What Is a Pilgrimage?
What Is a Pilgrimage?
Scripture commands care for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow so often that it starts to look less like an isolated law and more like a foundation everything else rests on. And the text is usually specific about why: because you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Israel is told to remember what it felt like to have no standing, no home, no claim on anyone’s welcome, and to let that memory govern how it treats the vulnerable once it has land and standing of its own.
Pilgrimage draws on that same memory, deliberately. You become a stranger again, on purpose, so that you know how it feels. You go so you will welcome the stranger when you return home, so you remember what it was to be a foreigner in Egypt, in Babylon, and so you come to know, in your body and not only in your doctrine, that God is not confined to the place you call home. He was there for Israel in the wilderness before there was a temple to house Him. A pilgrim relearns that on the road.
Christianity inherited this and gave it new destinations. From the earliest centuries, believers traveled to Jerusalem, and later to Rome and to the tombs of saints and martyrs, not merely to see a place but to stand where something had happened, and to feel, again, what it is to arrive somewhere as someone with no claim on it. Pilgrimage as a physical act is the body doing what Israel’s story had already said for a thousand years: that faith is walked as much as it is held, and that welcome is owed to the stranger because you have been one yourself.
Not the Same Thing as a Trip
Here is the simplest way to say what separates a pilgrimage from a vacation: a vacation moves you through space. A pilgrimage moves you through space in order to be changed, and it moves you through time as well. Walk a road that pilgrims have walked for a thousand years and you cannot help but feel them there with you, the whole procession of everyone who has gone before on the same stones, toward the same end. You are not only arriving somewhere. You are joining a line of people who arrived there too, most of them long dead, all of them, for a moment, your company.
The anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, writing in the late 1970s, gave this difference a vocabulary that has shaped nearly everything written about pilgrimage since, whether the writer knows it or not. They described pilgrimage as a form of liminality, a threshold state, in which a person is deliberately lifted out of their normal social role and identity. This is the stranger’s condition again, arrived at on purpose. You are not “at work” on a pilgrimage. You are not managing a household, chairing a committee, being anyone’s boss or parent in the usual sense. You are, for a set number of days, simply a person with no standing, walking toward something, alongside other people doing the same. The Turners called the bond that forms in that state communitas, a kind of fellowship that ordinary social hierarchy doesn’t produce, and that strangers, oddly, seem to find with each other more easily than settled people do.
You don’t need the academic language to recognize the experience. Anyone who has traveled with a small group toward a shared, serious purpose has felt some version of it. But it helps to know the concept has a name, because it explains why pilgrimage groups tend to stay in touch for years, in a way that ordinary travel companions rarely do. And it isn’t only the living who make up the company. The communitas of a pilgrimage includes the dead who walked the same road, prayed at the same altar, arrived at the same door with the same fatigue in their legs. You feel them there as much as you feel the person walking beside you.
Pilgrim or Tourist
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman drew a distinction that Christian writers on pilgrimage have leaned on ever since: the tourist moves through the world collecting experiences, while the pilgrim moves through the world in search of a destination that will, in some sense, complete them. The tourist’s journey is additive. The pilgrim’s journey is oriented.
This isn’t a moral judgment against tourism, which has its own pleasures and its own place. It’s a distinction of aim. A pilgrimage assumes you are going somewhere for something, not merely going somewhere. That assumption changes how you plan the trip, how you move through each day, and what you expect to feel by the end of it.
Where This Goes Next
Pilgrimage nearly disappeared in parts of the Protestant world after the Reformation, when the shrines that had anchored medieval pilgrimage were destroyed and the practice itself came under suspicion as a relic of superstition. But the impulse didn’t die. It went underground, resurfaced in different forms, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress among them, and has spent the last several decades staging a genuine comeback, one that shows up in hard numbers on routes like the Camino de Santiago.
The next piece in this series looks at why. Not the history of pilgrimage, but the psychology and theology of it: what a pilgrimage is actually doing to a person, and why so many people, after centuries of setting the practice aside, are picking it back up.
Stillpoint Travels leads small pilgrimage and travel experiences rooted in history, beauty, and presence.
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More in this series:
1. What Is a Pilgrimage? (you are here)