72 Lessons on Pilgrimage
The following lines were written on the northern steps of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela from 11:30 AM to 12:52 PM after the completion of a pilgrimage on June 21, 2024. They were recorded on a perfect Galician day as I pondered the pilgrimage experiences and watched hundreds of pilgrims complete the Camino de Santiago.
There is no such thing as a lazy pilgrim. Either you go, and go again, or you don’t.
Pilgrims enjoy presence. Your place is on the path. Nowhere else.
It is hard to photograph pilgrimages. Pilgrimage is a billion points on the path, not one vantage point or one frozen moment.
Nothing can replace the experience of a first pilgrimage. Returns, although meaningful, are not the same and the destination, ultimately achieved, may be anticlimactic.
True pilgrims always have their return in mind.
Pilgrimage is one large decision – to go and to keep going – that decision trumps all others.
Pilgrimage is the acceptance of come what may: hill, valley, rain, cold, heat… You accept it all once you start to walk. In this, you give up control of what your day, week, month…is going to be.
Pilgrimage is submission to the path and the power that pulled you to it.
Pilgrimage is about the people who join your path, those small but intimate opportunities to walk and talk with someone else.
Pilgrimage is about giving: giving to others and allowing them to give to you.
Pilgrimage is temporal awareness, allowing your body and feet to be in constant communication with the world around you.
Pilgrimage is beautifully and rewardingly slow.
Pilgrimage is about seeing – seeing the world around you (again or anew), seeing others, and seeing yourself.
Pilgrimage is about vulnerability.
Pilgrimage is about space and time and returning to a more human scale.
Pilgrimage is about slow seeing, allowing landscapes to unfold gradually, organically, naturally.
Pilgrimage cannot conceal the ugly, but it also accentuates the beautiful.
Pilgrimage is about conversation, not only with those who share your path, but with the world around you.
Pilgrimage is about becoming raw.
Pilgrimage is allowing a higher, more godly purpose to overcome pain and exhaustion.
There are few things more human than pilgrimage; it is the desire to go to a better place, to become better and more whole, and to bring that awareness home.
A repeat pilgrimage must be more about the reason than the destination.
Pilgrimage is an act of faith, an act of hope, and, when done correctly, an act of charity.
There is a reason why the Apostle Paul equates pilgrims with strangers. Everywhere they go they are strangers, newcomers, outsiders, refugees by their very nature, hoping for the kindness and hospitality of others.
To be a pilgrim is to be naked.
Pilgrimage is the process of coming home to a home you do not know.
With a pilgrimage, it does not matter who gets there first or in better shape; it only matters that you’ve made it.
To be a pilgrim is to know the power and promise of a single step.
Pilgrimage is always more about home than the destination. Your body might be on the path, but your thoughts are with home.
Pilgrimage makes being home better.
Pilgrimage is an exercise of the mind and spirit more than the body.
A good pilgrim can sense the presence of the generations of pilgrims that have come before them. Their presence is felt in the path, the rocks, and the trees. It is felt everywhere and inevitably their presence will be absorbed into the same matter for later pilgrims to know. You are stepping into the flow and by so doing add to the river of pilgrimage.
Memory is not enough to remember a pilgrimage with its emphasis on every day, every hour experiences. Objects – scraps, rocks, stamps, photographs… help keep the pieces of pilgrimage in place and help it live after the final step is taken.
Pilgrimages provide hope in humanity and its potential for goodness.
Pilgrimage, somewhat ironically, helps one realize that they are not alone.
Pilgrimage can offer the best example of a positive, shared, human experience.
Pilgrimage teaches you that you can do hard things and provides the eternal solution that it comes one step, one minute, one hour, one day at a time.
To be a pilgrim is to learn that God provides the path and the means to overcome each obstacle that comes along the way.
Pilgrimage reminds you that each day, each hour, each minute count. There are no wastes of time. Walking gets you to where you need to go but so too does stopping, resting, and napping.
To be a pilgrim is to belong to something bigger, better, and higher.
Pilgrimage must bring pain, and it must bring relief (even if the body still hurts).
Accomplishment is the cornerstone of pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage is greater than mere belief; it is belief put into action.
A pilgrimage may be temporary, but its effects should last a lifetime.
Pilgrimage is not defined by age, sex, wealth, health, color, but by the single step.
A pilgrim should not want to be unscathed. Bumps, bruises, wrong turns, qualify the pilgrim.
Everyone will need to be a pilgrim; everyone should be a pilgrim; everyone will want to be a pilgrim, at some stage. Pilgrimage has a certain gravity that pulls all of us.
Pilgrimage never ends. It is an eternal principle, even if we don’t fully understand the ramifications of what this means.
WE are all pilgrims with a desire to return or turn to something in time or space.
Pilgrimage is a spark that ignites larger and higher desires.
All photographs work as a private pilgrimage. Tellingly, they can transport but they cannot provide a way, nor can they provide meaning. It is up to the viewer/pilgrim to provide both. Photographs provide a point B to the viewer in point A and therefore, it is left to them to fill in the distance, both physical and temporal.
To be a pilgrim is to be humbled.
Pilgrimage works best when conducted with humility and with humble steps.
Pilgrimage provides more than the pilgrim expects. It is the embrace of chance and the surprise. It teaches the unexpected lesson to the unexpecting. It is the unexpected that sustains the pilgrim.
The pilgrimage is not about speed but diligence and dedication to the idea and purpose of the path.
Pilgrimage is less about place than process; pilgrimage is less about place than progress.
Pilgrimage, like life, is not a race. (There are no worse metaphors for both.)
Pilgrimage answers the question of whether you are willing or prepared to see something all the way to the end (and back).
Pilgrimage is about togetherness and learning about togetherness.
Pilgrimage teaches us that you learn more about yourself away from home and its comfort and ease.
We are taught through pilgrimage and innately feel the desire to be a pilgrim.
The world is less scary when you take it one step at a time.
Chance encounters and meetings on the path were always meant to be.
Pilgrimage, stripped down, allows one to get to what matters most more quickly than anything else.
The only abundance that matters on the path is an abundance of good company, healthy feet, and enough food and water.
Everything tastes better on the pilgrim path when you really must work for it.
Pilgrimages are as much about listening as they are about walking.
The pilgrim path helps you realize that you can do with less.
The pilgrimage path is a test to see if exhilaration can come out of exhaustion.
Technology tends to obliterate time and space; pilgrimage returns time and space and can fix them. It employs the first human technology – walking.
Pilgrimage is a reminder that paths have power.
Pilgrimages provide.
Further Reading
James Swensen is an Associate Professor of Art History and the History of Photography at Brigham Young University and the author of In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, 1953-1954.
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I especially appreciated #28.