Pilgrimage days are a vivid parable of life's journey and of the ceaseless quest of mind and heart. We are all on the road, and on a once-made journey. We seek varied goals but we are, finally, pilgrims of the absolute. It is not demanded of us to be, in the world's estimation, a success. It is asked that, responding to God's mercy, we be contrite, generous and faithful, and forgiving others as we hope to be forgiven.
Many have used holidays to travel as pilgrims to holy places. Lourdes, Rome, Canterbury, Glendalough and Knock are but a few of the names that echo in our prayer, our conversion experience and deep renewal. There prayer was valid. We are greatly helped as we walk, step by step, with others moving in faith and love in the endless, life-giving quest for God. Inspired and helped by the goodness and fervour of others, we know we are one with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Whatever our pilgrim destination, we all are seeking Christ. In every place He will open up for us the Scripture (if we have ears to hear) and allow us to join Him at His table and enable us to recognise Him in the breaking of the bread.
Our pilgrim days are few. We have no time to lose. We seek stillness, healing, and light in our darkness and the strength needed for the miles to go before we sleep. Close to six million people come each year to Lourdes to be renewed in mind and in heart and (if it be His will) in body. Amazing graces are recorded and in awesome wonder sceptic voices fade to silence. Why Lourdes? Why Jerusalem? Why Canterbury, Iona or Glendalough?
All places are holy for us if we allow God to speak and if we, in sincerity and awe, await His saving word. We are at one with Hilda, Brigid, Teresa, Catherine, Patrick, Dominic, Francis and with Columbanus taking the light from Bangor to Bobbio. All pathways by Christ's feet are trod. We seek to follow.
Paul never allows us to forget that we have not here a lasting city. We are ever seeking the one that is to come. We seek - and our inspired seeking is a lifelong task. Even as we move amid the daily tasks and seek to share the bustle of the marketplace we long for moments of quiet and for desert stillness. We treasure moments of solitude and silence. Even to preserve our sanity we need islands of quiet.
We have a most real hunger for God. We need to feed ourselves on truth and to listen to the beat of our own hearts and to feed the neglected hunger of the spirit. Like the woman by Jacob's Well, we thirst for living water. Only One can give it. In quest of this we pilgrims go. We return refreshed, made clean, and made strong for the daily round. We listen, in the deep heart's core, to the Master's Voice: "I am the Way!" He leads in holiness, in love, and in the peace that He alone can give.
Drop thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our striving is cease,
Take from our soul the strain
and stress
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy Peace ...
F.MacN