Becoming More Grounded: The Enduring Appeal of Ancient Pilgrimage for the Contemporary Seeker

Abstract

This article builds on a previous essay and arises from research carried out between the summer of 2018 and the spring of 2020 among pilgrims who had participated in the Camino de Santiago in northwestern Spain and St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg in the northwest of Ireland. Research focused on embodied experience in relation to pilgrim motivation, groundedness and the enduring power of sacred travel as ritual. Convergent considerations about psychology, theology and pilgrimage studies were deployed as lenses of analysis of the pilgrims’ experience. The findings brought clarity in relation to pilgrims’ motivations and the subsequent satiation experienced as they became more grounded in relation to the physical rituals of the pilgrimage. The experience of full-blooded, fleshy embodiment, the analysis suggests, has considerable psychological dividend and is, the discussion argues, of theological significance, particularly from the perspective of Incarnation. As pilgrimage scholars have noted, a refreshing outcome of 21st Century research is the way in which it has been lifted out of the ‘narrow fields of religious or medieval studies’ and yet the analysis of this study suggests that we not dismiss the enduring possibility of religious quest as a still traceable element in the experience of contemporary pilgrimage.

1. Introduction

The steep rise of interest in pilgrimage in the 21st Century has been noted by many scholars (Bailey 2022; Reader 2007) and includes a significant surge of interest in what I would term more ancient forms of pilgrimage. By ancient pilgrimage I mean those established during the first millennium of Christendom and boasting a continuous lifeline of pilgrim engagement since then. This research was carried out among 2018 and 2019 pilgrims on two such ancient pilgrimages, one to a small, remote island on Lough Derg in County Donegal in the northwest of Ireland and the other, perhaps currently more well known, that of walking the routes of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Both pilgrimages involve strongly physical challenges, and the desire of these pilgrims for such an experience was a particular focus of the research, hence the experience of embodiment and how that experience was interpreted became a critical focus of the research questions. The research approach was interdisciplinary and included psychology, (in particular, the psychology of the body), Christian theology (in particular, theological anthropology), and the intersection of these older (to significantly varying degrees) forms of knowledge with the newer genre of pilgrimage studies. A phenomenological analysis which included both psychological and theological hermeneutics was the research method adopted and will be described in more detail below. The findings were grouped under five main themes—the summoned seeker; becoming more grounded; ritualizing with intent and contentment; meeting the pilgrim other; and, finally, becoming a more expanded, more whole person.

These findings required not only a review of the contested definitions and descriptions of pilgrimage found in the recent and contemporary literature; they also brought new clarity about what remains essential for the contemporary seeker in terms of the enduring appeal of sacred travel. In a previous essay, I conducted such a discursive review of the variety and contrariety of these contemporary definitions, and it included a new description and definition of pilgrimage, both of which endeavored to reflect the findings that had emerged from the data (King 2023). Building on this new description and definition of pilgrimage, this article will focus on the findings themselves in a bid to add further thoughtful reflection to the scholarly research on contemporary pilgrimage experience. As a preliminary to the beginnings of my discussion on findings, let me first introduce the key aspects of my research methodology.

2. Navigating Pilgrim Territory—The Methodology

2.1. The Context

In adopting a research methodology, I sought to stay close to the lived experience of the pilgrims and give prominence to their voice in the articulation of that experience. In addition, I sought to review the data through both a psychological and theological lens and to further build my interpretive framework by including what is sometimes called the paradigmatic shift of contemporary pilgrimage scholarship. That shift Collins-Kreiner (2010) describes as a discrepancy ‘between the old paradigm predicated on the assumption that religious elements lie at the core of pilgrimage’ and an alternative approach which acknowledges the shifting boundaries between religious and secular, between tourist and pilgrim and other social identities and the variety of negotiations of meaning (ibid., p. 441). In its desire for a particular mix of an interdisciplinary approach to the research, my methodology did not fit easily into either paradigm. I was concerned not to consign all possible religious motivation for contemporary pilgrimage as ‘old paradigm’ and yet bring a freshness to the enquiry that fully acknowledges the post-modernist context of the pilgrimage research conversation. I pared back my research questions to two:

• How do pilgrims both embody and interpret their pilgrimage?
• How do psychology and theology, in particular, interpret that experience?

Twenty pilgrims who had completed a pilgrimage to either Lough Derg or along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela during 2018 or 2019 became participants in the formal study and a quarter of those had experienced both pilgrimages. These two pilgrimages, which vastly differ in terms of duration, spirituality, and focus, both share devotion to two of the major Saints of the first millennium of Christianity—St. Patrick in Lough Derg and St. James for the Camino. Tradition has it that St Patrick is believed to have established the first monastic site on one of the islands of Lough Derg in the 5th Century (See Conway 2016). The hermit Pelayo, led by a vision of celestial light and music (hence the ‘field of stars’ of Compostela), is believed to have found the remains of St. James at the site of the current Cathedral in the 9th Century (See Cunningham 2018). Such historical provenance in regard to both sacred places, (the basis for their categorization also as ‘ancient pilgrimage’), has profound importance for the contemporary pilgrim, the research indicates.

2.2. The Places of Pilgrimage and Their Physical Challenge

Given that the experience and impact of meeting the physical challenge of one or other of these pilgrimages was a strong focus of data accumulation, readers may find it helpful to understand better the basics of that challenge in both cases. Pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s purgatory on Lough Derg requires intending pilgrims to fast from midnight on the eve of their journey to Station Island. The journey, (usually by bus or car) brings intending pilgrims to a small jetty, quite literally at the end of the road beyond the nearest village, Pettigo. Pilgrims are then ferried by boat a short trip across the lake. Upon arrival, they are designated sleeping quarters and asked to remove their footwear. Pilgrims continue barefoot through all other stages of their pilgrimage until just before their return to the mainland, two days later. The cornerstone of the pilgrimage rubric involves the completion of nine “stations”. These involve repeats of a long circular-pattern prayer around six of what are called penitential beds, (four of these are remnants of monastic hermitages called beehive huts1), as well as other circular contemplative walking around the perimeter of the Basilica with notable stops at revered points around the site. This sequence of lengthy prayers is accompanied by ritual gestures of kneeling, sacred touching, kissing, upright prostration, and walking movement and concludes with a final prayer and blessing of lake water. Each station takes up to one and a half hours and most can be performed at the pilgrim’s own pace and according to their preference. They are performed outdoors, at the mercy of the elements, except for four stations which are completed in the Basilica, in unison with other pilgrims, during an all-night vigil on the first night on the pilgrimage. Other elements of the pilgrimage include attendance at morning and evening Mass2, an opportunity to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation (or Confession, as it is sometimes called) and private prayer in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel (optional). Fasting is interrupted once a day when pilgrims can have tea or coffee, dry toast or oatmeal biscuits. Water and the ‘Lough Derg Soup’ (boiled water with salt and pepper) are available at any time in the ‘Break Room’. This room also provides some shelter when weather conditions are harsh between stations. Fasting continues until the midnight of the day on which pilgrims depart the island. Such detail may help us to understand why this potent mix of fasting, ritual movement and prayer and sleep deprivation means that Lough Derg is considered still, ‘the hardest pilgrimage in Christendom’.3

The structured set of devotional exercises performed on the island in a relatively small physical space is in stark contrast to the requirements of the Camino de Santiago whose predominant rubric is to walk long distances (or cycle or horse-ride) across an immense landscape which may include traversing several countries depending on your starting point. For, although ‘the Camino’ as it is affectionately called, may sound like a singular pathway, it is in fact a network of many routes with starting points all over Europe, including from Ireland at St. James’ Gate, Dublin. As pilgrims walk (or cycle/ride), their focused destination is the Shrine of St James in the Cathedral of Santiago and/or its large exterior plaza. After a night or two in the famous pilgrimage city, some will re-enact a centuries old tradition of continuing their pilgrim walk onwards to Finisterre/Fisterre, which rather fittingly translates to “at the end of the world”.

Whilst a small proportion of contemporary pilgrims start their pilgrimages at one or other of the pan-European points, the most popular contemporary route is the Camino Frances, from St. Jean Pied de Port at the base of the Pyrenees in France, a route of some 850 km which may take 4–6 weeks to walk depending on pace, level of fitness and occurrence of injury. Pilgrimage officials in Santiago city give their coveted seal of approval, the ‘Credencial’, to pilgrims who have completed a verified 100 km walk, i.e., a pilgrim passport stamped daily by Cafés/Churches along the chosen route, (200 km for cycling). Accordingly, the final 100 km into the city of Santiago may be experienced as the busiest section of the pilgrimage route in terms of numbers of pilgrims.

2.3. The Research Process

The curiosities of my investigation were the embodied experience of the pilgrims, the meaning of that embodiment for them, and how their interpretation resonated (or not) with particular domains of theology and psychology. Theology is concerned with questions and concerns of ultimate meaning and psychology is concerned with the meaning of human experience and behaviour. Given that I was asking questions of meaning, the investigative research method I chose needed to be adequate for the task.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological view of the human body (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012) became important as I reviewed the relevant literature pertaining to my research, as did theologians, sociologists and body psychologists who brought such a phenomenological lens to their own domains and their discussions of the human body. As well as a genre of philosophical discourse, phenomenology has also become an important horizon for research methodologies, particularly so in the human sciences. Phenomenology’s appropriateness to my research inquiry was fitting, as Spinelli summaries, because it ‘deals with the attempt to understand more adequately the human condition as it manifests itself in lived, concrete, experience’ (Spinelli 2005, p. 131). In mainstream psychological research, the method has been further refined and clarified by Eatough & Smith and newly named Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, or IPA (Eatough and Smith 2017). IPA, the authors say, is concerned with the detailed examination of particulars, first providing an in-depth account of each case before moving to look at patterns of convergence and divergence across cases. The method is concerned with experience, they emphasize, not as in ‘the contents of the private mind but rather the concern-full involvement by situated participants’ (ibid., p. 193). Research participants are considered ‘agents who participate in a meaningful world’, and such experience of participation increases their sense of ‘participational-agency’ in the overall process (ibid).

Given the centrality of both experience and interpretation to my research questions, it was imperative that they also had a valued provenance in my research method. In deploying an interpretivist perspective, I worked upon the assumption that the interpretation of my research participants, and indeed others whom I would read and quote, would be the foundation upon which I constructed concepts or any new knowledge. It seemed to me that the strength of the phenomenological method was its capacity to handle the ever-present complexity of human experience4. I was mindful also of one of the main limitations of the method, as articulated by Bowe & Sloan, when they acknowledge that it is simply ‘hard to get it right’ (Bowe and Sloan 2014), given that there are so many possibilities when faced with the text from research participants and their voiced experience. The task of developing the data thematically and how to know what to give attention to can be challenging, they suggest, and this concurs with my personal experience. One of the ways of addressing such a challenge was to be as transparent as possible about my own biases and history as ‘the brought researcher’ and recognize that, in qualitative research, as a researcher, I become an instrument in the research process (Berry 2018). What some researchers call reflexivity—‘the capacity of the researcher to acknowledge how their own experiences and contexts inform the process and outcome of enquiry’ (ibid., p. 207)—therefore became a critical tool for me. As Berry adds, rather than being ‘an impersonal voice commenting on the stories of others’ (ibid., p. 208), I worked from the perspective that these pilgrims were co-constructing knowledge with me in three main ways: by agreeing to be interviewed in the first place, by their willingness to reflect on and interpret their own experience and by permitting their reflections to become part of my ongoing attempt to co-construct further layers of data. Hence, my research process was of a deeply relational nature and has been textured by many influences, personal, professional, and contextual. It included personal experience of both pilgrimages. I found the distinction made by many feminist theology researchers between data gathering and data construction a most helpful one in describing this important dimension of the research process (Slee et al. 2018). This distinction, it seems to me, honours the fact that the interviewees’ engagement with me and the quality of their recollections became and remain an integral and essential part of any insights, new definitions, or conclusions I have subsequently been able to come to and in turn now offer onwards to others.

2.4. Research Instruments

The format most amenable to such a process of data construction was the semi-structured interview, which focused on encouraging my research participants to recall and recount specific memories and tell their story of pilgrimage in a dialogical way. It necessarily involved some retrospective interviewing, a tried and trusted method in the qualitative research arena, (Flick 2009, pp. 158, 194), as opposed to immersive interviews, which are carried out while pilgrims are on pilgrimage alongside the pilgrimage scholar, and which other pilgrimage researchers have done to positive effect. (See for example, Slavin 2003).

Given that the overall research question was particularly focused on the multifaceted embodied experience of pilgrimage, the interview questions were crafted in such a way as to elicit participants’ reflections on all aspects of the physicality of their experience. These questions were embedded into a longer script of questions which had opening, mid-way, and concluding phases but asked in a open-ended way so that participants could elaborate on these suggested aspects or self-generated aspects arising from their experience. (See Figure 1 below)

2.5. Research Participants

The research process and my wider investigations resulted in meeting upwards of sixty intending or recent pilgrims over the two or so years of data gathering. These meetings occurred sometimes in groups and more frequently in one-to-one settings and included a number that were unplanned and informal. Some meetings were also held with members of the Staff Team on Lough Derg. Finally, twenty pilgrims agreed to become part of the formal in-depth interview process, which met the criteria of at least three characteristics of ‘purposive sampling’; participants represented fairly typical contemporary pilgrims but yet with a measure of diversity and included what researchers call ‘a critical case’, a sub-group whose participation makes for greater clarity of some aspect of the study (Flick 2009, p. 122). In this case, that critical case sub-group were the four pilgrims who had completed both pilgrimages. The limitations of the sample included its small size, (particularly in relation to the number who made the Camino pilgrimage in those same years) and a racial variation of only three. The other characteristics of the sample, including gender and the number of new or repeat pilgrims, are depicted in

Table 1. Abbreviated details of the research participant group.

	Participants	Camino	Lough Derg	Both	Repeat Pilgrim
Male	11	2	6	3	9
Female	9	5	2	2	8
Total	20	7	8	5	17

below. Ethical approval was granted by MIREC (A18-037), the Research Ethics Commission of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, and the research process was supervised by the Theology Department of the same college.

3. Analysis

3.1. Data Reduction and Knowledge Construction

The process of constructing knowledge from experience mediated by qualitative research is ‘a creative and inventive one’ (ibid. 2009, p. 79). Flick draws on Ricœuer’s three stages of mimesis to illustrate the movement we humans engage in to create knowledge, beginning with our tactile kinetic experiences in and of the world (in this case walking/doing the pilgrimage), through our symbolized representations of that experience in language (the semi-structured interview), eventually leading to cultural artifacts and/or writing (the original thesis/this article). He further illustrates this through the useful diagram below (Figure 2) (Flick 2009, p. 78).

The twenty interviews, transcribed by me personally, yielded a rich and significant amount of raw data, documents of between twelve and twenty pages each. A process of data reduction was assisted by using QSR Nvivo through which a first rough draft of codes was secured. This draft required a further winnowing process, and given that grounded theory is rooted in phenomenology, its rigors were useful in this second stage, particularly that movement from ‘open codes’, through the stages of ‘focused codes’ and then ‘axial codes’, leading finally to the greater clarity of the sought outcome, ‘theoretical codes’. Using snippets of text from the raw data of this pilgrimage research, an example of this movement is illustrated in

Table 2. From codes to concepts.

Initial Codes (Initial Analysis)	Focused Codes (Recoding More Frequent Themes (28)	Axial Codes (Making Connections)	Categories of (Embodied Experience of Pilgrims (5)
Doing it for my grandmother/Son/new baby Doing it with…	For the other…	Significance of close relationships in motivation to do pilgrimage	The summoned seeker
Something had been niggling me to do it for a while.. and then I heard that…	Changes in personal situation (or a Significant other)	Processing transitions/life events	The summoned seeker
Going barefoot The weather/the beauty	How being outdoors was experienced	The bodied self/the embodied self Word Made Flesh The Incarnated Body	Becoming more grounded
Sore knees, thought I was fit, blisters, bites, injuries	Physical challenges	The vulnerable/resilient body/the body familiar with suffering	Becoming more grounded

below. Theorists and research practitioners who were a helpful resource for this phase included Tarozzi (2020), Denzin and Lincoln (2011) and, again, Flick (2009).

3.2. Inserting a Hermeneutical Spiral

A third stage, given my interest in theological interpretation, was aided by what theologians have termed ‘the hermeneutical spiral’. Hermeneutics, the name given to the theory of interpretation, concerns, as Jeanrond clarifies helpfully, ‘the relationship between two realms, the realms of a text (in my case research data and the interpretive texts of others) or a work of art on one hand and the people who wish to understand it on the other’ (Jeanrond 1994, p. 1). As he points out, however, ‘understanding is not an automatic and unproblematic exercise’, but is rather ‘circular and spiral in nature and demands our active participation in recreating text’ (ibid., p. 2). Jeanrond identified and named the dimensions of this spiral of gaining understanding, which I have illustrated below (Figure 3).

Paying attention to such dimensions in constructing an interpretive analysis of my research participants’ experience required sustained attention to a view of theological hermeneutics as a collaborative and creative framework rather than an isolated, solitary act, as philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan avidly promoted in the latter stages of the development of what became known as his Lonergan method (See Coehlo 2012). Such collaboration was achieved firstly through rigorous conversation in the analysis stages with my supervisors and the wider departments of psychology and theology in which they worked. My moving towards identifying emergent patterns (or ‘an emergent probability’, as Lonergan would have termed it) from the pilgrimage research, the ultimate purpose of such methods of investigation, (ibid., p. 196) was therefore a multivalent, interdisciplinary endeavour. These three interconnecting stages beginning with data reduction, through developing concepts derived from that first draft of rough codes using the grounded theory method and, finally, inserting the winnowed data into a psychological and theological conversation contained by a hermeneutical spiral, combined, summarize my analysis process (a more detailed outline supplemented by literature reviews of the core epistemological underpinnings is available in the full text of the doctoral thesis, see (King 2021).

4. Research Findings

Five major patterns, (the theoretical codes), emerged from these layers of analysis of pilgrimage experience, and were given the following theme titles:

The summoned seeker

Becoming more grounded

Ritualizing with intent and contentment

Meeting the pilgrim other

Becoming a more expanded, more whole person

The order in which I came to list these themes became more important as the analysis progressed. It could be said to reflect something of the macro-movement of pilgrims, from the early stages of motivation to make a pilgrimage, (the summoning), through the three critical phases of the pilgrimage process, (becoming more grounded, ritualizing with intent, and meeting other pilgrims), and in a final movement towards a measure of transformation (becoming a more whole, more expanded person). The ‘measure’—that is, the degree and potency of such personal change—the findings would suggest, could be mapped on a spectrum from ‘significant to life-changing’.

In what follows I will flesh out each theme a little more, and I include excerpts from the research participant interviews, each identified by their pseudonym in italics.

4.1. The Summoned Seeker

The first pattern among the findings relates to the variety of motivations enumerated by contemporary pilgrims who made the decision to immerse themselves in these two ancient processes of pilgrimage. In the analysis of these motivations, a pattern of ‘being summoned’ emerged, sometimes summoned from within the pilgrim like a long-burning desire that grew stronger over time, at other times inspired by external circumstances such as a major life transition, including experiences of grief and trauma. The idea of being summoned was first suggested by LeSueur when he noted that ‘people who go on pilgrimage often say that their decision was, in some way, unusual—an inner summons that was heard’ (LeSueur 2018, p. 22).

For eighteen of the research study participants, their motivation, for example, included some measure of influence from a close relationship with others, as John put it:

I was blessed with good friends who were huge pilgrim people. One of them, Paddy, walked from his home in County Tipperary (Ireland) all the way to Compostela and he always encouraged me to think about it. His was the inspiration which inspired me.

For half of the participants, a curiosity about whether they would be up to the reputed physical challenge of the pilgrimage was a summoning factor, and for others, the attractiveness of long days of walking over an extended period and being outdoors in the fresh air, often in the hope of a ‘digital detox’ or ‘a relief from work and family stress’, were all among the galvanizing motives. Such factors I gathered under a sub-theme ‘summoned by and in the body’. The onset of a major life transition twinned with the possibility of processing it more fully was a factor in the summoning for ten of the participants. As Liam recalls,

Many things were coming to an end, a period of study and my most recent appointment. My mother had died so yes, many endings. I had a strong sense of taking time and space for myself and having an opportunity to do the Camino in a sustained way on my own provided just that, so yes all that was there in my motivations.

Mislav acknowledges that it is ‘difficult to articulate exactly what drew him so strongly to the Camino’, but added

I do know that it was a period in my life where I was definitely in a highly depressed stage and you know, total darkness in my life, with no perspective, no hope and very low self-esteem. I felt a total failure, a nobody … and there was something in the idea of the Camino that offered possible comfort, something that might break the mould of my mental framework, even if I didn’t know for sure if I could walk those kind of distances.

A sense of being summoned by an explicitly spiritual or religious intent was articulated by a number of participants, although it was notably stronger in relation to pilgrims who went to Lough Derg. Liam, one of the sub-group who had made both pilgrimages, confessed that his motivation to go to Lough Derg was sourced in a promise he had made to a good friend that ‘if her extremely ill sister survived a critical illness’, they would ‘do Lough Derg together in thanksgiving’. Another, Shannon, hoped that going to Lough Derg would help her ‘get her faith back’. She continues,

I had been quite religious and deeply so as a child and teenager but then I completely lost it. So, I was trying to get it back in a way, trying to rekindle the flame of my faith and keep it burning. And I thought if there is one place that might help me do that, it is Lough Derg.

Gabrielle, also a member of the sub-group who had experienced both pilgrimages, spoke of her attraction to,

… the whole idea of it, the idea of being a pilgrim. Reading about the experiences of others, the sense of reflective time and alone time, it was all so very appealing to me.

The final layer among the variables of being summoned was the prior experience of pilgrimage. This phenomenon of the repeat pilgrim is a strong one in both pilgrimages researched here and pilgrim scholars have endeavoured to articulate what contributes to this pattern. Coleman, for example, wonders if, in contrast to the Turnerian idea of pilgrimage as a movement away from the everyday, such ‘self-conscious repetitions’ might be about ‘making the extraordinary, ordinary’ (Coleman 2000, p. 156; see also Badone 2014). Thomas echoes this conscious motivation when he says,

And I had known from the time I had walked the Camino before what an amazing feeling it was going to be and what it was going to do for me on so many levels. And I knew that I needed something like that rather than say a packaged holiday.

Pilgrims, the research reveals then, are summoned to go on pilgrimage by an intermingling of motivations arising from their lived experience of the world, the witness/encouragement of others, spiritual motivation and recent challenging or life-changing personal experiences, some of which would benefit, they intuited, from a physical and psychological processing of these transitions.

Once summoned, whether from within or without, the pilgrim steps into the complex and potent world of their pilgrimage of choice, what I have previously described as an invariably interconnected process of many elements, including place, location, engendering story, ritual and movement, to name a few.5

4.2. Becoming More Grounded

Arriving at the distillation ‘becoming more grounded’ in the analysis process described above, helped me to collate a dense concentration of experiences and reflections cited by the research participants. It also helped to articulate something quite central about the quality of the whole pilgrimage experience as described by those interviewed from both pilgrimage sites. Before naming that ‘something central’ and given the significance of this embodied state of groundedness to the research questions, it is important to illustrate further the kaleidoscope of sub-themes which contribute to it (See Figure 4 below).

The brevity of the Lough Derg pilgrimage for example and the intensity of physical exertion involved in the pattern of circling the nine stations around small, even awkward physical spaces, unsheltered from the elements and combined with the deprivations of food and sleep all coalesce to lead pilgrims through an intensely physical experience. Their accounts of it underscore its potency and how unyielding the rubric is to individual human will. Teresa, for example, reflects on this and shifts with ease to an existential observation:

I sometimes wonder if that thing of taking off the shoes immediately we arrive helps everybody come to the same level … just because you’re this or you’re the other, it doesn’t matter. It really strips you to the bare essentials, that literally all you have is,—is you; it doesn’t matter about clothes or whatever, it’s down to the bare you and how you deal with it and how strong you are or not strong or whatever … and if you’re there to help someone or if somebody else there helps you. We come into the world naked and that’s how we will go out of it too.

The physical intensity of the Camino by contrast comes from the extended hours of walking and on many consecutive days. As Mislav recalls,

The second thing that amazed me and that I vividly remember were those days when my feet were aching, when I was hurting all over and the albergue for the day was still about 15 kilometres away. I couldn’t stop because it hurt. And when I walked, it hurt. And when I sat down, I hurt. And there were days when I was hungry and tired and my body was shot to pieces. And I remember thinking at the very same time … And, oh yeah, I‘m definitely doing this again!

Another important and recurring theme in the recollections of physical intensity was that of shedding and ‘being shriven to a radical simplicity’ (Whyte 2019). Camino pilgrims spoke of giving away toiletries to others as well as books and even guidebooks and all manner of things thought essential when the pilgrims had set out, sometimes reducing the load on their back to a mere four or five kilograms. The desire to live more like this endures as Thomas attests:

For a long, long time after my Camino, I tried to live like that, to carry only what is essential, to pay acute attention to the priorities, to shed myself of all that was unnecessary’

Lough Derg pilgrims do not carry luggage, but as Teresa above illustrated, they equally testified to being stripped to the bare essentials. As the physical, emotional, and psycho-spiritual challenges mount up, it is as if the pilgrim comes to a point of stark choice: surrender to what this pilgrimage process asks or continue to try and master it with fitness, determination or defiance. For most pilgrims in this study, the level of physical intensity of the process meant that at some point the decision to surrender was made for them by their body’s experience. This was well articulated by John, another of the two-site pilgrims:

‘And maybe there’s part of me that enjoys that physical challenge, but it’s not the thing- the hardest thing for me was kneeling on those stones because my knees are getting a bit wonky, you know. But there is something else about it … the word I‘d use about Lough Derg is cleansing, you know there’s a cleansing. And I think yes, it’s due to the fasting, but also maybe being out in the open and the wind and the rain and the wind blowing through you. And you’re just walking around in your bare feet and you become very grounded as you go. So that’s in a sense my image—you get into a very deep place. I suppose too it’s the concentration of your focus. And I think the same is true for the Camino, you get to that deep place too from just the constant walking, the placing of one foot in front of the other’.

When a pilgrim was able to enter as fully as possible these intense physical requirements of the pilgrimage, the dividend, overtime was found to be deeply energizing. Pilgrims found they could be more rooted in the present moment, and this groundedness in the here and now was liberating. The term ‘grounded’ has both psychological and theological resonance and is chosen with that kind of deliberateness. Firmly rooted in the lexicon of the psychological through the work of Lowen and Reich (Smith [1985] 2001), ‘grounding’ was specifically identified by the Gestalt school of therapy as that process of ‘establishing physiological connection with sensations and feelings as they ebbed and flowed (or were constricted) in the body, and, critically, being in strong contact with the ground through the legs and feet’ (White 2014). Experiencing physiological and psychological benefits such as less stress, improved sleep and a growing sense of well-being were frequently cited as the many dividends of the pilgrimage experience. Mislav, continuing onwards from his description above about how pained his body was whilst walking the Camino, describes well the struggle to articulate these almost paradoxical dividends:

… the whole positive experience of it was so strong, so powerful that it simply washed away all the pain. I didn’t mind the pain, I didn’t. I didn’t consider it significant at all because I was so heavily experiencing this positive feeling that I could not fully articulate. Possibly, I cannot even do it now. But I think that in some way, it was like walking with God, in a way.

Theologically speaking, ‘ground’ is the organic basis for life, the humus of existence and the gratuitous gift of God. The apt response of the human, the ‘ground-being’, is one of humility and gratitude. Pilgrim scholar Morinis describes pilgrimage as ‘a special going out which contrasts to the habitual staying at home’ (Morinis 1981, p. 2); we could add that in the special going out of pilgrims, they step onto the ground of ‘an elsewhere’ that has all manner of impacts upon them.

Becoming more grounded, finally, requires a surrender to the rubric of the pilgrimage, and for some, this may paradoxically mean entering temporary altered states. Robert Sibley speaks of these as ‘moments of epiphany’ and adds ‘even now, years later, they continue to reverberate in my mind, telling me that my pilgrimage is on-going and maybe even endless’ (Sibley 2010, p. 11). For one third of the pilgrims in this research, experience of such altered states, named by one pilgrim ‘deep places of another dimension’, were recounted. Lough Derg pilgrim, Fiachra, stressed straightforwardly that the rubric of Lough Derg brings him ‘to a place mentally that nowhere else and nothing else can’. Camino Pilgrim Eileen narrates her experience:

‘One day stands out in particular. I think it was near O’Cebreiro we were walking up a steep incline and if felt effortless, my backpack was comfortable and felt weightless, my legs were striding out smoothly. I felt totally in my body. I had arrived within myself, truly embodied; it was an -in-the-body experience a beautiful feeling, a freedom, a joy so intense that I can re-experience even now as I recall it to you’.

For Gabrielle, the altered state experienced on Camino was of a different hue, ‘a dark night of the soul’; she called it ‘a visitation of images, names, situations and prayer’ which continued for three to four days, during which she recounted that she made in that dark experience a profound, if painful, reckoning with her professional role as a therapist working with perpetrators and victims of child sexual abuse.

The research also suggests that a final stage of surrendering to the pilgrimage process was being able to accept, to take on, wear and embody the pilgrim identity. For ‘becoming pilgrim’ is not so much a sub-theme as a defining moment on the pilgrimage journey and is that ‘something central’ I had signalled above in my opening remarks to this section. Those who arrive at St. Patrick’s Purgatory are formally welcomed by the Prior as pilgrims. Within minutes of disembarking the bus in a town or village, along any of the Camino routes, a local may call out ‘Buen Camino’ to the traveller who might not yet have secured the straps of her backpack. Hence, at first, the identity of ‘pilgrim’ is conferred by others, and often with generosity and confidence. However, the moment of being able to confer that identity upon oneself comes somewhat later for most. Listening to the pilgrims in this study, this identity was more easily assumed when the pilgrim had become more grounded. Becoming more grounded, as the data reveal, involves a movement from preparation, through setting out, to experiencing the intense physicality, that is, a willingness to embrace both the expected and unexpected vulnerability and the suffering and pain that may come their way, doing without or doing with the bare essentials and being shriven of all the rest. These earthy elements of becoming more grounded and the spiritual challenge of assuming the identity of pilgrim are well captured by poet, David Whyte (2019, p. 11):

… remember you were given that name every day,

Along the way, you greeted as such.

Other people seemed to know you even before

You gave up being a shadow on the road.

… Pilgrim, they called you.

Pilgrim, they called you again and again.

4.3. Ritualizing with Intent and Contentment

Ritualizing with intent and contentment, the third theme arising from my research, could be said to be the pivotal theme. What I have called ‘non-ordinary gestures’ in my definition of pilgrimage (King 2023, p. 23) are expressions of ritual performativity, and ancient pilgrimages in particular offer the contemporary pilgrim any number of significant opportunities to engage in such ritual with at first intent and soon after, the research suggests, an accompanying contentment. Ritual, we might say, is the language of the symbolic and the metaphoric, and pilgrims’ commitment to the prescribed rituals of their chosen pilgrimage as well as to a variety of rituals of their own making emerged as key themes in the study. Paying attention to the body’s symbolic function and its sense-making/meaning-making performativity is an important element of phenomenological analysis.

Catherine Bell notes that although humans have engaged in ritualised activity since hunter–gatherer times, it was not until the nineteenth century that scholars began to group that range of diverse activity into what she calls ‘the rubric of ritual’ and to start theorising about ‘the origins of religion and civilisations’ (Bell [1997] 2009, p. 1). Because pilgrimage is considered one such ritual, many pilgrimage scholars elaborate extensively on ritual as part of their studies on pilgrimage. (Dubisch 1995; Dubisch and Winkelman 2015; Maddrell and Scriven 2016; Morinis 1981; Reader 2007, 2015; Scriven 2014; Taylor and Hickey 2015; Taylor 2012; Turner 1973; Turner and Turner 1978).

My analysis suggests that the shape and form of both ancient pilgrimages, (differently in each case), provides a robust ritual container for the contemporary seeker to activate their seeking and so temporarily embody the new identity of pilgrim. The ritual performativity of the pilgrimage is one of the main ways by which the pilgrims in the study placed their embodied selves at the service of their quest for meaning. Hence, it is pivotal and indeed central in the interrelationship of all five themes. This quest for meaning can include a way of connecting with the transcendent, the Sacred. As Colman, a pilgrim of both pilgrimages, recounts,

Yes, it’s the physicality of it … I think that’s part of the door of it. You know, it’s raw, physical, it’s (the Lough Derg pilgrimage) very physical. And in a way far more physical than the Camino …. But I think both of them carry the possibility of, of the body-praying as distinct from the mouth or the mind … the body. I trusted that in myself, that my walking was … it wasn’t that I had to pray while I was walking. My walking itself is prayer. And I think, the body praying helped me … it’s prayer. I don’t have to pray, if you know what I mean. You don’t have to go and say prayers. Because I‘m convinced that’s what people are doing, and at a very profound level. They’re really in a very, deep prayer. It’s very deep. And I know that it’s part of my incarnational commitment, no not commitment, I mean incarnational welcome. My welcome of that, all of physicality confirms that for me.

The public nature of that ritual activity, the witness value of its performativity before and with others is a most significant element which makes encountering other pilgrims an important further theme in these pilgrim accounts and analysis of them.

4.4. Meeting the Pilgrim Other

Levinas, a committed phenomenologist developed his philosophy ‘from a description and interpretation of the event of encountering another person’6. He offered a treatise on ‘the event of alterity, arising from ‘the call of intersubjectivity arising from the other’ (Treanor 2006). His ideas came to mind as I listened to research participants speak of the impact of other pilgrims upon them and indeed mirrors something of my personal experience of them as research participants. The more I listened to their transcripts, the more their ‘otherness’ sharpened. As Fiachra recounts,

The biggest thing I’d say about Lough Derg … sure the penance bit is one thing … but the biggest thing is the people you meet up there. There isn’t anyone you wouldn’t be impressed by. You meet the best of people, and you meet all sorts.

Some of these encounters with others were not enduring in a chronological way but were of immense importance at a deeper level. Brigid, for example, speaks of how ‘lovely an experience it is to be trusted by others who might only walk alongside you, if only for an or two hour’. She recounted the detail of one such encounter on Camino where a young husband confided in her that he was doing the pilgrimage in thanksgiving and relief for the birth of a healthy baby born just one year before. The birth was made more poignant by the fact that he and his wife had considered abortion, having been advised by medics of ‘probable, life-long disability’. She concludes,

At that moment, he imparted this very private information to me, a stranger. Just then, his phone rang. It was his wife. I just waved at him, saluted, ‘Buen Camino’ continued walking and I never met him again. And that is not the only time something like that happened.

Some pilgrims in my group of research participants were more confident in their reflections on any possible encounter with what I might call, the Ultimate Other, with God, or the ultimate meaning of the pilgrimage for them in terms of the possibility of interpreting perhaps as opportunity for encounter with the Sacred. This was a confidence not in terms of articulation but more in relation to a familiarity of reflecting on their experience of life as a journey also of faith. ‘God does not come to us as an external object’, says theologian Toma Halik, ‘but rather as a possibility, a challenge, an offer, an appeal. God comes’, he continues, ‘as a question, whether or not we are ready to accept the task to which he invites and challenges us’.7 In previous eras, both these pilgrimages would have carried a history of penitential, even punitive, intent that was legitimized by both the theology of a judgmental God and the socio-political power of religious leadership. Research participants referred at times to such history and yet endeavoured to articulate a healthier interpretation of the appeal of contemporary pilgrimage for themselves.

Lenora was clear that her pilgrimage was another manifestation of her ‘working on her spiritual life’, and she wondered what meaning the struggle of the pilgrimage might have for those who understood themselves as ‘atheist’. We can hear something of her internal discursive struggle regarding the relationship between pilgrimage and what we might call the Ultimate Other, and it seems to echo some of Halik’s understanding above.

I have faith but my biggest clarity is God does not need you to suffer to reach you, like they might have believed in the Middle Ages. Of course, we may suffer because terrible stuff happens. And it does. But I do not think God wills that. I always hated that part of Catholicism. … But I did wonder why would you do this (the Camino) if you did not believe in God, if you did not believe it had anything to do with religion. I mean some people really struggled on the Camino. Why would you do that to yourself? That was my big question. I never had an answer, and I still don’t. And soon I began asking, ‘Why am I doing this?’ And I didn’t have an answer for that either.

4.5. Becoming a More Expanded, More Whole Person

A number of pilgrimage scholars regularly describe pilgrimage as a practice with transformational intent, ‘pilgrimage is, among other things, a journey of intentional transformation’ (Terreault and Anderson 2015); ‘transformation is a key motivation/experience for both religious and secular pilgrims’ (Maddrell 2013); ‘pilgrimage is a transformative event’ (Scriven 2014), to give just three examples. The detail of how this transformation is brought about is not offered with as much clarity. Transformation, I would suggest, is a bold claim to make about any process or practice. Change is ordinarily difficult and total change, that is, that ‘one’s form, one’s very way of being is irrevocably changed’ (which is how I might translate transformation) is painfully difficult to achieve. I am hesitant to use it here, and my research participants did not describe their pilgrimage experience as ‘transformational’. However, a scan over the pilgrim utterances here indicates that this group of pilgrims experienced a number of significant impacts, some deeply altering, others liberating, affirming or galvanising. Physical rejuvenation, a sense of humanity restored, nourished by the inspiration of others, deepened gratitude for the gifts of life, appreciation for pilgrimage history, catharsis and assuagement of grief, empathy for the suffering of others, and willingness to embrace one’s own vulnerability were all among the dividend acknowledged. Instead of perhaps the metamorphosis of the caterpillar-chrysalis, that paradigmatic transformation metaphor from the natural world, the changes pilgrims describe here are more akin to a kind of ‘stretching’ of body, mind, spirit and heart. Socially, a new identity of pilgrim was at first conferred, then gradually earned, embodied and owned by the pilgrims. The ‘time-out’ from their other back-home social identities allowed for new or at least fresh perspective. We also noted that some experienced a new spiritual identity, one some of them understood as bestowed by God. Bearing this wide range of impacts in mind, the term that seemed more fitting to the data analysis here was to suggest that pilgrimage was a catalyst in becoming a more whole, more expanded person. Badone and Feldman describe the space pilgrimage inhabits as ‘a renowned place, a storied place … a distant space beyond a horizon that becomes a focus of vision and imagination, a place of desire and perhaps, transformation (Badone 2014, p. 203). It is their tentativeness about transformation that echoes my own findings alongside the fulsomeness they acknowledge in what is experienced.

This concludes my summaries of the five main thematic findings from this research. There has been some debate in pilgrimage scholarship as to whether or not contemporary pilgrims in places of ancient pilgrimage are sufficiently ‘authentic’. As veteran pilgrimage scholar George Greenia has been known to quip at pilgrimage conferences, ‘It is hard to be a pilgrim in a latte world’ (Greenia 2016, 2018). Medieval pilgrimage scholar Cunningham goes even further and distinguishes the contemporary pilgrims on Camino as “walkers” and yet confers the full honours of ‘pilgrim’ to the subjects of her medieval historical study of Camino pilgrimage. Rather than use my findings to further scrutinize the legitimacy of contemporary pilgrims, I prefer to place my findings at the service of a wider question: are contemporary pilgrims embodying something about human behaviour, desire and culture, including religious experience and culture, that we need to see more clearly, understand more deeply and take more serious account of? It is to this question I will turn in my discussion below.

5. Discussion

My first research question stemmed from curiosity as to how contemporary pilgrims embody and interpret their pilgrimage experience. In what was highlighted above, much of that ‘how’ has been fleshed out, and pilgrims’ words reveal some of their own interpretations. Secondly, I sought to research their embodied experience from both a psychological and theological lens. The human body is multifaceted and complex and an exploration of it, from any vantage point, requires multiple lenses of attention. As Sigurdson notes, ‘our experience of the body is more fundamental than our ability to represent it’ (Sigurdson 2016, p. 35), and yet representations are manifold. So pivotal is the body to human experience and knowledge, every age, (and often in vastly contrasting ways among various cultures simultaneously) can be said to have its own philosophy, theology, sociology, and psychology, as well as an array of ethical and cultural norms and practices in relation to the body and bodies in relationship to one another. Medieval historian Bynum, and cited by Sigurdson, notes that ‘despite enthusiasm for the topic, discussions of the body are almost completely incommensurable—and often incomprehensible—across the disciplines’ (ibid., p. 16). Despite her warning, and mindful that discourse on the body, as my literature review confirmed, is vexed and contentious, I proceeded to study what resonances my pilgrim experiences had with psychology of the body and with Christian theological anthropology, as well as the literature emerging from pilgrimage scholarship. Terreault’s simple and clarifying assertion, for example, that ‘the body is the place where pilgrimage happens’, is a helpful place to begin (Terreault 2019). ‘Through movement’, she continues, ‘pilgrimage transforms space into self-transformative place’ (ibid., p. 6). Contemporary philosopher of the body Mark Johnson (2007) argues that the process of meaning-making is grounded in the body and thereby dismisses any notion of meaning-making as a solely cognitive, post-event type of reflection. Pilgrims in this study corroborated that perspective as they located the shift in their understanding of themselves and their world directly out of their pilgrimage. In the experience of their pilgrimage, the findings indicate, in ‘the givenness’ of its intense physical requirements, pilgrims are drawn into a deeply holistic sense of their embodiment in the world. This deeply somatic experience was found to be satisfying at many levels.

The psychology of embodiment, although a more recent field in the wider domain, already sports a vast area of discourse. Totton offers a comprehensive historical summary of this development as well as his own description of embodiment. He categorizes embodiment as a ‘double-term’, meaning both the ‘state of being a self-aware organism’ and also ‘the meta-level process of realizing and experiencing that we are a self-aware organism’ (Totton 2020, p. 4). Mindful of much of the alienation from the body experienced today, he wonders if we might, ‘come back home’ (to the body) and as a result ‘gain access to an eco-systemic perspective that respects life in all its forms, including our own’ (ibid., p. 68).

That eco-systemic perspective for 20th century theologian Karl Rahner, the originator of the theological anthropology method, would have included what he would have called ‘respect for our life in God’. He was convinced that ‘the primal orientation of the human being was to God in creation which fuels our endless search for meaning (see Kelly 1992, p. 35). Godzieba, a contemporary theological anthropologist, views the human body as ‘a multivalent phenomenon of embodiment, particularity and intentionality, including ultimate intentionality’ (Godzieba 2007, p. 371). He goes further and adds that we must ‘claim the body and its intentionality as the revelational space, par excellence’ (Godzieba 2006, p. 791). Since this theological view is an attempt to articulate better our evolving understanding of God and the relationship between God and creation, insights from other lenses, such as the psychological and the philosophical, are interwoven in its corroborative illuminative layers (see The Revelatory Body, for example, Johnson 2015). In my findings, pilgrimage experience emerges as satiating bodily longing and bringing increased psychological ease. These together seemed to pave the way to a deeper embodied feeling that I began to term, ‘a deep incarnational longing’. Incarnation might be described as the taproot theology of Christianity and ordains that the birth of the man Jesus into a family and community in Nazareth was ‘Word of God becoming flesh’, divine life pitching Godself among humans and thereby subject to the earthy vulnerabilities of body, relationships, socio-political context and time. An important implication of that theology, from the perspective of theological anthropology, is how it honours all humans born in all times and all places, including their fleshy, sometimes joyful, and often ‘messy’ experiences. The pilgrimage experience, the findings suggest, connects pilgrims to something of their deeper longings, such as that of belonging, i.e., a sense of place not only in one’s body but in the world; furthermore, their pilgrimage seems to increase the capacity of the pilgrim to surrender more acceptingly to the messy chaotic vicissitudes and emergences of life. This dense layering of embodied experience stands in contrast to much of what Taylor calls the ‘excarnational’ pull of other factors and forces in contemporary culture (Taylor 2007, p. 771; Kearney 2021)8. Contributing factors to this ‘excarnational’ pull include technological dependency, daily busyness, a perspective that equates vulnerability with weakness, and a catastrophic sense of disconnection from being embedded within Earth as the living body on which all life fundamentally depends. Such factors were cited as familiar and constant in the ‘back-home’ life experience of pilgrims in the study.

‘It was so freeing to leave the phone in the car for the three days’ Shannon.

‘I just loved that the pattern of the whole pilgrimage, that the main demand it asked of us was to walk all day and to be outdoors. I loved it and I would have continued to walk all night only for it was too dark, Gabrielle.

These two ancient forms of pilgrimage require the pilgrim to be physically in their body to a significant degree of what I might call ‘conscious availability’. By conscious availability I mean attentiveness and attunement towards bodily tasks and to the ground beneath their feet. If embodiment is, as Godzieba (2006) insists, a fundamental theological principle, what definition of embodiment then might be suggested by the pilgrim body:

Embodiment is a state of being in which a person is simultaneously present to the wholeness of their personal beingness, in moment-to-moment relatedness to the larger context in which they find themselves. The depth of consciousness of this level of embodied presence-in-place may vary (including capacity or willingness to articulate it) but nonetheless, this kinesthetic, tactile experience continually arises and informs living, relating, moving and being, each passing moment.

Incarnational theology from this anthropological perspective would rejoice with contemporary pilgrims being reminded that their particular being and story is unique, whole and holy, and that it is good to experience again and again the gift of aliveness, in their embodiment; it would remind them that they are just as precious in God’s eyes when they are in pain, distressed and vulnerable. Finally, such a theology would interpret their graced encounters with others as evidence of their being made for relationship and that our becoming more whole and expanded is always tied up with others. We too are flesh, such theology stresses, and we live among others; we are at once held as particular and unique and yet knitted into the collective. This dynamical movement between the particularity of ‘the I’ and ‘the body of Christ, we’ is amplified by the various aspects of the pilgrimage process. Theologian Heather Walton cautions against believing that ‘God can be caught’. Rather, she suggests we pay attention to the ‘messier wordlings of God … discharged into the haecceity of matter’ (Walton 2015, p. 10). She would be reassured by the many earthy and somatic references to such haecceity by the pilgrims here as they speak of feet, pain, tiredness, hunger, walking, and the leg-wobbling challenges of circular prayer around small, stone beds.

Pilgrimage scholar Keith Egan by contrast to such theology refers to the Camino as ‘the product of contemporary concerns grounded in the immediacy of existential crises and aspirations for a bodily and worldly transcendence’ (Egan 2011, p. 4). Although he believes most pilgrims ‘skirt the contours of a dimly remembered faith’ he adds that ‘religious motivation cannot be discounted’ (ibid.), he suggests the Camino ‘endures as a contemplative mode of movement; a ritual walk as ordeal, while pilgrims traverse an inchoate landscape of the self to seek wholeness and communion more than they search for Christian communion and an orthodox sense of sacredness’ (ibid., p. 5). I contend however that the aspirations he notes—existential concerns, as well as bodily and worldly transcendence’—are elements of a religious quest. Such aspirations are about meaning and ultimacy and the enduring hunger for a sense of mystery within and beyond whilst simultaneously dealing with what Taylor calls ‘the cross-pressures of the dominating immanent frame’, so characteristic of contemporary belief systems (Taylor 2007, pp. 540–93). The central image in the etymology of religion is ‘ligament’, that sinewy tissue that binds and connects muscle to bone. The ‘re’ is to do again; the core task of religion, then, is to reconnect, again and again, to re-bind humanity to its true source. This is the quest I mean, not a quest for a return to what might have been formerly meaningful religious practices. Ritual performativity of a sacred kind, which pilgrimage undoubtedly is, is patterned but not repetitive in the sense that it is consistently created and co-created by each new group of pilgrims who begin it again. As theologian James Alison puts it,

The search for meaning is a co-constructing act, not something created on a heroic journey in splendid isolation. ‘I seek to become more of who I am in relationship with you … meaning is something that is grown in the in-between.9

My findings reveal that ‘the you’ for pilgrims in this study would include the other pilgrims, the pilgrimage landscape/environment as well as the potency of the rituals of the pilgrimage as a whole.

6. Conclusions

In this interdisciplinary study of contemporary pilgrimage, twenty pilgrims narrated their experience, and the research method endeavoured to stay as close to that experience as possible, in accordance with the requirements of a phenomenological approach. The five thematic patterns which emerged from that analysis began with the variables which motivate contemporary pilgrims to set out, a colourful and textured confluence of internal curiosities, the inspiration of others, significant life events, and the historical provenance of these two ancient pilgrimages. The second thematic pattern gathered all the data in relation to the embodied experience of pilgrims studied under the umbrella of becoming more grounded. The importance and centrality of the ritual performativity of both pilgrimages were noted, and when pilgrims were able to surrender to these processes, they could ‘own’ more authentically the identity of pilgrim.

The discussion noted the psychological dividend of the experience of becoming more grounded and further suggested that from the standpoint of theological anthropology, the satisfaction experienced could be described as satiating a deep incarnational longing in the pilgrim. Hence, the research suggests that pilgrimage might also be described as an opportunity to rejoice in the particularity of being an incarnated being, a fleshy, vulnerable, resilient, relational, full-blooded being with a sovereign and dignifying share in God’s incarnational and fleshy intent for and love of all creation. Pilgrimage immerses the pilgrim in a very particular way in the ‘haecceity of matter’ and thereby, as Walton suggests, perhaps an opportunity to hear a ‘wordling of God’. In my introduction to the research methodology, I expressed my desire not to consign all possible religious motivation for contemporary pilgrimage as an ‘old paradigm’ and yet bring a freshness to the enquiry that fully acknowledges the post-modernist context of the pilgrimage research conversation. In naming this satiation of a deep incarnational longing, I intimate that for all the secularization of pilgrimage and the tossing out of meta-narratives of religion that are characteristic of our post-modernist era, pilgrimages would seem to retain an indelible trace of religious quest in the bodies, hearts, and souls of those who make them.