Some of us may not be called to travel long physical distances but we may still feel the call to
embark on a new or more intentional inner journey. A time of deepening relationship with God and with ourselves. This is also an exciting and daunting journey because when we choose to engage with greater intentionality with our inner lives, we discover our gifts as well as our own shadows. We may be drawn to engage with our own unresolved griefs. We may be challenged to step out in new ways in our lives. We may for the first time allow ourselves to see and name our
deepest desires and longings. Pilgrimage invites us to new inner places.
To enter into pilgrimage demands of us an attitude of openness and generosity. An opening to the process of what God desires to reveal to us. A sense of child-like wonder at all there is to be discovered and a willingness to trust not in our own resources but in the God we seek to know more deeply.
It can help to deliberately welcome the dawn of each new day as the next step along the pathway. We do not know what the day will bring. We cannot control it. But if we bring ourselves to the day with a sense of openness and expectation to sense God’s invitation in both its joys and its adversities, then we are living the spirituality of pilgrimage. And in the evening to recall
the way we have travelled and how we have been sustained along the way.
In the metaphor of the outer journey, we may miss our train, or lose our passport, or take an
unexpected detour, or meet a travelling companion who becomes a life-long friend. We do not know what gifts and challenges the journey holds but if we see each moment as a place in which we can encounter God, even the moments of crisis hold the potential of gifts and growth.
We also need practices to keep us on the pathway and for each of us they will be different. It may be a way of praying, an act of creativity or worship, the study of scripture. In a way it doesn’t matter as long as we are faithful to the daily practice of the journey. We make the way by living it. We do not have a map of the route but we are following a thread of grace, of
invitation. Listening deeply and taking a next step and allowing ourselves to be led along the path.
What attitudes and practices would support me in my spiritual pilgrimage?
