Life-as-journey is just one of countless pilgrim-related metaphors. We use metaphorical language to speak about time and place. Our God-talk is a metaphorical discourse. We encounter the unknown, the stranger, and the Other with metaphorical thinking that seeks connections between the unknown and the familiar.
Metaphor is an unexamined aspect of the Holy Land experience. Pilgrims enjoy a firsthand, empirical encounter with the land as they investigate scripture, history, and archaeology. But metaphor is never far away. We engage foreign places by using what we know to examine what we don’t. As soon as we explore the meaning of Jerusalem or make connections between the holy places, pilgrim travel, and our earthly lives, we are delving into metaphor, thinking of something in terms of something else. Holy Land travelers should engage metaphorical thinking as a tool of spiritual exploration, employing metaphorical language in their reflections of God and the pilgrim journey, including their descriptions of places, events, and emotions.
Pilgrimage Is Autobiographical
Pilgrimage is first-person experience, viewed through a first-person perspective. Pilgrimage emphasizes the context and narratives of our individual lives: each unique, distinct, and sacred. Our earthly existence is conditioned by age, gender, health, personality, family, culture, and ethnicity. We have our own thoughts and emotions, passions and preferences, gifts, skills, and talents. Our life stories differ is striking ways, shaped by events and circumstances, incidents and accidents, choices and decisions, obligations and responsibilities. We are on individual journeys of goals, adventures, and plateaus, repentance and return, healing and wholeness. Pilgrimage is personal narrative, and every Holy Land venture is a unique, irreplicable experience.
Pilgrimage is Corporate
While pilgrimage assumes a first-person perspective, it is not a self-centered journey. The pilgrim life is a shared experience that takes us beyond ourselves into the company of others. Pilgrims are called to journey as a sacred people: living well together, committed to a corporate experience of God. Pilgrimage is an exercise in collective memory and public commemoration, marked by monuments, rituals, and festivals. Using the holy sites to commemorate the life of Christ, Holy Land pilgrimage is a public act of Christian memory enacted through the context of a short-term Christian community.
A Comprehensive Expression of the Christian Faith
Pilgrimage is life intensified, a microcosm of life itself. Pilgrimage must move beyond narrow perceptions of personal spirituality to a holistic approach that values the Other. The pilgrim life speaks to all areas of Christian practice from prayer and worship to acts of mercy and compassion—from the sanctuary to the street. The Holy Land journey is a crash course in the comprehensive claims of the gospel story.
The Component Parts of Pilgrimage
Themes
Themes are unifying ideas, prominent motifs, and reoccurring subjects. Along with the quest for God, self, and the Other, pilgrimage coalesces around two primary sets of themes—(a) time, place, and journey and (b) the stranger, the foreign, and the unknown. The themes are not unrelated—insomuch as a stranger may be one who travels—yet they stand on their own. Pilgrimage contains secondary motifs as well: quest, discovery, and personal challenge; identity, narrative, and autobiography; commemoration, collective memory, and sacred topography; monuments and shrines; feasts and festivals; rituals and embodied prayer. While the Holy Land experience focuses upon biblical landscapes and narratives, history and archaeology, ecumenical and interfaith issues, and peace and reconciliation, every journey has its own personal and incidental themes.
Templates
Templates are the common types, or patterns, of pilgrim expression, which are formed by various criteria and degrees of specificity. Pilgrim templates are neither fixed nor finite but are logically and flexibly construed. A given pilgrim expression may be associated with more than one template, while distinct templates may share common features. There are round-trip templates and one-way journeys. A journey to a holy place is a particular pattern, while liturgical processions and prayer walks are another. Some templates focus on people rather than places—some on personal issues, others on the Other. There are local pilgrimages, global travels, secular adventures, and physical challenges. Short-term mission trips and pilgrimage as “the street” embrace evangelism, compassion ministry, and social justice as forms of the pilgrim life. The modern popularity of pilgrimage has focused upon a few specific templates, such as long-distance walking and alternative tourism, while other expressions have received less attention.
By appreciating the spectrum of pilgrim expressions, we can apply various templates and their corresponding themes to the Holy Land experience. The Abraham story reminds us that pilgrimage is about following God in a foreign land. People-focused templates turn our attention to the Living Stones. Pilgrimage as reconciliation positions us as peacemakers in a land of conflict. Long-distance walking models the virtue of perseverance for tired pilgrims. The template of the earthly life envisions New Jerusalem as our spiritual destination, creating a reflective juxtaposition with the present-day city.
Elements
Elements are the parts of pilgrimage that, on their own, do not comprise a complete expression of the pilgrim life, such as departure and arrival, home and holy places, prayer and journaling, baggage and souvenirs. Elements include almost anything associated with an act of pilgrimage: God, self, and the Other; time, place, and journey; logistical details, local context, and pilgrim companions.
Images
Images, like elements, refer to virtually any aspect of pilgrimage with one imposed distinction: images may be independent of actual expressions. A case in point are scriptural images, such as Jesus as the alpha and the omega, that relate to time, place, and journey. Jesus is the way, the gate, and the good shepherd. He is the light of the world, the bread from heaven, and the water of life. Christological images offer pilgrims standalone content that can resource religious travel in significant ways.
Virtues and Values
Virtues are the principles that guide pilgrim behavior. They are the “what” that pilgrims always do. While pilgrims pursue the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23; Col 3:12; 1 Tim 6:11), pilgrimage has particular associations with certain virtues, such as hope, patience, and perseverance; hospitality is its constant companion. Pilgrim theology claims the virtues of compassion, respect, self-awareness, and personal responsibility. Pilgrimage also espouses a number of secondary or relative values that are not operative in every situation. Pilgrims navigate between intentionality and spontaneity, austerity and extravagance, confidence and humility, boldness and caution, which underscores the importance of context, discernment, and decision-making in pilgrim spirituality.
Lived Experience
Lived experience is the currency of pilgrimage. It is the actual content of the journey, the events, emotions, and episodes that we interpret and reflect upon. Pilgrimage is embodied, first-person experience, or the actuality of lived experience in time and place.
Adages and Aphorisms
Pilgrims are constantly translating lived experience into short interpretative phrases that express the wisdom of religious travel. They are the quotable quotes and shareable sayings concerning life and faith that emerge throughout a pilgrimage, which we will collectively refer to as adages and aphorisms.12 God is in the facts; life is a journey of losing things along the way; the journey is never over. Forged from experience or borrowed from others, they are concentrated verbal tools for perceiving, exploring, and interpreting the pilgrim