Practicing Pilgrimage

What if pilgrimage begins long before you lace up your boots? The Christos Center for Spiritual Formation argues that the real journey is learning to notice God in ordinary places, unexpected encounters, and daily routines. Before pilgrims cross continents, they must first cross the threshold from distraction into attentive presence. ⁱ

Once we learn to see the road beneath our feet, another question emerges: who walks with us? The Pilgrimage reimagines spiritual formation as a shared journey of friendship, healing, and transformation. In a culture of isolation, it insists that souls rarely travel far without companions. ⁱⁱ

Yet the deepest journeys often require leaving familiar maps behind. Shalem’s pilgrimages invite participants into sacred landscapes where silence, prayer, history, and place converge — suggesting that spiritual growth is not merely about arriving somewhere new, but becoming someone new along the way.

i.   One of the qualities I love about the Narnia stories is that while the wardrobe becomes the doorway to the Great Journey, it cannot be manipulated or controlled. The children enter it many times without being carried into the land beyond. We may be able to direct our bodies to a different place. But to be changed, to come into the presence of the Living God, to go ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ — that can only come, if it comes at all, as a gift. — John

ii.   Hard to think of many books outside the Bible that have impacted more people’s faith than Pilgrim’s Progress. When my wife was in grade school a teacher would read a section of that book every day, and Nancy could never understand how anyone could fail to be riveted by it. Translated into over 200 languages (80 in Africa alone), its temptations (Vanity Fair, anyone?) and failings and dramas and new beginnings remind us — everybody has a story. Everybody’s on a journey. — John