Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage is one of the primal gestures of mankind, insofar as we are able to look back into its history. Mankind is always on the move: It looks for something bigger. […] Because such a deep truth lies in mankind’s primal gesture of searching and being on the move, Israel was able to receive anew, and in a new way, the call for pilgrimage in God’s revealed law as his will.

On the threshold of the Holy Land, after forty years of wandering in the desert, they were told: Even in your homeland you shall remain a wandering people. Three times a year you should go to Jerusalem, as if it were a constant journey from daily life into the Other, into a companionship with God and with one another, and from this greatness back into daily life again. You shall remain wanderers, people on the move who know that we are still searching for the final city.

Such pilgrimages in Israel also had the purpose of frequently bringing this scattered people together to unity, to allow them to experience the fraternity of the twelve tribes of Israel. In this way they might always be one in the unity of the one God, who alone can ultimately endow unity and reconciliation among people. Thus, various meanings of pilgrimage in Israel were established: It is about the unity of the people, about the visible representation of the unity of the only God. It is about staying on the path, not forgetting the temporary nature of all our things.

None of this has been overhauled in Christianity. This is why pilgrimage has – from the earliest times – remained one of the ways in which the Christian faith is expressed. After all, man's primal longing could not be extinguished, at times to find a way out of the ordinary of daily life, to gain distance, to become free. […]

The simplicity that being a pilgrim assumes is part of pilgrimage. For if we just want the same consumption and the same life style everywhere, then we can only travel around the world as far as we want; we always remain within ourselves. We can only experience something truly “different” if we ourselves are different and live differently, if we become pilgrims from within, in the simplicity of faith. This includes the inner determination of faith. Pilgrimage is not about any sight-seeing or experiences which then do not lead us out of ourselves into something truly new. The aim of pilgrimage is ultimately not sight-seeing, but rather breaking out towards the living God.

We attempt it by visiting the sites from the history of salvation. Their interior and exterior paths do not go in the direction of arbitrariness. We wander, as it were, into the geography of the history of God, to the places where he himself established his sign posts. We approach that which is predetermined for us and not what we have sought out for ourselves. As we enter into his history and turn towards the signs which the Church lays down for us from the authority of her faith, we also come towards one another. As we become pilgrims, we are able to better receive that which tourism seeks: the Other, distance, freedom, and deeper encounters. Pilgrimage should not just be a mere excursion, but rather an entrance into the history which God has made with us: in the signs of salvation that he has set up for us, in the simplicity that is one of the essential signs of faith.