Pilgrims

Many years ago when I was young, I read from cover to cover, John Bunyan’s, book - The Pilgrims Progress.

Poor Christian, how he slogged away to reach that gate and enter into heaven. I was with him all the way - those that fell by the wayside were not for me - Faint Heart and the like who gave up in the Slough of Despond.

I nearly read the second half of the book - the progress of Christian’s wife who struggled just as much to join him - but I couldn’t go through it all again!

But it left me with a pilgrim’s heart - a yearning to travel - a yearning to see beyond the next hill - to move on and to move on.

In my youthful days, I found myself in a group of friends who introduced me to the poetry of Robert Service. They were a restless lot and his poetry echoed in their hearts. We used to think of ourselves as the subjects of ‘The race of men that don’t fit in, a race of men that can’t stay still’

Actually we were not the Yukon nomads that Robert Service wrote about. Restless in our hearts maybe but we all had jobs - admittedly of a sort. We lived for the long weekends and the trek to climb in the hills. Dangling off ropes in Snowdonia and careering down screeds in the Lakes we felt the joy of the open air - and we recited often enough the verses of our Bard -

Thank God, there is always a Land of Beyond
For us who are true to the trail
A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,
A farness that never will fail
A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal,
A manhood that mocks at a bond,
And try how we will, unattainable still,
Behold it, our Land of Beyond.

Of course we all grew up and we settled down to the ordinary life- though sometimes we felt in chains.

All these memories drifted back into my brain when I was reading this month’s magazine - the Unitarian. The front page writer this year is Rev Jane Barraclough, who works down there in the smoke.
Jane was writing about pilgrimages - and how there is a growing interest in them. ‘ Religious Pilgrimage is growing again among all religious communities’, she writes and says that so many people are going on the Hajj to Mecca that the Saudi authorities are considering limiting the number of times any pilgrim can make the journey. It is a requirement of Islam that all Muslims should perform a Hajj in their lifetimes.

In days gone by that meant a hazardous journey, taking many weeks. Now it is a seven hour flight away and the hardest part of the pilgrimage is getting trough the security at Heathrow.


My friend from all those years ago regularly goes to Spain from where he now lives in New Zealand and does the Pilgrim walk to Santiago de Compostela. He walks alone. He loves the solitude of the open air and the magnificence of the countryside. he enjoys the casual company of people he meets upon the way. It fills his spirit with something which I would call spiritual and which he describes as simply the song of life.

Another friend has just trekked over the Pyrenees following the trail that took war time escapes and refugees from France to the safety of Spain. ‘Thousands took part’ he said. I went with him as one of his sponsors - and h came back with the song of life in his heart too.

Pilgrimage was always a religious quest - and always seem to involve having to suffer on the way - think of those Hindus who walk many hundreds of miles to wash in the water Ganges - and some choose to walk on their knees. That I cannot understand.

There is enough suffering in life without that. There is enough pain in the world - no need to add to it.

I like the idea of pilgrimage. Wouldn't it be good if we could all decide to go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury or Rome. To go as a crowd and take a long time - to notice the world we were walking through and to look after one another and entertain one another with our stories around the table at night.

We would get to know one another better, we would be honest with each other and we would learn a lot about ourselves as we travelled along. Perhaps we would all return with the song of life in our hearts!

The story of Jesus of Nazareth is the story of a pilgrimage - a story filled with magic and myth and mystery - perhaps that is part of its enduring appeal - The pilgrimage begins in Galilee and heads for Jerusalem, the holy city.

No wonder his followers were called People of the Way - as he passed by he called on people to join him - and they put down their nets and they followed. Theirs was a journey like no other - they witnessed healing. they witnessed miracles, they saw multitudes of people, they listened to teachings they had not heard before. They followed a way of life they had never known before. All the restrictions were gone - no sabbath rules, no class distinction, they eat with the fallen and the outcasts. There were no mothers and fathers, no gender discrimination. Theirs was a transcendent life of brotherhood and sisterhood - people on the way - following the light of their mysterious teacher. Told about a God who only loved - and loved all - the broken as well as the strong,

And even though this great adventure ended in the death of their beloved leader, nothing was ever going to put out the light that he had brought to their lives - no wonder he was the light of the world. It was a new world - a land beyond anything they had ever known before.

It was never going to be a revolution - not for many more years - and then it was never going to be quite the same - but the light stayed. The song of life could live on in the story of that journey.

For whatever has become of christianity since - the fact that it has become an institution - that the institution fragmented into many parts and many beliefs - that the teachings are no longer live teachings given on a hillside or in the quiet of an upper room - but have been turned into learned texts, added to and amended and long commentaries written on what they might have really meant.- the essence of that first journey remains.

We need to be pilgrims. We need our whole lives to be a journey to some sacred space. We don’t have to set out on the open road. We don’t have to think that the goal is all. It is more important to travel than to think only of the end. It is the journey that changes lives more than the goal. To travel without feeling the beauty of the world or passing time with strangers or dining with friends is not a pilgrimage at all.

Pilgrimage is about enriching the soul, discovering the song of life. To find that sacred space within our own being, our own lives.

One of the words that is used to describe our modern fast moving, no longer walking world but speeding world is brokenness.

They talk of a broken world filled with broken people - the sad and disappointed, the sick and the disillusioned, the soulless and the listless. Broken people in a broken world an with nowhere to go. People feeling in the way rather than on the way and people broken on the wheel of life not going anywhere.

To heal broken spiritsd and broken lives the spiritual pilgrimage awaits - the journey that walks alone but talks to strangers and tells its story and listens to stories of others. The pilgrim will discover that the goal of life is within ourselves. The way of truth, the way of life, the way of true religion - the way of love for one another is under our feet. The God of Love is within and the God of Love is all around. We can sing the song of life wherever that way leads us.