Go East, Young Woman

During a study abroad more than a decade ago, one of my assignments was to reflect on the difference between touring and travelling—intentions behind going somewhere and the ways once experiences that place. Are to you going to see a particular, popular thing, check it off your list, and go back home? Are you searching to learn more about an area, its people, its customs and open to being changed in the process? Are you a voyeur, a tourist, or a cosmopolitan traveler? It’s not wrong to merely be a tourist, but it’s good to know your intentions and biases when dropping into somewhere foreign. Are you there to be entertained, or are you willing to be changed by your experience?

As I prepare to travel again, the first time out of the country in years, I am reminding myself not to get caught up in the tourism of the places I’m headed, but I am not a tourist but a pilgrim.

I’ve been a pilgrim before, though I probably didn’t call myself that at the time. I’ve been pulled to religious places and gone with spiritual intentions. But this is the first trip fully labeled a pilgrimage, and it’s making me more conscious of insuring the distinction.

Pope Benedict XVI said this about pilgrimage: “To go on pilgrimage is not simply to visit a place to admire its treasures of nature, art or history. To go on pilgrimage really means to step out of ourselves in order to encounter God where he has revealed himself, where his grace has shone with particular splendour and produced rich fruits of conversion and holiness among those who believe.”

Christianity is a tactile faith. God physically became man to be with us. He lived at a specific time in specific places. He physically manifests in Eucharist. Matter matters. We want to touch, draw near. We hold onto relics and walk in the footsteps of those who walked the Christian journey before us.

In the fourth century, St. Helena travelled to Palestine to locate relics and locations related to Christ and the apostles. Recall that Jerusalem had been destroyed in 70; the Temple and other places Jesus would have been had been razed and new buildings had been put up. Helena had to research and inquire to determine where these holy places were (and then use her imperial power to knock down pagan/Roman buildings that had been built on those sites). Many of the churches commemorating specific events in Christ’s life in the Holy Land were built under her direction. Immediately, the Holy Land became a destination of pilgrimage for Christians with the means to travel. The Itinerarium Burdigalense ("Bordeaux Itinerary") was written by an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux, recounting a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the years 333 and 334.

The earliest pilgrims were merely searching for historical facts, establishing the things and places the Bible told of and restoring that knowledge. But once those places were established, pilgrims journeyed there with a more spiritual goal—to experience the place, to be there. Jerusalem, Rome, and the churches established by the apostles are the most popular Christian pilgrimage destinations, but there are thousands of others. European pilgrimages rose in popularity when the Ottomans held control of the Holy Land. Pilgrims went seeking answers to specific problems, even in hopes that the pilgrimage would bring healing (like Lourdes today). One of the most popular books in early English, The Canterbury Tales, takes place as pilgrims travel together on pilgrimage to Canterbury, the most important cathedral in England.

Pilgrimage is not a requirement in Christianity like the haj is in Islam. God is omnipresent, and we can encounter him wherever. But, it is a tool that can help us connect to Christ, biblical figures, saints, etc. Be it Jerusalem or the Camino or the local cemetery on All Saints Day, what makes one a pilgrim is the intention. Pilgrimage can pull us out of our routines and comforts and draw our mind to God. The physical journey can aid our spiritual one. If we let it.