Qualifying the Sacred
It is worth noting that the sacred is not a definitional qualifier: our experiences of God, self, and the Other are not limited to the holy. Pilgrimage traverses the profane as well as the sacred, marking the good, the bad, and the ugly. Reaching beyond the sacred does not weaken or de-spiritualize pilgrimage; rather, it expands the spiritual landscape, allowing us to explore lived experience with a more thorough regard for the human condition. The pilgrim life is more richly layered when sacred places are understood as only one way of encountering God spatially. God is found in all types of places, high and low, far and near. The same holds true for time: pilgrims perceive God through periods of perseverance, in the ordinary moments of everyday life, and in the singularity of sacred occasions. Pilgrim theology does not seek to make all things sacred but to discover God in the undulations of the earthly journey.
The Dimensions of Pilgrimage
Cursory reflections on the fourfold dimensions of time, place, journey, and people reveal the rich and varied contexts in which pilgrimage is pursued.
Time
Time is linear and circular, sacred and ordinary. Pilgrimage embraces the past, present, and future, often simultaneously. Pilgrims acknowledge God’s past actions, live faithfully in the present moment, and anticipate God’s future promises. Pilgrimage is an exercise in personal and collective memory, and virtues—like hope, patience, and perseverance—have temporal qualities. Circular time is recurring: pilgrims feast and fast; they celebrate the seasons. A sojourn is a stational pause within a journey, while pilgrimage is the bracketing of time for a particular purpose.
Place
Place speaks to physical, spiritual, and emotional location. One can be in place or out of place, lost or found, at home or displaced, here or elsewhere. A place may be a paradise or a wilderness, a sanctuary, refuge, or hiding place. A space may be special or commonplace; spaces change and stay the same.
Journey
Journeys are marked by departures and arrivals. To depart denotes the beginning of something and the end of something else. Arrivals likewise involve beginnings and endings. A process is finished; a goal is completed; an experience is over. Then something else begins. Graduation is a commencement, the start of something new. The journey itself consists of movements and transitions, opportunities and dead ends, progress and change. Pathways have straights and intersections; they diverge, turn, and merge. Journeys have detours and delays, breaks and pauses. We wander, get lost, and persevere. Things come and go. Journeys fail; we lose things along the way. There are one-way trips and return journeys. We travel forward into the unknown. We come full circle, returning to the point of departure.
People
Pilgrimage is a call to companionship. Disconnected from others, the individual pilgrim is a diminished figure. The pilgrim life is a shared experience, involving guides, hosts, and fellow travelers. Pilgrims are dependent upon strangers. They receive succor, encouragement, and inspiration from others. Hospitality and generosity, gratitude and thanksgiving, compassion and clemency are the currencies of exchange. Pilgrims hear the cries of those who have no choice but to be pilgrims: refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers, the homeless, the weak, and the weary. Pilgrimage is occasionally a pathway to a sacred place but is always the streets of everyday life where we attend to those in need.
The Character of Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage is incarnational, metaphorical, autobiographical, and corporate. It is a comprehensive expression of the Christian faith.
Pilgrimage is Incarnational
Christian pilgrimage is patterned upon the incarnation. God blessed creation and inhabited human flesh in time and place. God was embodied; Word became flesh; the immaterial took material form. Christ assumed human attributes and was subject to mortal suffering. Salvation played out upon a landscape of blood, sweat, and tears. Christ was made impotent upon a tree before rising from the dead.
Pilgrimage is an embodied spirituality, engaging the senses and embracing the physicality of religious experience. It is a sensuous theology full of sights, sounds, and smells. Christ taught spiritual truths using material examples as simple as seeds and salt and set aside common, ordinary objects, such as bread and wine, for spiritual consumption. The incarnation is a divine declaration that matter matters. We experience God through the everyday events of our earthly lives, and pilgrimage is the reckoning of the facts in which we find ourselves. God is present in the actualities of life, experienced through actual events, real people, and specific locations.
Tracing the footsteps of Jesus, the Holy Land experience is an incarnational journey. According to Ernest Renan (d. 1892), the land reveals Jesus as a living figure.9 It does so as a sensuous encounter. Cyril of Jerusalem told his fourth-century catechumens that “others merely hear, we see and touch,” while Paulinus of Nola (d. 431) noted that “no other sentiment draws people to Jerusalem than the desire to see and touch the places where Christ was physically present.”10 Contemporary travelers are captured by the sensuous nature of the Holy Land—its sights, sounds, tastes, and smells—while the incarnational emphasis on embodied spirituality prepares pilgrims to encounter God through the actualities of the journey: its surprises, insights, and revelations as well as its challenges, questions, and difficulties. As physical witnesses of the gospel story, Christian pilgrims commemorate the incarnation in time and place as they sojourn through the Holy Land.
Pilgrimage is Metaphorical
While pilgrimage thrives on a spirituality grounded in the physicality of everyday life, its incarnational emphasis is complemented by a metaphorical perspective. Metaphor, in many ways, has been poorly understood. Its core function is neither to explain difficult concepts in simpler terms nor to tell us what we already know. Rather, a metaphor is a tool of exploration that allows us to discover things that, otherwise, we would not be aware of.
A metaphor is “a figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another.”11 It pretends that “this” is “that.” It takes something we know (a source) to explore a less familiar target. That, of course, is how we learn: using the familiar to explore the unknown, finding similarities between dissimilar entities. Yet, herein lies the essence of metaphorical understanding: the interaction between source and target creates a new perspective whose meaning cannot be conveyed in any other way. To change the source alters the insight; thus, a given metaphor is irreplaceable and irreducible. The metaphor of life (target) as journey (source) uses what we know about travel and movement to explore the mysteries of our earthly existence. We can use other images—e.g., life is a box of chocolates—but the concept of journey renders insights into the earthly life that we cannot otherwise obtain.
Whenever we describe abstract concepts, we instinctively resort to metaphor. Since transcendent realities, such as God, cannot be directly known, religious language requires indirection. God is a shepherd; Jesus is a vine. Using one thing to describe another, metaphor employs indirect and non-literal thinking. Jesus is not literally a vine; God is not literally a shepherd, but metaphorical imagery allow us to explore the nature of God in effective ways. The fallacy of literalist thinking is equating the source with the target.
When Protestants say that the inner journey is what really matters, they are instinctively appealing to the abstract targets of metaphor. We should be careful, though, not to put the physical and spiritual dimensions of the Christian life at odds. Our focus on incarnational theology places a premium on embodied experience and cautions against an overly spiritualized approach to pilgrimage. Metaphor is based on non-literal thinking, but it is not opposed to concrete, empirical realities. Abstract targets are funded by less abstract sources; metaphor uses one to explore the other. In order to probe the spiritual world,