Next month: the Camino Portuguese!

Just about anyone can set out, look around, and be changed by the experience.

Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

A year into my retirement, I walked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, a relatively famous 500-mile pilgrimage, one that deeply and profoundly shaped my life.

I have always liked going places and then finding meaning in the experience, which is more or less what a pilgrimage is. But for most of my life I didn’t have the language to describe what I was doing. By the time I walked that first Camino, however, I knew that I was a pilgrim, and I knew that what I was walking was a pilgrimage—on a path that pilgrims like me have been walking since the 9^th century CE. I now think of each day of my life in terms of pilgrimage.

In a few weeks, I will be heading back to the Iberian Peninsula, this time to walk the Portuguese Camino, a somewhat shorter route, but one that has the same destination—Santiago de Compostela, a lovely university town in northwest Spain which happens to have a famous cathedral (a cathedral that may or may not contain the remains of James, apostle of Jesus). And so, I am writing this post to reflect with you on pilgrimage and what it means to be a pilgrim.

When I was young, my parents took me and my sisters on three-week road trips around the United States and Canada. We didn’t call those trips pilgrimages, of course, because the word “pilgrimage” sounded too Catholic, and as Reformed Christians we tried our best not to sound “too Catholic”—or even to be seen in the presence of Catholics. (Our next-door neighbors at the time, the Blackwells, seemed nice enough, but we knew they were Catholic and so we kept our distance.)

A scene from The Way, starring Martin Sheen, directed by Emilio Estevez

Looking back, though, I can see that what my family was making each summer was a kind of pilgrimage. We ventured far from home and saw stuff. And while looking at it—the Space Needle in Seattle, the Civil War Battlefield in Gettysburg, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the Vehicle Assembly Building in Cape Canaveral, even the newly-built Astrodome in Houston—we would ponder it and try to make sense of it. I can now see that my family’s travel was my introduction to pilgrimage.

My dad would always take photos of whatever we were seeing (with his fancy Nikon 35mm camera), and the rest of us would stand around in wonder and awe. I’m pretty sure I learned wonder and awe not in the Reformed church of my childhood, but outdoors, on summer vacation, in places far from home.

I was a young pastor when members of my church asked me to lead a tour to the Holy Land. I liked the idea immediately and found a tour company to help with the arrangements. The tour company offered to produce a brochure which I could use to market the tour among church members, but when the brochures arrived I noticed—right there on the first page! — that our Holy Land tour was described as a “pilgrimage.” At first, of course, I was taken aback, but I soon realized that the people in my church weren’t nearly as afraid of Catholics as I had been raised to be. Curiously, they seemed to like the idea of making a pilgrimage, and eventually so did I.

After that first pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I returned several more times, each time with different groups from different churches. I have also led pilgrimage groups to Greece and Turkey (following in the “footsteps of Paul”), Scotland (the Isle of Iona), and several other places around the world. And when I grew tired of the work of leading large groups (it’s more difficult than you might imagine), I started to go alone. My pilgrimage next month is the latest in a long list of…well, what exactly?

I have come to think of my trips—as well as my daily walks, every time in fact I set out in the morning—as physical journeys in search of spiritual meaning. Everywhere I look, there is something to see, something that produces wonder and awe, but also occasionally something that produces growth in me.

And here’s the remarkable thing: Catholics don’t own the copyright to pilgrimage. Reformed people can do it too. In fact, just about anyone can set out, look around, and be changed by the experience.

Originally released in 2010, The Way was re-released on May 23, 2023.

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