The pilgrim

He had been motionless for months, one leg broken in battle. During his convalescence, having finished the books of chivalrous exploits he liked, his sister-in-law had given him the lives of saints to read. He had begun to reflect on the different feelings that the two different readings aroused in him. When he was healed, he set out for Barcelona, ​​with the idea of ​​embarking for Jerusalem. Instead, after 660 kilometers on foot, he had stopped in Manresa: the whole journey had been a progressive illumination, a "feeling and tasting things interiorly", right down to the last, on the Cardoner river: God meets in all things.

During that pilgrimage, Ignatius of Loyola was inspired by the Spiritual Exercises, an interior journey to live more and more intertwined with God: a grace that then helped the Church to recover from Luther's wound and today continues to help many Christians, without 500 years have added a wrinkle of old age to the “Ignatian method”. Does it take a pilgrimage on foot to have a life-changing spiritual insight? Something must be there, if every year 13 million Christians go to Lourdes and Fatima, millions of Muslims go to Mecca, millions of Hindus bathe in the Holy Ganges in Varanasi and more or less 300 million people make religious tourism. On the Camino de Santiago you meet people with the most varied motivations, an incurable disease, a choice of life, the loss of a loved one or simply a challenge with themselves or a cut from the usual routine.

Everyone starts with a question inside, almost no one receives the grace he asked for when setting out, but the one he did not foresee: on returning he finds himself changed. What the anonymous author tells of the Russian pilgrim happens to everyone: he leaves to learn about the light, goes from church to church, listens to homilies and conferences. He hears that we must pray, he looks for a teacher and in the end he understands that the only authentic pilgrimage is the inner one. Words previously incomprehensible become clear to him, worship in Spirit and truth, the Kingdom of God is within you, the inexpressible groans of the Spirit, the glory of God, remain in me. In everything he sees an inner fire.

In the transfigured world the pilgrim is happy: "everything invited me to love and praise God: men, plants, animals, everywhere I saw the image of the Name of Jesus ...". You don't need breath and good legs for a real pilgrimage; the legs are God's desire, love for the journey with him, for the same falling and getting up knowing that he is always there, for the present lived with trust, for the wonders of which life in Christ is populated. The true pilgrim has perhaps never traveled, perhaps he is in a hospital bed, in his own room, in his own city, all his life. Like Ignatius: the last forty years lived in his little room without leaving Rome. By loving and serving God, wherever we are.

Flaminia Morandi
NP october 2019