite literally the end of the earth. Then, throwing their shoes into the Atlantic Ocean, they have to stop. There is no further to go.
The anticlimax at the end of a pilgrimage is heightened for modern pilgrims because, after many days of travelling at 3.5 kilometres per hour, they get on a plane and fly home in a matter of hours.
No such option for the ancient pilgrim: when they reached Jerusalem, they were only half done. The next job was to return back along the path they came. Eliade thought pilgrimage was all about arriving at the Sacred Centre; in reality, the Long Road Home is just as important.
On pilgrimage, I travel away from what is familiar to me, I experience myself in a succession of different places and among different people, I cross boundaries I never even knew were there.
But finally, I return home, changed and different. For a while it is strange to be back among family and daily cares, but after a while, the experience of pilgrimage shapes a new way of being at home.
In the Gospel of Matthew, after the Magi had made their pilgrimage to see the newborn King, they were warned in a dream not to go back to Herod. The Gospel writer says: “they went home by a different way” (Matt 2:12). Every time I return home from pilgrimage, I come back “a different way” because I am different. I am not the same person I was when I walked out the door and turned left at the start of my journey.
I have a little ritual when I arrive home after pilgrimage. I say the three simple words that Tolkien put on the lips of Samwise Gamgee at the end of his great work Lord of the Rings: “Well, I’m back.”
And my mind meditates on this verse from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
On the Aussie Camino in 2014. Photo by Sean Deany.
