The revival of pilgrimage in an age of secularism and distraction

All bets are off when you venture forth on pilgrimage. You leave the mainframe, escaping the grid; you’ve gone rogue, delving to a deeper level of existence. As one pilgrim—a mother of seven and one of the UK’s few iconographers, so not exactly your turn-on-tune-in-and-drop-out kind of person—put it to me after we had been on the trail together for a few days, even the colors of the land take on the more vibrant and lurid sheen of some sort of LSD-infused adventure.

Such is the apparent power of the simple act of walking consecutively each day toward a pilgrimage goal. The sensory stimulation is also attended by powerful and challenging conversations, as I experienced on a recent 111-km Camino pilgrimage in central Portugal from the city of Coimbra to Fátima, one of the world’s most important—if not baffling, given the extraordinary sequence of events that occurred there—Marian shrines in the world. Among the group there was not a single visible tattoo. The clothing on display was far from cutting-edge fashion—more a hybrid of inexpensive hiking gear and what you might put on to potter around the garden sorting out the weeds.

But what the group lacked in edgy display, it made up for in the content and character of the cutting-edge conversation and debate that never shied from taking to task the shibboleths of the modern era and its progressive arbiters.

Nothing was off the table as the pilgrims gave vent. From the relentless encroachment of new restrictions and laws in the name of environmentalism and “saving” the world; to myopic mainstream media narratives around COVID, lockdowns and vaccines; to tensions and infighting at the Vatican; to the dumbing down of hymns; to Joe Biden’s wielding of his Catholic credentials—there was much that clearly needed to be said. This sort of push back (which is more a yearning for truth, I’ve since realized) engendered on pilgrimage makes sense. Pilgrimage is an old force, tapping into ancient truths and realities of the human condition, especially when set within the context of the mysteries and incomprehensions of eternity.

Reawakening of pilgrimage in Europe

“Pilgrimage seems to be a deeply ingrained part of human nature, with its roots in the seasonal migrations of hunter-gatherers, and, more remotely, in many millions of years of animal migrations,” Rupert Sheldrake, a preeminent biologist and author who, like Aldous Huxley before him, isn’t shy of exploring how science and religion can relate, writes in his book Science and Spiritual Practices . “For all of us today who live in villages, town and cities, this immemorial pattern of continual movement has come to an end.”

Pilgrimage is a natural buttress against the enervating effects of consumerist existence, providing an antidote to the dystopian trends benighting the modern world. Those trends increasingly seek to corral humans into ever tighter, narrower spaces of existence—to reduce us to simple automatons of gender, race, sexual identity and economic production. Pilgrimage facilitates the sort of rubbing of shoulders, chance encounters and walking and talking together, that so many decry as not existing in their isolated, atomized lives that are increasingly shaped by technocratic elites who proclaim to have our best interests at heart. For many of our policy makers, this appears to be having us safely tucked away, living out the pod-like existence presented in E.M. Forster’s science fiction short story The Machine Stops , in which humankind dwells underground isolated in pods, in which all their needs are administered to by the Machine.

Pilgrimage stokes “spiritual fighting power ” to counter the sense of doubt, fear and hopelessness that seems to grip so many today. And people appear to be taking note and, as result, are attempting to break out of the pod-like realm and, as happens with the protagonist in The Machine Stops, to go rogue and head to the surface to be able to breath.

“The contemporary reawakening of pilgrimage in Europe is remarkable,” Sheldrake says. “As societies become increasingly secular and materialistic, this ancient spiritual practice is undergoing an astonishing revival.”

Europe’s Catholic shrines have seen a marked increase in visitors during the past two decades. Lourdes in France is one of the most important sites of pilgrimage, attracting about six million pilgrims a year. Fátima drew 1.5 million visitors when Pope Francis visited in May 2017 for the centenary of its Marian apparitions . The total number of visitors for that year hit 9.4 million. Spain’s Camino de Santiago pilgrimage offers one of the most remarkable examples of a contemporary pilgrimage resurgence. In the 1980s, a few enthusiasts made sure that the Way, as it is often referred to, was marked with signs and markers—scallop shells on walls and yellow arrows sprayed on anything that doesn’t move—and that there was some infrastructure and lodging for pilgrims on route. In 1987 the number of recorded pilgrims was 1,000. By 1993 it was 100,000. Before Covid got in the way, the Camino was attracting about 300,000 people from 150 countries—and many of those will have done the full 750-kilometer trek, which is quite the commitment—and no doubt it will return to those sorts of numbers, and based on previous trends pre-Covid, the footfall will keep on increasing. As Guy Hayward, the cofounder of the British Pilgrimage Trust puts it, the Camino has become the Google and Microsoft of Western pilgrimage (also noting that pilgrimage in the UK, while also increasing in popularity, is still rather at the startup stage).

Old pilgrimage routes are re-opening elsewhere, Sheldrake notes, as part of the “contemporary reawakening of pilgrimage in Europe.” In Norway, the mediaeval pilgrimage route to the shrine of St Olaf in Tronheim has been sign posted, and in 1997 was officially opened by Crown Prince Haakon. Since the end of communist rule in Russia, and the re-opening of Russian Orthodox churches and monasteries, ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims are again heading to holy places. In the UK, the British Pilgrimage Trust is reviving the old pilgrimage routes to Canterbury, while there are hopes of creating a sort of British Camino to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, site of an 11th-century vision of the Virgin Mary in southern England. Demolished during the Reformation, Walsingham currently draws 250,000 pilgrims annually, which isn’t bad going.

“It is a large venture, aimed at nothing less than reviving the walking routes as part of a spiritual and cultural revival among those huge numbers in the population for whom pilgrimage and prayer are unknown,” Joanna Bogle writes for Catholic Herald on the spiritual potential of the “Walsingham Camino” and its value for people today. “There is a spiritual hunger in Britain: you can feel it and sense it. Rather than lament it, or allow a variety of nonsensical, bogus or indeed sinister things to fill it, let’s offer the truth and beauty of Christian pilgrimage.”

The UK offers a particularly interesting case study when it comes to pilgrimage. The tradition and practice of pilgrimage became a rather taboo topic in the British Isles after the Reformation. Henry VIII banned pilgrimage in a 1538 injunction (given by Thomas Cromwell) commanding his subjects “not to repose their trust and affiance in any other works devised by men’s phantasies besides Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles, or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same.” As a result, the UK lost most of its physical pilgrimage infrastructure and shrines. This left it at a pilgrimage disadvantage to Spain and Portugal, which, for all their own great social changes, remain Catholic countries where the veneration of saints does not cause ridicule or suspicion. Sheldrake suggests that this is one of the reasons why the English invented tourism—which came within two hundred years of the pilgrimage ban—a “form of frustrated pilgrimage”.

Away from distractions, focused on God and holiness

Such frustrations and spiritual hunger is certainly not limited to the UK. It increasingly appears to be a condition of the developed Western world directed by technology and distractions.

“Now an entirely different kind of decay is ascendant: a growing lassitude and despair, a true decadence in which no praise is to be gained from moving in any direction,” Yoram Hazony writes in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, though he could have been writing about pilgrimage versus modern culture. “And so meaningful movement ceases, and all that is left is the monotonous parade of sensations induced by alcohol, drugs, and flickering scenes.”

This sort of despair and spiritual deficit might well be argued to represent a far deeper pandemic. One causing far more widespread misery than did COVID, about which the world obsessed over and devoted so much energy to, while neglecting absolutely everything else. When the pandemic-justified lockdowns seemed intent on truly recreating the ghastly world of The Machine Stops , it was pilgrimage that offered me a way out to resist the collective imprisonment. During the latter-day odyssey that followed, I encountered a small group of pilgrims who had set forth for similar reasons and to escape the madness. As this band of End of Days pilgrims strode on, having congealed into a small group of resistance fighters marching under the banner of Saint James, we often discussed how the lockdowns, done in the name of protecting health, of course went against every basic principle of achieving and maintaining good health. These are very much at the fore during pilgrimage. Our group of pandemic pilgrims resisted lockdowns—and we felt better for it.

“Walking itself has many proven benefits,” Sheldrake notes. “It promotes mental health and wellbeing, improves self-esteem, mood and quality of sleep, and reduces stress, anxiety and fatigue.” He notes that people who take exercise in the fresh air and in green spaces tend to benefit more than those who exercise indoors. Also, “purposeful activity is more satisfying and contributes more to wellbeing than purposeless activity; this is a basic tenet of the practice of Occupational Therapy.”

But pilgrimage is not just about achieving a wholesome lifestyle and improving physical and mental health. It is about taking one into the spiritual and transcendental realm, toward holiness, and even toward eternity.

“Any earthly pilgrimage is a mirror of our eternal pilgrimage to heaven,” says Fr Hugh Allan, the abbot of a Norbertine community in Chelmsford in England. “It is all about keeping our eyes fixed on the gift of eternity and making sure this earthly pilgrimage really does take to heart the phrase we say in the paternoster: ‘thy kingdom come’. How we live here and now is what echoes for eternity and our earthly pilgrimage needs to be set with each day being set in the kingdom of God.”

An illustration of this can be found in the famous scripture reading about when Jesus Christ appeared to two disciples walking to Emmaus shortly after the Resurrection. Pope Benedict XVI spoke about how the locality of Emmaus evokes a road for each Christian:

There are various hypothesis and this one is not without an evocativeness of its own for it allows us to think that Emmaus actually represents any place: the road that leads there is the road that every Christian, every person, takes. The Risen Jesus makes himself our traveling companion as we go on our way to rekindle the warmth of faith and hope in our hearts and to break the bread of eternal life.”

These challenging ideas require a different way of thinking to what we are used to during our average day, when most of our bandwidth is taken up with details and micromanaging, focusing on the minutiae and requirements of work, family and navigating daily life. In essence, it requires a form of dislocation from our usual mode of thought. And this is what pilgrimage, seen in the light of eternity, sets out to achieve.

“Pilgrimage is the removal of the pilgrim from the present and the usual, to a place where others likewise displaced have sought connection with those who have been in some sense sanctified either because of geographical or spiritual connection with a place and with God,” says a priest, who while not wanting to be named, noted that he was drawing on the wisdom of a monk who had not left his monastery since taking solemn vows over 40 years ago . “Pilgrimage ought to enable us to connect with those who have lived holy lives, but the point of pilgrimage is not to arrive, to walk, to ride, to suffer; but to dislocate sufficiently to enable the settled to live as the holy once did and thus to become better able to be heaven bound. Dislocation, and that may involve doing things in a way that is not entirely normal or usual, is generally a necessary part of the process.”

He highlights that the “earthiness” one encounters traversing the land is “incredibly important,” because it emphasizes our present temporal state, with all its implications. “We are called into being to live in the present but with the ability to understand that the past existed and shaped the present and that we have, as part of the present, a rolling entree into the future which never arrives because it becomes present and rapidly assumes the characteristics of the past,” he explains. “Thus, time is both a metaphysical construct and a lived, and understood, reality.”

A good example of this is Mount Athos in Greece, he says, a place that can “be thought of as a repository of communal monastic life where the saints in their infinite variety are brought into the present by an unchanged life that reflects that which was when they were alive.” In this way, he says, “the past” is “dragged ever through the present to the future.”

A link to eternity

Furthermore, through pilgrimage we are taken out of our “comfort zone”. This does not just mean leaving behind our creature comforts. It also means leaving behind “the displaced zone in which we can keep God at bay”. All too often, the priest explains, “absent the material discomfort and the risk of disease and death and in the security of the familiar, we have no need to reflect upon a future that is apparently infinitely extensible, certain and very good, or alternatively is extremely frightening.”

Such fear, of course, formed an enormous component of the reaction to COVID, when mere existence was prioritized over actual living and “a longing for goodness, truth and beauty in our hearts” coupled with “fresh air, exercise, companionship and a sense of purpose,” as Bogle puts it.

If there was one image from the pandemic that got me wondering if the claims about the death of Western civilization might not be exaggerated, it was the sight of people walking in the open air on glorious Spanish and Portuguese beaches wearing surgical masks while a stiff offshore breeze blew, buffeting the airborne sea gulls this way and that. This will for me forever serve as a reminder of the feats of insanity that sane people are capable of achieving through a mixture of collective hysteria, fear mongering and conditioning by media, the government and its contracted agencies nudging away.

The desire to make oneself culturally prostrate has come into the open,” Nathan Pinkoski writes in his recent essay “Spiritual Death of the West”, which analyses the prophetic message of French writer Jean Raspail’s 1973 book Le Camps des Saints (The Camp of the Saints ), in which an armada of one million migrants sail from India for the shores of France. “Sometime during those seemingly good years after World War II— Les Trente Glorieuses , as the French call this period, which still prevailed when The Camp of the Saints was published—the West lost its soul. In a sense, the apocalypse has already happened.”

And, as Raspail describes, the French government allows it to happen, failing to intervene as the country implodes—though governments regular intervene when it comes to pilgrimage. Sheldrake notes how throughout history those in authority often have been rather uncomfortable with pilgrimage, and perhaps not without reasons. He cites the example of the English pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral to commemorate his martyrdom and “all it symbolized of spiritual resistance to earthly and especially royal power.”

It’s true that pilgrimage has also been banned because of religious reasons: the Protestant reformers had various objections against pilgrimage based on it being judged as not supported by the authority of the Bible and it risking idolatry. But more often pilgrimage has been banned for starkly anti-religious motivations. The French Revolution proclaimed the Cult of Reason as the state religion and secularized churches and cathedrals while pilgrimage was banned, Sheldrake notes. The atheist governments of the Soviet Union similarly closed churches, destroyed monasteries, killed priests and persecuted religious activity. Likewise, in Communist China and in Cambodia under Pol Pot, religious practices have been viewed “as superstitious” and suppressed “in favor of the Marxist’s philosophy of materialism.”

And, more recently, of course, during the time of COVID, the churches were once again closed, while movement and the right to free association were denied. Once again, the past was “dragged into the present,” though in a far more forbidding way than occurs during pilgrimage. Though pilgrimage can only go so far, and can, like anything else, be misused and misunderstood.

The less that confession is used, the less the emphasis and understanding of the consequences of sin appears to be,” cautions the priest. “That feeds into a loop in which the invocation of the saints and the collection of indulgence [on pilgrimage] renders the whole process less and less important. Here perhaps is the missing link to eternity.”