It’s growing on me, this pilgrim thing. I never really saw myself as the ‘type’, if there is such a thing, but somehow it is starting to take root. 

I don’t want to sound flippant, but I sometimes do think that different stages of life call for different expressions of spirituality. 

And now, after so long in Cathedral ministry, I find myself drawn towards pilgrimage. That sense that there is no escaping the fact that others have trodden here before - a long time before – and that we now stand in their place. We have moved up the queue of those called to be custodians, holders-in-trust today. 

A glib metaphor for life, we are pilgrims on a journey, but nonetheless there is deep comfort, connection and coherence about places where others have walked in their thousands and ten thousands over the last millennia. 

Looking back, I think it was a visit to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall which lies beneath the deeply contested Haram Al-Sherif, the third most holy site in Islam, that was a turning point. 

As Orthodox Jews were rushing through the narrow lanes of the old city, I found myself in the crowd at the Wall with a group of Christian leaders. And there, in an act of extraordinary hospitality, we were welcomed to pray alongside Jews who were praying for the Peace of Jerusalem. 

Not my tradition, I have to say, but there I was writing on a scrap of paper, scribbling an inchoate request for a loved one, and inserting it carefully chosen crack in the stonework. What did I think I was doing? Was God going to come along like some divine janitor to pick up all these scraps and read them one by one? 

I really don’t know. What I did know was that there was something profoundly moving going on. A connection between the fragility of my prayer and the permanence of that wall. Between praying alongside a community of which I was no part and the intense feeling of joining an ancient practice. An overwhelming sense that this was the right thing to do without the slightest clue what was going on. 

In short, that’s my layman’s guide to pilgrimage. 

Something which is viscerally embedded in an ancient past, but somehow points to a life and vitality that is anything but over and done with. An experience which is most often communal – even when it’s not your community – but firmly implanted in the knowledge of one’s person in relation to God. 

So, to be a pilgrim, and in these Lent reflections I will draw on Scripture to help us on our journey.