At one point or another, many of us had to read The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s 14th Century tale of pilgrims on their way from London, England to Canterbury, to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket, at the cathedral. I say had to, because most of us read it as teenagers, an age when few of us would willingly pull the book of the shelf and give it more than a cursory glance. I struggled through it like everyone else, even with a connection to the text as an Episcopalian, a part of the Anglican Communion, whose birthplace and spiritual home is still at Canterbury. Little did I know then that I would become intimately familiar with Canterbury later in my life.
I became a teenage pilgrim to the shrine of Thomas Becket when my parish went on a youth pilgrimage (I call it that, but I am aware we didn’t call it a pilgrimage back then) to England and France. I thought the story of the murder of Archbishop Becket was interesting, and the sword sculpture to commemorate the place where he was struck down was, to a teenage boy, kind of cool. I had another opportunity to travel to Canterbury while in seminary, spending nearly a month living on the Cathedral Close (the name for the grounds inside the Cathedral walls) as a part of the Canterbury Scholars study program that gathered Anglican seminarians from around the globe. Because Canterbury is still a pilgrimage site, one of our assignments was to write a paper on pilgrimages in our own culture. As it turned out, the Americans got dismal evaluations of our reflections, to a person.
A pilgrimage is most simply defined as a spiritual journey. The journey itself is a large part of the experience, not just reaching the destination. The destination is certainly likely to be significant, often a holy site or a shrine of some sort. And in that regard, as it turns out, there are few such sites on our own shores. Certainly there are some, but not as many as are available to our brothers and sisters across the pond, as it were. Without comparing notes,
most all of the Americans in the program realized that the closest such journeys we have here are often around sporting events, and several of us talked about the phenomenon of destination shopping. While both can be spiritual experiences (everything can be a spiritual experience), they didn’t quite meet the expectations of our evaluator who gave us low marks.
I think I may also have written about taking “pilgrimages” to historical sites like Gettysburg or Independence Hall, or even Birmingham, Alabama, but those, too, failed to meet the test of our examiner. As we learned in conversation with him later, he just didn’t buy that we didn’t make spiritual pilgrimages as a normal course of our faith because, apparently, they are so common other places. Now, to be fair, there are Americans who make pilgrimages to religious sites outside of our own borders. I know people who have traveled to Jerusalem, Rome, Canterbury, Lindisfarne, Compostela, and several other places.
I know people like to tour the National Cathedral when they happen to be in Washington, DC, but I don’t recall anyone who ever went to Washington on a pilgrimage to the Cathedral itself. It’s always been an add-on; they went for a particular service like the consecration of the Presiding Bishop, or they went as tourists when they were in DC on business or vacation. Apart from a few Catholic shrines that are rarely visited (from what I’ve heard), and the Mormon trail which some devout Mormons traverse, we just don’t have holy (religious) sites on our shores. What does that mean, if anything? Have we lost the spiritual gift of pilgrimage, or is it truly a practice that naturally coalesces around ancient Christian sites?
Pilgrimages can serve different purposes. They can be seen as a microcosm of our lives, a chance to seek after and hopefully find God. They are intentional departures – interruptions – to our daily lives that take us into an unknown way of being. The word pilgrim literally means resident alien, so that when we are on a pilgrimage, we are living out the call that St. Paul shared, that followers of Jesus be resident aliens as they follow Jesus. Jesus wandered over long distances, and there is an ancient practice of emulating that behavior. Pilgrims have to separate from their lives, experience a time of liminality, an in-between phase, and then reintegrate into their lives once again, having grown in spirit along their journey.[i]
Perhaps we can work at recapturing this fleeting spiritual practice once again. We may not be able to walk the Camino in Spain, nor find our way through the Outback. But, we can find a labyrinth to walk, or we can spend the day, without mp3 player or phone, walking the beach on Jekyll for no other purpose than to find God there. We can plan a trip around quite moments of prayer in various churches or out in nature. It is the intention of going on a journey with and for God, that is the defining characteristic. There is a gift to be found in the journey we take, as a way of setting ourselves apart for God. I hope that we can find it once again.
Tom+
PS – if you have an interest in going on a foreign pilgrimage as a part of a Christ Church group, let me know. I’m interested in forming a group to evaluate an option of going on a spiritual pilgrimage.
O God, our heavenly Father, whose glory fills the whole creation, and whose presence we find wherever we go: Preserve those who travel; surround them with your loving care; protect them from every danger; and bring them in safety to their journey’s end; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[i] Robert Broncatelli at Santa Clara University has described this threefold process of pilgrimage.