Dear pilgrims of hope,
how do we decide on the destination for our pilgrimage?
Let us continue to talk about how to make a pilgrimage. We talked about how pilgrimage starts at home. Now that we have cleared up our obstacles, we can decide whether we want to make a pilgrimage. Next step: where should we go?
A friend of mine told me a story about making decisions. “There were five frogs that sat on a wall and one of them decided to jump. How many frogs left on the wall? …. Five!” The frog decided to jump but he never jumped. Because there was no action linked to his decision. I am thinking maybe he could not figure out where he wanted go and so he rather stayed on the wall until something forced him to change. Either way, a decision without a goal will not take us far. So let us talk about some places we could go on pilgrimage to.
There are some very well-known places like Rome, the Holy Land, Lourdes, Fatima, Guadeloupe, Santiago de Compostela and some closer ones to home. Sometimes our decision for a destination can be influenced because our parish organises a pilgrimage. We know that we will know some fellow travellers, we might know the priest, all factors that might entice us to go, without really thinking about whether we want to go to the place that is offered. Now, this is not supposed to discourage you from going on pilgrimage with your parish!
But it is important that we know where we want to go. If life is a pilgrimage in a foreign land called earth, should we not focus first on where we want to go and only after that select our travel companions? Otherwise we might end up at another place that we did not intend to go to.
So how do we decide? First we pray! We pray about our intention to go on pilgrimage, we pray about the right destination, we pray about our finances, we pray about our travel companions. And the Holy Spirit will guide us. When I decided to walk the Camino in 2019, I discovered that Lourdes was only 150 kilometres away from the start of the Camino in Frances. And I knew that I could not miss out going to the place where Saint Bernadette had encountered our Lady. I will keep the story about my Lourdes visit for another day, but suffice it to say that although Lourdes was out of the way of my original plans, it was the best decision I made, to go to Lourdes first.
We need to know where we want to go, dear pilgrims of hope, so that if we get lost along on the way, we can correct our course. If others try to lead us astray, we can recognise it and sometimes that means to part with travel companions. Heaven is our real home and I pray that we all become saints one day so that we can be with our Lord for eternity.
