Overview

In The Way Is Made by Walking, Arthur Paul Boers chronicles his 500-mile pilgrimage by foot along the Spanish Camino de Santiago in June of 2005. CRG staff had the opportunity to ask Dr. Boers what prompted him to make this pilgrimage; what he learned as he embraced the Christian practices of prayer, simplicity, and hospitality; what "habits of the heart" he developed along the way; and how the practice of pilgrimage can bear fruit in our lives. Here are his reflections, along with a set of resources for people considering this "ancient and current" practice.

About Arthur Paul Boers

Arthur Paul Boers is the author of six books, including The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago (InterVarsity), Never Call Them Jerks: Healthy Responses to Difficult Behavior (Alban), and The Rhythm of God’s Grace: Uncovering Morning and Evening Hours of Prayer (Paraclete). Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, he is an ordained Mennonite minister and Benedictine oblate.

Interview

CRG: In The Way is Made by Walking, you begin by telling us, "I once walked five hundred miles to attend church." Particularly for those who have not yet read the book, would you tell us a little about when and where you did this walk—and what prompted you to do it?

Arthur: The Camino de Santiago (literally "Way of St. James) in northwest Spain is one of the most famous and most significant Christian pilgrimage routes. The Spanish believe that St. James (disciple of Jesus; brother of John the Beloved; son of Zebeede, son of thunder) was the first person to bring the Gospel to Spain. A cathedral is erected in his honor (with the altar over his ostensible relics) in the city of Santiago de Compostela.

People began walking to this cathedral over a thousand years ago. In medieval times, it was the third most important pilgrimage destination (superseded only by Rome and Jerusalem). Over the last millennium, millions journeyed this path. In the past decade, it has begun to resume its popularity, with tens of thousands undertaking it every year. In some ways this long-distance walking route is the European equivalent of our Appalachian trail. (The latter does not have explicit Christian heritage, of course, and is also more isolated and demanding.)

I first learned about the Camino when I was doing research in Europe in 2000 for a book on daily prayer. I considered that trip a pilgrimage and so began reading about pilgrimage traditions. I kept learning about the Camino, both its past importance and its present resurgence. But the attraction eluded me. "Why would anyone do that?" I wondered.

Later the same year of the daily prayer "pilgrimage," I began almost on a whim to walk on a part-time basis the Bruce Trail, a 500 mile long nature conservancy route in Ontario Canada, where I was then living. I had never been particularly athletic but this new challenge unexpectedly drew me in. I noticed that many effects I experienced on long-distance walking were similar to going on retreat: I detached from stress and preoccupations, I recognized where my life had gone off balance recently, I started to breathe more deeply and slowly, I made new resolutions about how to get my life back on course. Plus there were added benefits of being outside, enjoying nature and its vistas, getting vigorous and invigorating exercise.

As I pondered this, I thought it a shame that Christians had no traditions of walking as spiritual exercise. But I quickly realized that I was wrong. We do and it's called "pilgrimage," a practice that for various reasons mostly got put aside by Protestants in and after the Reformation. Now we live in an era when old divisions of Christianity are breaking down and Christians are eager to rediscover, embrace, and reclaim a wide array of church practices.

Once I recognized the relationship between walking and pilgrimage, I knew that I had to attempt the pre-eminent Christian route, the Camino de Santiago. I took two years to plan, get my schedule in order, and train (by walking four miles a day with an increasingly heavy pack). I walked the Camino in 31 days during the month of June, 2005. I carried my possessions in a backpack and relied on hostels, cafés, restaurants, public fountains and grocery stores for my most basic needs.

CRG: What made this walk a "pilgrimage" for you?

Arthur: This route was made a pilgrimage by predecessors in the faith long ago, Christians who began walking to Santiago de Compostela to honor James. The medieval church gradually realized the significance of the Way of St. James and began supporting and encouraging it, practically and spiritually. Villages on the route have welcomed pilgrims for over a millennium.

As I walked, I was deeply aware of and encouraged by the Christians who traversed this path over the centuries before me. And I was heartened by folks I encountered along the way, walking it now. It was a rich and vivid experience of the communion of saints. I was not attempting this journey alone, but found myself in good company.

Several elements made this pilgrimage particularly meaningful for me:

• Every day I read scripture excerpts about James and reflected prayerfully on how his story spoke to mine. Although he was part of Jesus' inner circle (along with Peter and John), little is reported about him in the Gospels and Acts. His presence is noted, some of his actions, but almost none of his words. Still he was faithful in dramatic ways: abandoning his work and his father as soon as Jesus called, for example. He experienced temptations that I recognize in my own life: unruly ambition, hostility to others who do not share one's faith perspectives, divisive competition with other disciples. In the end, he gave his life for his faith, but again that story is cryptic and curiously lacks the details of other martyrdoms (Acts 12).



• Each day, I "prayed through" a phase of my life. (I'll say more about that later.)



• As I walked, I employed a hand-made rosary that a friend had given me. I used it to pray the Lord's Prayer and to sing various Taizé songs.



• I wrote lengthy journal entries daily. I have been a journaller since I was a teen, so this was a natural thing to do.



• While walking, I prayed for family, friends, acquaintances, and fellow pilgrims.



• I was overwhelmed by the beauty of Spanish geography: mountains, vineyards, rivers, plains. When I prayed "on earth as in heaven" in the Lord's Prayer, I felt very close to both earth and heaven at the same time. When I said "Glory" to the "maker of heaven and earth," I saw how these spheres are deeply intertwined. I had never experienced this connection so closely before: not in church, not on monastery retreats, not in private devotions. I perceived something new by virtue of so deeply encountering natural surroundings while being prayerful.

A pilgrimage is a spiritually or religiously motivated journey where we seek to encounter God in some way and where that encounter transforms our "regular life." As all these things happened to me, I consider my Camino experience a "pilgrimage."

CRG: The book explores a number of Christian practices that you embraced more deeply as a result of this pilgrimage—including prayer, simplicity, and hospitality. What did you learn as you reflected on these practices, and practiced them?

Arthur: I'll begin with prayer: I have tried to be a person of prayer since I was a child. I have gone to a Benedictine monastery on retreats for 26 years and eventually became an oblate there. Many of my writings over the years have been about prayer (often in connection with social justice).

The ways that I prayed while on the Camino depended on whether I was alone that day or with others. (My wife walked with me for the first ten days and then went home to work. Along the way, I sometimes walked with new acquaintances for a day or two.) When I had solitude, I prayed more expansively and often aloud (since no one could hear me anyway, except for God I trust). When I was with others, I was more discrete. I recognized that it is okay that over the course of my life the ways I prayed varied according to life's circumstances: as a graduate student, as a young father juggling jobs and childcare, as a pastor, and now as a seminary professor whose home nest is empty.

I also saw that too often the kinds of prayers we emphasize in church are for the introverted, intuitive, and contemplative. While all those terms describe me, they are not categories that fit many or even most people in church. We need also to promote spiritual practices that are more outward oriented, physical, and engage nature. As I reflected on the seniors in the last congregation I served as pastor, I recognized that most of them were formed by concrete corporate practices of barn building, service, disaster relief, and quilting. Pilgrimage as a collection of practices offers varied ways for a wide array of people to enter into spiritual life.

On the next practice, simplicity: Most Camino authors warn against carrying too much. It is common for pilgrims to abandon stuff in hostels, ship it ahead to Santiago, give it to other pilgrims, or mail it home. One friend had a 50 pound pack because of weighty camera equipment. Another, a Canadian, even had a can of maple syrup because he hoped to eat pancakes along the way. My own weight problems included the fact that I could not imagine going with less than five books (Bible, prayerbook, journal, novel, and route guide). So the Camino raised the questions over and again, "How much is enough? How much is too much?" These are obviously relevant to how we live in North America. We are often not aware of how taxing our possessions and their maintenance are.

Life on the Camino was focused. I had no cell phone and only sporadic access to email (less than once a week). I concentrated on walking six to eight hours per day. And then I had to work on cleaning myself and my clothes, arranging for food, and finding lodging. Life was direct and undistracted. That certainly gave room for a rich prayer life and also for spending ample time with all kinds of people, a rare experience for a workaholic introvert such as myself. It also helped me appreciate simple pleasures and joys: weather, scenery, showers, food, sleep, bed, good company. Ironically, in our overextended and overly busy lives, we may be so saturated and satiated that we are not aware of basic, good elements that are still present.

Finally, on the practice of hospitality: I pondered hospitality in two ways.

First, Spain is a more outwardly-oriented culture than I experience in North America. At the end of my wife's journey, she and I stayed in a bed and breakfast for two nights. Outside our bedroom was a nondescript alley. It was a graveled roadway between buildings, with no vegetation in sight. There was a straight wooden bench on which an elderly woman sat all day. And around her cycled a continual flow of loud and boisterous visitors. Later we realized it was a holiday. We were especially impressed at how people just hung out and talked for hours. In many towns, I saw local people sitting on benches in town squares and talking at a leisurely pace. The same was true in cafés and restaurants. I was struck by how hard it is in North America just to find a time to eat with others, let alone hang out for hours on end.

Second, pilgrims were attentive to each other. We were all taking on an arduous journey and had this reality in common. So we helped companions with directions, tending blisters, finding food and lodgings, and simply offering encouragement. I realized how isolated my busy life at home often feels. And I wondered how I could offer solace and support to others around me. I resolved to work harder at regularly inviting people into our home for meals.

CRG: In addition to spiritual practices, there were some "habits of the heart" that you developed, particularly the habit of trusting in God. You tell us that on the Camino, you "learned to pay attention to God—God's company, God's workings, and God's interventions." Again, particularly for those who have not yet read the book, would you say a little bit about learning to trust in God and how a pilgrimage fosters such trust?

Arthur: As I had expansive time on my pilgrimage journey, I decided to reflect on my life as a journey itself. The life of faith is itself a pilgrimage after all.

At first I thought I would do this a year at a time. But my first year did not take very long to ponder! Ditto for my second and third years. Then I began reflecting on periods of my life, from my earliest memories up until the present. Walking while praying brings out unexpected memories (perhaps because the rhythm of both arms and both legs stimulates both hemispheres of the brain). I had luxuriously long periods of time to ponder experiences, education, church, friends, family, acquaintances, and high and low memorable incidents. I discovered again and again that throughout my life there was a strong sense of providence, of God's guidance and care. I could not pretend to like everything that had happened: conflicts, losses, grief, betrayals, disappointments. But now I could see that even those hard things were part of a bigger picture and that God – in the words of a Taize song – "leads me into life."

People marvel at all the serendipity and synchronicity that happen on this route. "Well, that's the Camino," we said often. In one mountainside monastery, I sat at table with a woman who shared friends with me from London Ontario. Then I spoke with a retired Episcopal bishop who had visited the monastery where I am an oblate and knows my monk friends there. At a bed-and-breakfast where I did not intend to stay but "it just happened," I met two Benedictine monks who had mutual friends with me in both the denomination where I was raised and in the Mennonite denomination I joined as a young adult. That's the Camino.

Walking this route was one of the hardest things I ever attempted, certainly the most physically challenging. There was so much about this trip that was out of my control. Yet everyday, I was grateful to be there and everyday I felt as if God was tossing bouquets of blessing and encouragement my way. I long to maintain that kind of awareness and attention in all of my life.

CRG: Your book devotes a chapter to "focal living." What are the dimensions of focal living? Do you have any thoughts on how congregations might foster such living?

Arthur: I was struck by the immense popularity of the Camino. What drew people? The popularity was also surprising because so many pilgrims were not professing Christians. Many told me they were "unchurched," "beyond church," or "spiritual but not religious." So, one might wonder, what brought them to the Camino?

There is a prevailing and uneasy sense in our culture of being too busy, being stretched and tugged in too many directions, living in off-balanced ways. Albert Borgmann, a philosopher of technology, describes how our lifestyles these days leave us disembodied, disoriented, and disconnected. This is an important pastoral and spiritual challenge for the church today.

In Borgmann's terminology, the Camino is a "focal place" and walking it is a "focal practice." He shows that "focal" reality has three aspects.

First, it has a commanding presence. It makes demands on us. It requires discipline, practice, the learning of skills. The Camino is a taxing route that requires people to undertake a physical challenge of walking great distances, day after day.

Second, it has deep and evident connections with the wider world, including people and our ecosystems. Being on the Camino connected one with medieval pilgrims, current companions, hosts along the way, and involved one closely and intimately with geography and weather.

Third, it has orienting or centering power. It reminds us of realities greater than ourselves and helps us set and know our true priorities. The Camino, with its churchly heritage, obviously reminds us of God. But even many people who were not believers per se found here the courage to make courageous life-changing decisions. Many folks were in a liminal place: recovering from illness, mourning a loved one, grieving a broken marriage, pondering a job transition.

The ways that we choose to engage our culture, technology, and possessions often displaces focal priorities. It grows harder and harder to find focal reality now. Surely one reason the Camino is popular is because it is a focal place, one of the few remaining focal places.

I worry that while our hyperactivity is evidently a pastoral issue, the church does not say much about it. In fact, the church often makes things worse: by heaping more expectations and demands on people.

Yet every worship service could be an occasion where we experience focal priorities. We are called to discipleship. We connect with God, with others, with God's creation. We are encouraged to orient our lives by God's Reign. We experience Sabbath rest and renewal.

And surely our lives as Christians could also reflect focal realities. My next book, which I am working on now, is on the challenges of focal living.

CRG: You conclude by telling us that "pilgrimage bears fruit at home where it overlaps and infiltrates and alters one's life. Christian pilgrimage reorients normal, day-to-day existence." How did the Camino pilgrimage reorient your life? In what ways did it alter your relationships with God, with others, with yourself?

Arthur: There are several things that I would observe about this.

First, the Camino was a call to focal or balanced living, as I've already described. I struggle with keeping the right pace. I can relate to the lyrics of Canadian singer Bruce Cockburn: "I've never lived with balance/ Though I've always liked the notion." Ironically, my driven lifestyle got me into difficulties on the Camino. I ended up in an ER, a third of the way on the route, because of bagel sized blood blisters and towards the end I got tendonitis as well. Both were problems of how fast and far I tried to go. So I did not "arrive" at balanced, harmonious existence even on that incredible spiritual journey and I'm not there now either, but the pilgrimage renewed my awareness of how important that priority remains.

Second, the Camino was the most physically daunting thing I ever attempted. I have never been athletic. I only started hiking in middle-age. Yet here I was going 500 miles on foot, including crossing several mountain ranges. Life was rich and rewarding, it was also challenging and difficult. I became aware of how often at home my frustration threshold becomes very low. (Why do I even care if the email is slow or disconnected for a couple hours?) I resolved to learn how to live with more gratitude and less reactivity. One motto I brought away and try to repeat to myself now when faced with frustrations is: "Well, this is not as hard as the Camino and I chose that." As a worrier, "de-catastrophizing" is a good strategy.

Third, most pilgrims I encountered were not professed believers. They were comfortable calling themselves "spiritual but not religious." That term previously bothered me for various reasons. But now that I had hours of time with strangers engaged in a common challenge, we helped each other, and we could talk at length. I began to listen more carefully. It's no secret that there is a huge spiritual search and yearning going on in our culture. (One reason for that, I believe, is the fact that focal reality is displaced and not evident or even readily accessible in how we live.) I have not tried hard enough to connect with those who are "spiritual but not religious." And I believe the church could do more too.

Intriguingly pilgrimage appears to be a practice that "spiritual but not religious" people are willing to attempt. Are there other rituals and practices that we can promote as ways for people to test or try on faith?

When I visited Britain in 2000, church folk were still trying to make sense of the spontaneous responses to Princess Diana's death years earlier. Anglican priest Ray Simpson told me: "It was the most extraordinary event of public ritual in my life." He quoted a bishop: "The people out there are not where we thought. They are very interested in the spiritual but we haven't connected." Simpson concluded that church "worship has generally lost its street credibility."

A Camino pilgrim I met sponsors Rave parties in Australia that involve neither drugs nor alcohol. Although seminary trained, although he no longer considers himself Christian. (He once was active in church, but several issues came to a head for him. So on one Sunday, he stood up from where he was playing guitar during worship and walked out of the sanctuary.) An important aspect of his work now is the sponsoring of life rituals for people who are not part of a religious institution. He regarded this as a secular form of ministry, a new and much needed kind of pastoral care.

Do we offer worship services, pilgrimages and other opportunities for prayer that might be hospitable for folks who do not regularly attend church? In an era when North Americans work longer and longer hours and perpetually complain of being busy, can we provide space for Sabbath and rest, renewal and reorientation? Think of the impressive success of the Methodist Walk to Emmaus movement, retreats of prayer and worship that have by now involved thousands of participants. I wonder whether the church might not offer even more pilgrimage type retreats geared for seekers.

CRG: What advice would you have for people who, like you, feel called to this practice of pilgrimage?

Arthur: In the book, I have extensive counsel for how to discern a call for pilgrimage, prepare for pilgrimage, and complete a pilgrimage. So I'll not belabor that here.

Some scholars argue that pilgrimage increases as church-going diminishes. The Camino de Santiago attracts at least half a million each year. Western Europe currently has thousands of pilgrimage sites drawing as many as 100 million attenders annually. Colleagues at foundations that fund pastor sabbaticals comment bemusedly on the popularity of Iona and Taizé as destinations. In God's Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis, Philip Jenkins observes that the "continuing popularity of pilgrimages ... refutes simple claims that European Christianity is dead." He notes that pilgrimage may reinvent and reinvigorate European Christianity.

Not everyone is called to walk 500 miles. (But don't be as quick as I was to dismiss such an idea.) In the book I include a lengthy appendix about a number of other pilgrimage locations written by various contributors: Canterbury and the Pilgrims' Way, Coventry, Croagh Patrick, Glendalough, Lindisfarne, Iona, Israel/Palestine, Norwich, Medjugorge, Rome, Syria and Taize. Many of these places are being visited more and more. There are others, of course.

Furthermore, every time we venture to church, we make a small pilgrimage. Each Sunday is an explicit pilgrimage. Church buildings – with or without labyrinths – are constructed for local pilgrimage. Church sanctuaries have aisles that guide pedestrians up to the front. Processionals, offerings, children's stories, and rituals invite movement. Classic cathedrals have ambulatories, a rounded corridor at the front of the church (behind the altar), which is literally a "place for walking." Visit such monumental buildings and one almost always finds people strolling there.

In the late 1980s, I visited a mountain village in northeast Haiti. On Sunday people converged there from all directions, having walked up to two or three hours to worship in church. They hiked on bare and worn feet over rocky mountain paths. But they wore their finest clothes and when they arrived at the town square, they put on their best shoes, the women even donning high heels, to cross the town plaza to the church. For them, church-going is an occasion. They helped me understand its importance. Think of people stuck in poverty – whether in medieval Europe or contemporary Haiti – living hard-bitten lives of austerity, who once a week are invited as local pilgrims to feast in God's kingdom. The local church or cathedral was often the only place to encounter beauty and inspiration.

It is also important to see daily life and regular Christian living as pilgrimage. Critics of pilgrimage rightly observe that one need not travel far to seek or find God. Indeed all of life can and ought to be pilgrimage. Each day's activities and all our encounters can also lead us in the search for God and the longing to keep company with God. Weekly worship and daily life can be done in a pilgrim spirit. Nevertheless, there is merit in deliberately engaging more demanding journeys from time to time, just as there are good reasons to step aside for prayer, worship, fasting, and retreat.

I am struck by a remark of Cees Noteboom, a famous Dutch travel writer. He comments on medieval pilgrims "who simply set aside their lives to walk halfway across Europe in dangerous times." And he notes that now many Christian pilgrims – and Muslims too who go to Mecca – rely on modern transportation. For all of us, ironically, "the longer [we] live the less time [we] have."

In other words, find ways to make focal priorities central.

Resources

The Way is Made by Walking concludes with appendices that describe a number of resources—not only resources on the Camino de Santiago, but also resources on other pilgrimage locations (including Asperen, Canterbury, Conventry, Croagh Patrick, Glendalough, Lindisfarme, Iona, Israel/Palestine, Norwich, Medjugorge, and Rome). For those inspired to walk the Camino, Dr. Boers suggests and describes guidebooks, informational volumes, travelogues, and Web sites.

In addition to the resources listed at the back of the book, the following resources are suggested by Dr. Boers. For more information or to obtain a resource, click on the title. Or, if the resource is a book that you prefer to obtain from Amazon.com, click on "Amazon" at the end of the publishing information.

• Resources on Pilgrimage Theology and Memoir

Follow Me: Christian Growth on the Pilgrim's Way
Brett Webb-Mitchell, Author. New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2006.
Amazon

The Road to Emmaus
Jim Forest, Author. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007.
Amazon

School of the Pilgrim: An Alternative Path to Christian Growth
Brett Webb-Mitchell, Author. Louisville, KY: Church Publishing, 2006.
Amazon

The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground
Rosemary Mahoney, Author. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Amazon

• Resources on Focal Living

Crossing the Postmodern Divide
Albert Borgmann, Author. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Amazon

Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millenium
Albert Borgmann, Author.
Amazon

Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology
Albert Borgmann, Author. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003.
Amazon

Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Culture
Albert Borgmann, Author. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Amazon

Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry
Albert Borgmann, Author. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Amazon

Transforming Our Days: Finding God Amid the Noise of Modern Life
Richard Gaillardetz, Author. Liguori, MO: Liguouri Publications, 2007.
Amazon

This interview is part of the Wise Voices project, which gathers thoughts and essays from people who know congregations. These are leaders with know-how—through first-hand knowledge, academic study, or practical experience. If you are or know of a Wise Voice we should include, please contact us at info@crg.org.