Anecdotes

Historically, the focus of pilgrimage has always been about the place to which one was travelling; a holy site or a place connected to a healing miracle or the martyrdom of a saint.1 The focus was “travelling to”, not “travelling”.2 My own experience, perhaps already heavily influenced by my Protestant theology of the God who is everywhere and the lack of veneration of the saints, has meant that increasingly my focus has been on the fruitfulness of the journey, rather than the arrival.

Travelling

The majority of a pilgrimage is spent on the road, rather than at the destination. Perhaps for this reason, my most positive memories are tied into the journey rather than terminal places; the process rather than arrival. It is whilst travelling that friendships are developed – Heike and I still see each other regularly, a South African pensioner and I still email each other with jokes (folk met walking the camino de Santiago). It is on the journey that kindness is most frequently received and offered – a French small-holder called me over to chat one afternoon, and on discovering that I like cherries, invited me into the fruit cage to help myself off the (organically grown) tree while he went to get a bag so I could take some with me. It is the placing of self within a wide landscape that helps bring perspective – seeing a large European bird of prey (an eagle of some sort by its size) soar majestically through a valley after I had had a steep scramble down a hill into a meadow, reminded me that no matter how majestic nature is, God is more majestic still. It is the unexpected gifts of the road – a bright green praying mantis in the middle of an otherwise empty country lane, (my initial thought, on seeing such a green object, was “how sad that someone has dropped a sweet wrapper here”; it was only as I got closer that I realised what I was actually seeing), or a hummingbird hawk moth hovering over flowers in the border of a park,3 or a wind-bent, stunted apple tree bearing fruit at the edge of a field – that lifts the spirit and reminds the pilgrim of the God who is closer than breath and speaks through general revelation too. The tree held a particular resonance; I saw it on a day when Pritchard’s book had suggested walking with eyes open wide to see what God might use to bring his message.4 For me, the message was that even a stunted tree does what it was created for – having roots, a trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and then fruit. Even someone who feels stunted by life can be fruitful.

It is as you travel that folk all around cheer you on and do their utmost to try to understand what you are saying. In a tiny village in Galicia, an elderly woman bent over with years and hard work, did not speak Castilian Spanish and could not read from the phrase book. She spoke the local dialect Galego, of which I spoke none. However, she did know the word peregrina, pilgrim, and could say “buen Camino”, literally “good road” and a blessing like the Irish “may the road rise to meet you”. I tried several ways of communicating – my few words of Castilian, showing her the phrase book, miming, and eventually just offering her a drink from my water bottle. We sat on a wall in the sun together for a time, before I continued walking.

Arrival 

Santiago de Compostela is a shock after the road. Although many pilgrims travel and refugios are frequently full or almost full, it is quite possible to walk all day and only see other pilgrims in the distance or at places you stop and sit for a while. The footpath also runs woven through small villages and sometimes criss-crosses the main trunk roads used by vehicles and the bravest of those cycling the Camino, so it is common to see from a distance locals and traffic once you get closer to Santiago. However, once past Ponferrada there is only one large town (Sarria) on the walkers’ route to Santiago. There sounds, sights and smells assail you. Your dutiful palos,5 (which have brought you through thick and thin, beaten back bushes, kept stray dogs away, plumbed the depths of puddles and aided balance over rough terrain), now become a hazard, as they slip on the paving. If shouldered, they become a hazard to the crowd walking before and behind you.

The cathedral is the goal of all pilgrims.6 At an office in the cathedral precincts, new arrivals present their pilgrim passport*, which has been stamped along the route at regular intervals to mark the speed (or rather slowness) of your passing. After a brief questioning about why you have walked the route and what your immediate reactions are, the officers decide whether or not you will receive a Latin Compostela certificate of completion.7 This office is welcoming and encouraging and a place for those ahead on the road to leave messages for those coming after. I left a note for another walker which was collected while I was at Finisterre. However, the cathedral itself provokes a mixed reaction. Santiago is famous amongst other things for a giant censer, the Botafumeiro, which is only swung during designated pilgrim Masses.8 It takes eight men to swing it and is a sight to behold. Meant as a special blessing for pilgrims, it attracts tourists from all over the world; they fill the cathedral, save pew space for their families sight-seeing elsewhere in the cathedral or city, and jump up with their video cameras as soon as the men move into place. For the scruffy, dirty pilgrims trying to mark the completion of their pilgrimage with a service in the cathedral, who seem marginalised to those seats with little or no view of the altar, preacher or action, the reality of “normal” life is brought crashing home.

And yet, even so, all over the cathedral pilgrims leave their little offerings from the journey. There are many places and collection boxes for donativos or financial gifts. The money is used by the cathedral to fund good works and keep the building safe. Less formally though, almost in an unspoken consensus, pilgrims gather small objects on route – when I was there with the three Germans, we had between us a piece of quartz, eucalyptus and oak leaves, pine needles and a walnut, chestnut and almond – to bring the road into the cathedral and offer thanks to God for a safe journey. We wrote out a simple prayer in Castilian, German and English that said “Thank You God for these gifts and the gifts you pour out on us every day”. We tucked the prayer and natural gifts high up on a ledge on one of the large pillars, hoping they would stay awhile before the cleaners removed them.

There was a very different feel at Finisterre/Fisterra, where Heike, Bine (Sabine), Manu (Manuella) and I drove after we had had a couple of days in Santiago to recover. Along the way we stopped at a little beach and all paddled in a very blue, very warm, very sheltered bay of the Atlantic. When we got to the town, we were denied access to the refugio because we had not walked there.9 Bine and Manu did not have the money to stay in a hotel and planned to sleep on the beach. Heike and I did have the money, so we booked a twin room each and then went to find the others, telling them one room would go empty if they didn’t sleep in it. We then went out for a picnic and to watch the sun go down over the ocean. As we finished the meal, I thought how fitting it would be to share communion to mark the end of ‘our Camino’, but immediately thought too that as they were Catholic, I could not suggest it. (I should have known better, after being offered communion at all three Masses I attended and Heike suggesting that maybe God was trying to tell me something when I admitted it had happened a third time at the Cathedral). However, even as the two thoughts crossed in my head, Manu suggested we should share communion. Heike told the others that I led communion in my church (at that time, I went to an independent evangelical church), so they insisted that is what we should do. We held one of the most moving communions I have ever shared in, before returning to the hotel and the next day, to Santiago where two got on a plane to Germany and I got on a bus back to Madrid. 

Arrival at the destination, though, also means parting. This moment is delayed for those who have done their pilgrimage in an organised group, but will still occur for them once they are back at their original meeting place or home town. In Santiago I met up with a number of people who I had seen along the way, who either arrived before or after I did. With each one when I knew it was our final meeting, I wished them “buen camino para la corazón” (“good road for the heart”). My intention was to suggest that though the physical pilgrimage was over, the lessons and attitudes learned from the road might continue in their life at home.10 What I found most interesting were people’s responses. The majority of those who seemed not to understand and answered that they had finished the pilgrimage, were Catholic. The majority of those who nodded and wished me the same were New Agers. This “continuing pilgrimage” attitude made me even more ambivalent to the importance of destination, so that I felt at liberty to walk in France with a set time rather than set distance to cover. Whilst I was disappointed in France that my injury prevented me from covering more ground, I did not feel I had failed or let myself or God down by deciding at Tours that there was too great a risk of a snapped Achilles tendon in open French countryside to continue safely.11 

Analysis

We live in an age when people endow places with importance.12 After car accidents on busy roads, or at a crime scene, spontaneous “shrines” appear. Sometimes these move beyond being temporary places marked by sad, wilting flowers, into sites permanently marked with a cross or sign with the name of the deceased.13 We honour fallen police officers killed in the line of duty with memorial plaques close to where they died.14 It may be that these practices are more rooted in folk tradition than faith,15 but in building bridges to the community, does the Church need to look again at what makes a place “holy”? What constitutes a site for gathering and remembering?

Almost every faith community,16 and many a group within the New Age movement,17 sees spiritual benefit in making journeys that they will happily call pilgrimages.18 Destinations are chosen because of significance to members of that faith or group. These journeys can lead to life changing decisions. In a review that I wrote of Fedele’s book, I suggested evangelists would need to be careful about only using the argument that “Christianity works” as a reason for coming to faith, as the New Age beliefs of the pilgrims she studied also, at some level, “worked” to bring transformation.19 Are Protestant Christians robbing themselves of a means of spiritual blessing by not engaging with this ancient practice?

God is everywhere but does that mean we often miss him hiding in plain sight? If every place is equally holy, does that make our search for him seem too easy? Does the desire to have to make physical effort to go to a place to find him play into our inability to accept salvation purely through grace alone?

If we know we are called to be a pilgrim people metaphorically as well as perhaps physically, does the dissatisfaction on arrival at the destination reflect the deeper internal knowledge that actually satisfaction and a sense of “true arrival” will not be possible until we walk with God in the re-created new heavens and new earth? 

My experience tells me that God was to be found just as much, if not more, in making the journey and through the people I encountered, as in the focal point of the destination. Is it then, the attitude of setting aside time and having a dedicated purpose of seeking God more actively in our surroundings, that marks the difference between home and pilgrimage, between “normal” and “holy” space? 

Application

Land and place were important in the Old Testament. Inge spends an entire chapter discussing the relevance of geographical place in Christian scriptures, particularly the Old Testament implications of ‘The Promised Land’.20 Whilst Yahweh was God of the whole Earth,21 rather than a localised god, he still called a people out to a Promised Land to be his own;22 his own witnesses and blessings to the other nations.23 It took a long time for his people to end up in their land, and that time gave them a rich understanding of being sojourners. Encounters with God happened wherever he willed, indoors or outdoors. Indoor encounters seem to be confined to the tabernacle and Temple (which were set up as places of encounter), but outdoor encounters happened in many places – for example, under shady trees24, in a burning bush in the desert,25 at overnight stopping places whilst travelling26 and on particular mountains –27 and those places became identified as holy places, marked with altars or stones to remind people of the encounter.

Particularly during the Exodus, God was with his people, and showed them when to move from place to place,28 providing for them in every place.29 This presence, in a modified form, continued with the tabernacle and the Temple after the land was settled. The Temple became the place to encounter God, hence the requirement to visit at least three times a year. Within the Psalms of Ascent, geography and place are very important. Only four of the fifteen psalms do not mention Zion, other geographical areas or topographical features.30 Potential dangers of travel and the safety offered to pilgrims by God are mentioned,31 as is delight at both the idea of travelling to Jerusalem and arrival in the city.32 Psalm 84 similarly focuses on the delight to be found at the Temple, a delight so deep that it is better to have one day waiting at the gate to enter, than a thousand days anywhere else. Kraus and Tate both emphasise that the one at the door is not someone with an official post within the Temple, but rather a pilgrim so keen to get into the Temple that they sleep on the doorstep.33

During the Exile, God’s people discovered his universal nature; he was with them in exile, even though they did not feel able to sing his songs in a strange land.34 Through his prophet, God instructed them to settle and be good citizens and bless the place where they dwelled.35 However, both Jeremiah and Jesus also tackled the false hope God’s people put in the physical place of the Temple – the belief that destruction could not come upon them whilst the Temple stood. Jeremiah 6 is a blistering rebuke for those whose faith is in Jerusalem, rather than God. Jesus warns of the destruction of the Temple.36 Perhaps that false hope is why, ultimately, it had to go? After the Ascension, with the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost and the new understanding of both God’s people and God’s temple, the focus on place shifted to fulfilling the Great Commission, which emphasises that heaven and Earth are within Jesus’ remit and that rather than gathering folk to one place to find God, he himself would go with them to the ends of the Earth as they proclaimed him.37 By his Spirit, God could be encountered anywhere. No one place was more holy than another.

To carry the logic of divine omnipresence one step further, as the Protestants did in the sixteenth century, there can be no especially holy places, because God is everywhere, equally, in the hearts of the just. Pilgrimage loses any earthbound, geographical focus and becomes a metaphor for the journey through life toward a heavenly goal. This logic has a certain intellectual elegance, but it strips the earth of sanctity and leaves us no place truly sacred to go during our earthly sojourn.

 

–from Mary Lee Nolan and Sidney Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe, reissue (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) pp. 337-338.

Yet even as Christians, we recognise that some places seem to aid our encountering of God, our meeting with him. The Celtic Church referred to these as ‘thin places’38 and they were often, although not always, marginal places – islands, wells, caves or cliffs.39 Somehow, the physical liminality of a geographic place invites within us a spiritual liminality – an openness to the Spirit that can be harder to experience in busier, more populated places. Wynn discusses reasons why liminal places may be spiritually important.40 Similarly in the East, early saints frequently went to isolated places – the desert, a mountain – to wrestle spiritually and learn to know and love God.41 Others went to learn from them42 and in both East and West a parallel form of monastic community grew – with collections of cells enabling solitude and companionship. Saint Cuthbert famously separated himself from the other monks for times of retreat on a small island off Lindisfarne.43 There was also a mendicant tradition, although charlatans discredited this practice to the point where Benedict wrote stability into his Rule44 and later the church made mendicant monks illegal,45 although this form of pilgrimage remained within Orthodox practice.46

Historically, there were many reasons for going on pilgrimage to sites frequently connected to saints or healing miracles.47 Whilst the journey was important, arrival at a place where God had acted and might act again was more important.48  Asking for healing at a place where others had been healed,49 or being able to walk in the places where Jesus had walked, helped the pilgrim to ‘plug in’ to a spiritual reality that seemed less accessible at home. 

Post-Reformation, pilgrimage remained popular in Catholic areas of Europe,50 but declined elsewhere.  Indeed, for a time, pilgrimage was illegal in England and Wales,51 though the site at Holywell continued to be visited.52 Religious wars saw a decline in, although not the cessation of, pilgrimage in Europe.53 As a more metaphorical understanding of pilgrimage took hold particularly amongst Protestants, there was less imperative to actually go on pilgrimage, although Coleman and Eade suggest ‘It is surely too limiting a perspective to see Protestantism as transposing sanctified travel on to a purely metaphorical plane.’54  Luther had said that pilgrimage could be of value if done rightly, but also said it was better for a man to stay at home and use the money to help his neighbour!55

Through the twentieth century, there was a rise in Christian pilgrimage to traditional European sites, which Inge suggests restores the importance of “place” denied by the Reformation,56 and also a rise in religious tourism to the Holy Land, which may have been helped by relative cheapness of flights, meaning a tour can be done in weeks rather than months or years. Talking with a frail, elderly French woman in Santiago, she explained how upset she was that in Spain she was not perceived as a proper pilgrim because she was travelling by coach. With a group of other elderly or ill Catholics, she was visiting Santiago, Fatima and Lourdes. We agreed that pilgrimage was about the heart motivation,57 not the form of travel. I hope for her sake that her coach party spent time as a travelling community worshipping together and encouraging each other. If not, I do feel she would have missed out on something important. As Jones says, ‘En route, many modern-day pilgrims feel the urge to open up their hearts to fellow travellers…and share at a deep level some troubling issue from the past.’58 Those we travel with should be one of the means through which God speaks to us. 

Another element is the return home; both we and those left behind have been changed59 and how we re-connect is important.  Every journey ends and both the destination and the partings we make reveal that we are not yet home, that there is more journeying to happen, whether physically or spiritually, practically or metaphorically. Rieger says ‘This journey ultimately points us to our true home, which is found at last where we least expect it: in the presence of God, who is often encountered in special ways in the unfamiliar’.60 Indeed, until the new heavens and the new earth come into being, every arrival and departure is going to be ultimately dissatisfying. Whilst Revelation is written in symbolic imagery and metaphorical language, there is still a great deal of description of the city where one day God will dwell with his people, not least appearance, size and content – no Temple, a river, trees and a throne, 61 and we will not feel truly at home until we live in that city.62

Action

Perhaps individually, the biggest lesson to learn is about paying attention to detail; even when life at home is fast, to deliberately slow the pace and look, rather than glance at what is going on, at who I am with, at where I am and am going. I once heard love described as ‘seeing someone as they really are’63 and if our two greatest commands revolve around love,64 then taking time to really see is important. Slowing life down and paying attention to each step, being more intentional about putting in time – time to invest in others, time to reflect and take stock of my own life, time to get away quietly as Jesus did to purely be with God65 – may be the perfect complement to the small weaving in of spiritual elements relating to physical action mentioned in the last chapter.

 A second lesson may be about dealing with disappointment. ‘No one is good, except God alone’,66 so it is inevitable that people will fail, or let us down or not live up to our expectations. If we can learn to hold our expectations loosely and remember that we are all dust, perhaps the sting of disappointment will not be so great. Similarly, our planet is very beautiful, but it is no longer Eden and not yet recreated. Developing the pilgrim attitude of gratitude, may we not learn to enjoy ‘our place’ despite its imperfections? To recognise beauty and creativity in the unexpected places – the sun glinting on dew in a cobweb, the delicate alpine flower that has established itself in an old brick wall, the smile of joy on a pensioner’s face as she feels the sunlight? Will learning to see, not just look, fill our hearts with small delights that overcome bigger disappointments? 

Some might suggest that in the light of our current pilgrim sojourner state we should learn to hold everything – friends, job, home, possessions, health – so loosely that their loss or lack of meeting our expectations will no longer hurt or disappoint us,67 but I believe that would make us less than human. Rolheiser posits that ‘unless we risk the hurt of loss, we will never have any form of intimate friendship.’68 We are whole beings – physical, mental, spiritual, emotional – and to deny any aspect of that is to diminish ourselves. Others may suggest that to avoid disappointment, we should have low expectations, but if Jesus came to give us “life to the max”,69 then this again diminishes us.

For the church, we need to help people escape the false label that our faith is about “pie in the sky when you die”. We indeed have an eschatological hope, and long for it, but our life in the here and now should be rich and varied and fulfilling, within the limits of not being home yet. Churches must look at what and how we are feeding the flock. Are we truly “companions on the road”? If not, how do we help each other to truly see one another and become faithful companions?

Much preaching is aimed at individuals within congregations, rather than the congregation collectively. Challenges are about personal practice, personal decisions or personal relationships with God, rather than addressing how “we” live, how “we” decide or how “we” relate to each other and God. We have little communal sense of service or purpose; even in small congregations, people fall into the habit of expecting particular people to do particular tasks, even if there are no formal ministry teams. Even in my church of fifteen, one pair always wash up. Three ladies always cook. The same woman always prepares communion. Two or three people always move furniture. Two others always volunteer to help deliver invitations. There is nothing wrong with people recognising and using their skills and gifts, unless they become so defined by an activity, that it becomes a straight-jacket hindering their growth or development. Our teaching needs to reflect our communal identity as well as personal issues and we need to learn the lessons of slowing down, of supporting each other, of truly seeing each other as we are, whilst recognising that we too are unfinished works of God and may well be people who are causing disappointment to others. We are all on the journey to fully realized resurrection life and it would be healthy and wise for every member of the body to remember this.

Endnotes

1. Luigi Tomasi, ‘Homo Viator: From pilgrimage to religious tourism via the journey’ in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The social and cultural economics of piety Religion in the Age of Transformation, ed. by William H. Swatos, Luigi Tomasi and William H. Swatos Jr.  (Westport: Praeger, 2002) 1-24 (p.3).
2. Simon Coleman and John Eade, Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in motion (Routledge: London, 2004) p.2, criticise Turner and Turner for their focus on site rather than journey, but possibly the Turners were reflecting the experiences of pilgrims they had observed and interviewed.
3. Although these daytime flying moths are moving into the UK as our climate gets warmer, at that time they were confined to mainland Europe.
4. Sheila Pritchard, The Lost Art of Meditation: Deepening your prayer life (Scripture Union: Bletchley, 2003) p.63.
5. Wooden, shoulder height walking sticks.
6. Many of the New Age walkers spent time in the cathedral and even attended the Pilgrim Mass.

* The office has now been moved to a side street away from the Cathedral

7. If you cannot satisfy them that you have had a spiritual experience whilst walking, you will not be granted a Compostella, even if you have satisfied the distance requirement (100 Km, for walkers).
8. Originally, there was need for such a large censer because of the smell of the pilgrims, despite the tradition of stopping seven kilometres outside Santiago to wash in the river at the delightfully named Lavacola (literally, “wash arse”).
9. The coast is a two or three day walk from Santiago. Only a minority of pilgrims walk the additional route.
10. I coined that phrase before I knew the NIV translation of Ps. 84:5 that now adorns my wall.
11. On a practical note, I was also not sure whether my travel insurance would cover me, as I went to France with a known injury.
12. Clift and Clift dedicate chapter five to ‘Secular and Patriotic Pilgrimages’ pp. 88-110. Clift, Jean Dalby and Wallace B. Clift, The Archetype of Pilgrimage: Outer action with inner meaning, New edn (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004) First published 1996
13. In Greece, these often take the form of a miniature church building.
14. BBC news website <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18204402> [accessed 10/06/14]. This story highlights one such memorial.
15. Although remembrance of a death is integral to one of the few sacraments Baptists celebrate, along with all the other orthodox denominations.
16. Many of the academic books in the bibliography, with sociological or ethnographic authors, study pilgrimage from a wide variety of faith perspectives.
17. Anna Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative pilgrimage and ritual creativity at Catholic shrines in France (OUP: Oxford, 2012), writes about three New Age/Neo-Pagan groups interested in Mary Magdalene.
18. Secular society uses the word more widely than that; for example before the 2012 Olympics the BBC described as a pilgrimage a walk across Wales done by artists within the Cultural Olympiad. BBC news website <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-18465418> [accessed June 2012, re-accessed 15/06/14].  
19. Sarah Bingham, review of Anna Fedele, Seeking Mary Magdalene, European Journal of Theology, XXII (2013):2 pp. 188-189.
20. John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place (Ashgate Publishing: Aldershot, 2003) (Chapter 2, pp. 33-58).
21. Ps. 24:1.
22. Gen. 12:1.
23. Gen. 18:17-19.
24. Gen. 18:1.
25. Ex. 3.
26. Gen. 32:24-30.
27. Ex. 19:16-20
28. Ex. 13:21-22.
29. Neh. 9:21.
30. These four are Psalms 123, 127, 130 and 131.
31. Dangers are found in Psalms 121 and 124, and the Lord’s protection is a blessing through Ps. 121.
32. Psalms 122 and 132 most obviously, though Ps. 126 may be making a lateral reference to the harvest pilgrimage in the mention of the harvest. 
33. Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 60-150: A Commentary trans. by Hilton C. Oswald (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989) p. 170.
34. Ps. 137:1-4.
35. Jeremiah 29:7.
36. Matt. 24:1-2.
37. Matt. 28:18-20.
38. Inge pp.79-80 discusses ‘thin places’ as sites where people have repeatedly had an encounter with the Holy Spirit.
39. Cintra Pemberton, Soulfaring: Celtic pilgrimage then and now (London: SPCK, 1999) covers a wide range of historical Celtic pilgrimage sites.  
40. Mark R. Wynn, Faith and Place: An essay in embodied religious epistemology (OUP: Oxford, 2009) pp.20-22.
41. D.L. Okholm, ‘Asceticism’, in New Dictionary of Christian Ethics, ed. by Atkinson and Field, pp. 173-174, discusses the positive rôle of asceticism without specific mention to the Desert Fathers.
42. William H. Swatos, Luigi Tomasi and William H. Swatos Jr. (Eds) From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The social and cultural economics of piety religion in the age of transformation, (Westport: Praeger, 2002), p. 32.
43. Mary Low, St. Cuthbert’s Way: A pilgrim’s companion (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 1999) p.155.
44. Swatos, Tomasi and Swatos, p.44.
45. Swatos, Tomasi and Swatos, p.45.
46. Being famously introduced into Western consciousness through the book The Way of a Pilgrim, first published in England in 1930. Current editions include a translation by R.M. French with a new introduction (London: Triangle, 1972).
47. Swatos, Tomasi and Swatos, Cliff and Cliff and Nolan and Nolan all give good overviews on pilgrimage.
48. Welch suggests this may no longer be true, p.122. Welch, Sally, Making a Pilgrimage (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2009)
49. Welch, p.83.
50. Nolan and Nolan, p.111-112. 
51. James Harpur, Sacred Tracks: Two thousand years of Christian pilgrimage (Francis Lincoln: London, 2002) details Tudor instructions for clergy to preach against pilgrimage p. 135.
52. <http://www.saintwinefrideswell.com/about-the-well/4569900184> [accessed 16/06/14].
53. Harpur, p.137.
54. Coleman and Eade, p.50. 
55. Martin Luther, ‘Lectures on Titus, 1527’ in Luther’s Works 29: Lectures on Titus, Philemon, and Hebrews trans. by Jaroslav Pelikan  ed. by Jaroslav Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1968) p.55.
56. Inge, p. 102.
57. Clift and Clift offer a comprehensive set of spiritual motivations for making a pilgrimage. Chapter 3, pp. 42-62.
58. Andrew Jones, Pilgrimage: The journey to remembering our story (Abingdon: Bible Reading Fellowship, 2011) p.65.
59. Welch, p.125.
60. Joerg Rieger, Traveling, Christian Explorations of Daily Living (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011) p.56. (US spelling).
61. (Rev. 21 -22).
62. McGrath, The Journey: A pilgrim in the lands of the spirit (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999) pp.24-25.
63. Although the author quoted here is not my original source, I suspect the preacher who I heard say it got it from here, although he may have done so unwittingly: <http://www.searchquotes.com/quotes/author/Elias_Atienza/> [accessed 16/06/14].
64. Matt. 22:37-40, quoting Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19:18.
65. Mark 1:35.
66. Mark 10:18.
67. This is similar to the Buddhist teaching of ‘detachment’. <http://www.dalailama.com/teachings/training-the-mind/verse-2> [accessed 16/06/14].
68. Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart (London: Spire, 1988). Originally published (Denville: Dimension Books, 1979) p. 153.
69. My modern paraphrase of John 10:10.