What is Pilgrimage? Part 2: Christian Critique

Pilgrimage is not unique to Israel of course.  To this day, pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one’s lifetime (if possible) is one of the pillars of Islam.  Other religions have analogous expectations or practices.  There is something within the human-divine relationship that calls us to leave home and work and family and security and set out to seek the great encounter, to grasp the Pearl of Great Price.  So powerful is this sense that in addition to the millions who go on pilgrimage each year, some of the most powerful spiritual literature is “quest” literature; from the Holy Grail to the Lord of the Rings.

On the other hand, in fundamental ways Christianity subverts the place of pilgrimage, dislodging it from its central place.  It refuses to locate God’s earthly home anywhere except within the baptized, individually and corporately, (and derivatively, within the places where they gather.)  “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” (I Cor. 6:19)  “Where two or three are gathered in my name there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 18:20) “Believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.  … the hour is coming and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him.” (John 4:21, 23)

Part of what Christianity proclaims is that “prayer has been valid” (T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding) as truly in the church building dedicated last week, or in the Christian home, or in the place of work or play, as in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or Lindisfarne.  The Christian faith always critiques the notion that we must go somewhere else or be something different in order to meet God and be transformed by him.  Rather, God is nearer to us than we are ourselves.  His people are the spiritual stones being built into the true temple.  So Christianity always critiques pilgrimage, subverting its foundational assumptions.

And yet, we are not pure spirit.  From the earliest days followers of Jesus have undertaken physical journeys to material places searching for something and have found themselves encountering the living Christ.