Citizen Columns
Question
What is the significance of pilgrimage in your faith?
Answer
This question can be answered on two levels, historical and spiritual. Historically, pilgrimages have been an important “optional extra” for those seeking to stir up their spiritual life by visiting sites of special sanctity, associated with the life of Jesus, the saints, or a living person of holiness and wisdom. This was the aim, for example, of the 19th century Russian seeker whose journal, “The Way of a Pilgrim” has become a classic for learning the inner life centred on the constant repetition of the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”.)
Such pilgrimages, especially in the company of others, can have a life-long impact that is at once both uniquely personal and comfortingly shared. That was my experience of a pilgrimage in 1978 to Spruce Island, off the coast of Kodiak, the home of St Herman of Alaska (+1837), the first Orthodox saint in North America. He was a beloved monk and defender of native rights, and for that reason spent most of his life in Russian Alaska as an exile, persecuted by church and government authorities.
Exile is also a key aspect of pilgrimage as a spiritual state of mind. A hermit who had lived for years in the same place, never travelling, was once asked what he did all day. “I am on a journey,” he replied. This attests to the deep Christian conviction that we are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). Christians can and should be engaged in public life, but they are still pilgrims on the way to their true homeland. As another classic text put it in the second century, “They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. … They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven” (The Epistle to Diognetus).
With love in Christ,
Fr John
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