Pilgrimages have always been a staple of Catholic spirituality, more popular in earlier times than they are now. And not just among ordinary people. Catholics of all classes once took enthusiastically to the practice.

A week ago, to put myself in the mood to get this article going, I went online to see if I would find anything on Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome. And there was the book in its entirety on a site called Project Gutenberg! 

I had read it many years ago as a student at St Mary’s, and as I perused the first pages, memories came rushing back, to my great delight. Every time I read a phrase or paragraph I had specially liked, I smiled or chuckled. Belloc was a unique mid-twentieth century Catholic icon and apologist, he and his perhaps more famous friend, GK Chesterton.

The Path to Rome is the record of a pilgrimage Belloc made on foot from the Moselle Valley in south-eastern France to St Peter’s, in Rome, the result of a personal vow to God.

Belloc tried to accomplish this by walking in a straight line, 30-45 miles a day. His extraordinary route took him well off the beaten track, through isolated villages, nearly impassable mountains and rivers, and sparsely populated plains.

Belloc describes his experiences with his usual insight and verve, and offers humorous digressions on aspects of faith and culture. The book is a wonderful summary of the values and virtues of “pilgrimaging”, and a delightful read in the bargain.

All pilgrimages have a certain dynamic, whether you go American Airlines first-class to Fatima or Lourdes, of take the PTSC with a parish group to Siparia. The dynamic is always the same. The first feature is that you leave home. I remember pilgrimages my brothers, sister, and I went on as children, with my mother and some of her parishioner -friends.

One in particular stands out in memory, a journey we made from St John the Baptist, our parish in San Juan, to La Divina Pastora. The prospect was exciting from days before, an excitement stemming from the imaginable prospects of the trip. As children, going somewhere “far” meant a special thrill.

On the morning in question I remember waking up to wonderful smells coming from the kitchen, and the next thing I knew, we were on the bus, and taking to the open road.

My nostalgia should not distract readers from the importance of this first feature, which is absolutely crucial. You leave home, or better, you turn your back on home and you take to the open road.  It’s a Janus-like moment: turning your back upon home, at the same time opening up yourself to what the road ahead, what the way has to reveal. 

The Guyanese novelist, Wilson Harris, says that in such circumstances, you not only look at and see new things; you become receptive to all the energies of the possible. You have embarked upon the status of a pilgrim.

In the ancient world, pilgrim was a basic dimension of the identity of the wise or the holy person. He or she, says historian Bernd Jager, always seemed to be setting out. They never took for granted what seemed to be obvious to everyone else. They always appeared strange.

Strangers in a foreign land was how Christians too were once described. They too saw themselves as pilgrims, and Christianity itself, before it became Christianity, was simply called The Way.

Pilgrimage is thus an essential feature of the Christian vocation. We are a pilgrim community. Vatican II put this notion at the centre of its reflection on the Church, recovering a very ancient insight and designation. Settlement, however, is our more normal inclination.

Being on the way is too uncertain, exposed, and unsettling. We don’t take to the road unless we have to. Something, usually cultural challenge, puts us out, and we have no option then but to leave home.

Home is thus not simply our address or geographical location. Home is the realm of the established and the well-known, the ritualised, the set. But we do not come by new possibilities of life, or new perspectives on things unless we are prepared to leave behind the habit of settlement. Pilgrimage is not an option; it’s an imperative required by both life and thought.

On the way discloses a further feature of our existence. In ordinary life, we all live within certain roles and statuses. We are doctors or accountants or teachers or civil servants, and some of us have more influence and social rank than others. On the road, these social denotations, conventionally so important, are all shed.

Relations are one-to-one, purely existential and human, and without special attention to accidental worth. A pilgrimage thus provides no ordinary instance of community. It reveals the richly textured community-substance present in communities before they yield to structure, or before role and status take over.

When pilgrims arrive at their destination, they make their devotions, and say their prayers. They relax and chat, and share their preoccupations. It’s a time of total refreshment and renewal, as both the sick and the healthy discover at Lourdes

At length, it is time to go back. You pack your bags, baskets, and your mementoes -- your bottles of Lourdes water, pictures of St. Bernadette, or piece of a plant near the grotto or the shrine of the saint you came to honour. You board American again or PTSC and you head back home.

What you head back to is the same thing you left behind, the same house, same family, same job, same neighbourhood.  The change is all within. You return to the same old things, but not as the same old person. Pilgrimage has given you transformational energy - to deal with it and everything else afresh.

I think ordinary people especially, whose lives tend to be more fixed and predictable, have always recognised this. That’s why they have always taken to pilgrimage with such anticipation and relish.

This devotion is still alive, and there will be some of it during the course of Lent. The promise of new energy and transformation will once more be available. Would that more than a few people could know its benefits!