Pilgrim Spirituality

Defining Pilgrimage Again for the First Time

Rodney Aist

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666709438, 9781666709445
• eBook ISBN: 9781666709452
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A pilgrim-themed spirituality for Christian formation, Pilgrim Spirituality resources everyday Christianity, congregational life, social outreach, and religious travel through definitional frames of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a prominent biblical image. Yet, despite its contemporary resurgence, its capacity for Christian formation remains untapped. While our understanding of pilgrimage has been too narrow, we lack a definitional framework that fosters transformational practice. Definitions matter, thought creates possibilities, and intentionality enhances experience. Recognizing pilgrimage as a comprehensive expression of the Christian life, Pilgrim Spirituality provides tools for perceiving spiritual possibilities, engaging situational context, and interpreting lived experience. Espousing both personal and social holiness, Pilgrim Spirituality gives definitional status to the Other, attends to the self, and seeks the presence of God in the facts in which we find ourselves. Pilgrim Spirituality examines Christian concepts of time, place, and journey, while emphasizing the personal, corporate, incarnational, metaphorical, and tensional character of the pilgrim life. Exploring the motives, experiences, and practices of pilgrimage, Pilgrim Spirituality resources readers in their destinational pursuit of the Christian faith: the union of God, self, and the Other.

1

Introduction

I was on my way with Bob and Stacy to meet a group of Protestant–Catholic couples to discuss issues affecting their relationships when Stacy asked me, “How does pilgrimage relate to people living stationary lives?” In the midst of an around-the-world pilgrimage, I was staying for a week at Casa Materna, a Methodist children’s home outside Naples, Italy, where Bob and Stacy, American missionaries, served as chaplains and pastored a nearby Waldensian congregation. As we talked about religious travel, Stacy wondered about the applications of pilgrimage for everyday Christianity. How does peripatetic experience inform the Christian life? Pilgrim Spirituality seeks to answer Stacy’s question.

As a young pastor, I took a one-year, around-the-world journey, visiting local congregations, ecumenical communities, and institutional ministries. The journey ended with a forty-day wilderness experience in the Ozark Mountains. Throughout the year, I visited traditional pilgrim sites, met people of faith, and observed local Christianity in a variety of cultural and theological contexts. I spent time in prayer and worship, reading and writing, engaging Christians in conversation, exploring images of the pilgrim life.1

The trip came about in a curious way. As I neared the end of a three-year pastorate of two Methodist congregations in northern Arkansas, I was planning to go to graduate school when I received a call to go on pilgrimage instead. God gave me “permission” to go on an around-the-world journey, which God qualified by saying “but it has to be a pilgrimage.” Except for an undergraduate course on medieval pilgrimage nearly a decade before, I knew little about the practice, and the call seemed to come out of the blue.2 Happy to oblige, I began drafting sample itineraries. Focusing on personal interactions with global Christians, I would explore prayer, worship, and spirituality, participate in ecumenical communities, and visit local churches and related ministries around the world. In short, my embrace of the pilgrim life has been a personal, vocational calling, and the relational approach of my around-the-world journey remains central to my understanding of pilgrimage today.

So, how does pilgrimage relate to everyday Christianity, congregational formation, and the social mandates of the Christian faith? How can we enhance religious travel, and what are the undeveloped themes of the pilgrim life? What, in a word, is pilgrimage? I have spent most of my ministry years exploring these questions. My academic focus is Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem before the Crusades.3 I have studied pilgrimage in the Celtic context, walked over 750 miles of the Camino de Santiago, and have pastored in Rome. I have led and hosted mission trips, taught cultural immersion courses, and have directed family camps and retreats. As the course director at St George’s College, Jerusalem, I have taught and guided pilgrim courses in the Holy Land. Working with clergy and laity from around the world, my time in Jerusalem has led me to view Holy Land travel—and pilgrimage more generally—as an exercise in Christian formation.

While holy sites, historical pathways, and short-term Christian community contribute to my understanding of pilgrimage, for me, engaging the Other epitomizes the pilgrim life. Pilgrimage is about being a stranger and encountering the unknown. To be a pilgrim is to cross boundaries, building life-affirming relationships with those “on the other side.” From alienation to reconciliation, pilgrimage is the embodied celebration of human diversity. It’s the gathering of nations as the people of God. My approach to the pilgrim life draws upon ministry experience in both indigenous and international contexts from the Navajo Nation to Novara, Italy, working with people rooted to the land as well as global migrants living far from home.

Pilgrimage Today

Pilgrim Spirituality embraces the contemporary revival of pilgrimage. People are rediscovering the ancient practice as a means of spiritual renewal, social engagement, and personal transformation. Pilgrimage is expanding spiritual horizons, enriching life experience, and reshaping our understanding of God, self, and the Other. People are adopting a pilgrim identity, speaking its language, and sharing impassioned testimonies of its transformational power. Pilgrimage is changing lives.

People are responding to the call to pilgrimage in various, creative ways. From long-distance walking to short-term mission trips, Christians are embracing religious travel like never before. They are participating in embodied forms of prayer, and Celtic Christianity, with its emphasis on place and journey, excites the religious imagination.4

Certain themes consistently appear in contemporary writings. First of all, there is a growing emphasis on embodied experience and God’s preference for the particular, which is grounded in the Christian experience of the incarnation.5 Second, a renewed emphasis on God’s blessing of creation is displacing traditional dichotomies of the sacred–secular and the sacred–profane that have limited our perceptions of the contextual possibilities of spiritual experience. Third, there is a growing appeal to the perceptual dimensions of pilgrimage—to be a pilgrim is to see the world differently. Pilgrim spirituality focuses on our perception and awareness of God, self, and the Other. Fourth, there is interest in the theory of liminality, which applies to personal, institutional, and societal experience.

Despite the attention, pilgrimage remains a peripheral practice. We have yet to capture its comprehensive breadth or tap its capacity for Christian formation. Our explorations of the pilgrim life have only scanned the horizon, and we are merely at the start of where pilgrimage can take us. To move pilgrimage forward, the book precedes with the following premises:

•Pilgrimage is a prominent image of the Christian faith.

•The Bible embraces the image and practice of pilgrimage.

•Pilgrim spirituality has natural affinities with Protestant theology.

•Integrating personal and social holiness, pilgrimage is a comprehensive expression of the Christian life.

•Pilgrimage has transformative applications for religious travel, everyday Christianity, social outreach, and congregational life.

•Despite its contemporary resurgence, pilgrimage as Christian formation remains largely untapped.

•Notwithstanding our familiarity of biblical, historical, and traditional images, we need to redefine pilgrimage. How we think about pilgrimage determines the way we approach it. Definitions matter, thought creates possibilities, and intentionality enhances experience. For pilgrim spirituality to realize its transformative potential, it needs a definitional framework.

An Intentional Roadmap

Notwithstanding the freedom of the road, pilgrimage involves plans, directions, and roadmaps, a sense of where we are going before we begin. A good method, or methodology, helps us get where we want to go. Our goal is the union of God, self, and the Other. Our vehicle is the image and practice of pilgrimage.

People who have walked the Camino de Santiago or have visited the Holy Land have experienced the transformational power of pilgrimage. Change, progress, and personal growth are intrinsic qualities of the pilgrim life, and those who have been on pilgrimage know its life-changing power first-hand. Transformation occurs, one way or another, in natural, uncoerced ways, which raises the question: does intentionality impair experience? Does method thwart the spirit?

It depends on the approach. A method may employ prescriptive checklists, mandating practices and dictating experience. Or, presenting possibilities, a method may offer tools, resources, frames, and perspectives. Pilgrim spiritualit...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part 1: Defining Pilgrimage
• Part 2: Biblical Expressions of Pilgrimage
• Part 3: The Objective of Pilgrimage
• Part 4: The Dimensions of Pilgrimage
• Part 5: The Pilgrim Experience
• Part 6: Applications of Pilgrim Spirituality
• Part 7: Moving Forward
• Bibliography