Nearly half a million people visit Galicia each year to walk the Camino de Santiago. It seems that northern Spain is not the only pilgrimage destination that has become increasingly popular. In the past couple of weeks I’ve come across four magazine articles on pilgrimages and pilgrim routes. Two of them in our own Grapevine.
In his piece in the September Grapevine Peter wonders whether the runners pitting themselves against time constraints and the challenges of the Pennine Way could be on a pilgrimage.
Hazel’s description of the Peak Pilgrimage walks, in October’s Grapevine, is of something more leisurely and gentle. Of following a route and visiting a series of churches. Nevertheless, both are about challenge and achievement – getting somewhere and proving something. Even if it is only collecting a sticker to say you were there.
Certainly, traditionally a person on a pilgrimage is trying to achieve something. They are on a journey with a purpose. There is a destination the pilgrim is trying to reach. A place of spiritual significance. But after they reach it, they are still, like the rest of us, on life’s journey.
So we are all travellers, wayfarers, pilgrims even. And being a pilgrim is a way of moving through the world. A way that we create daily by our words and actions. For, as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado says, “Caminante, No hay camino… Traveller there is no road… your footsteps make the road.”
Chris Dawson