Neil Darragh describes journeying as a reality and a symbol of a pilgrim people — a synodal way of Church.

The spiritual life is often represented as a journey, a search for God with its own stages and stopping places, with its own twists and reversals, and its alternation of commonplace and insight. Many well-known spiritual writers, such as Dante, Bonaventure, Teresa of Avila, and Bellarmine have used the metaphor of the journey to represent the search for God at the heart of the Christian life.

Yet the experience of journey is not just something that affects individuals. The Christian community is itself on a journey as a community of people with a common bond and a common hope. During the season of Easter, the idea of “journey” is particularly sharp. The liturgies of Easter from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday are rites of passage, a participation in a ritual journey through death into new life. The resurrection of Christ is not just a return to life but the same person transformed into a “life-giving spirit” (I Cor 15:45).

Images of the Church

We use images and metaphors like the “journey” to understand the deeper realities of life. The image of the journey helps us understand what the Christian community, the Church, is like and, more importantly, what that Church should be like even if it isn’t quite like that yet.

The image of the Church as people on a journey is one that has come into prominence in recent decades. One of the images common in the Catholic Church in the 20th century was that of the Church as the mystical body of Christ. This is an image originating in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. It focuses our attention on the Church as an organic unity with many parts all of which need to cooperate for the good of the whole.

Another prominent image at that time was the Church as a hierarchically structured institution which was focused on teaching authority and a pyramid-like management style.

The rather different image that came into prominence during the course of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was that of the people of God which put emphasis on the human and communal rather than the institutional and hierarchical side of the Church (Lumen Gentium, par 9-17). Here the emphasis is on the whole people, though with its own internal diversity, on a journey towards the fullness of the realm (kingdom) of God in which all people play a part. This people of God is a pilgrim people.

Pilgrims on the Way

The image of a “pilgrim people”, has a sense of journey and change. It is a rather ragged image, moving along without very clear boundaries about who belongs and who doesn’t, with trust in God’s leadership, on a journey towards a future goal (the future realm of God as Jesus described it) but not yet quite sure how to get there or what will be encountered on the way.

This imagery has substantial roots in Hebrew and Christian history. Abraham and Sarah left their own country and travelled to an unknown place that God would show them (Gen 12:1-5).

The apostle Paul uses this journey as the great example of faith (Rom 4:1-25).

The two books of Luke (the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles) are concerned with two great journeys: the journey of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem with its culmination in his death-resurrection, and the journey of the early Church taking the message of Christ from Jerusalem to the "ends of the earth".

These early disciples were not then called Christians but “followers of the Way” (Acts 9:2).

Stories of journeys are deeply embedded also in the identity of nearly all New Zealanders whose ancestors, long ago and more recently, journeyed here in the hope of finding a better future.

Kinds of Journey

We are familiar today with the journeys of migrants. Some of these are deliberate and planned. Others are forced journeys, refugees and asylum seekers fleeing from desperate political or economic conditions.

Then there are other journeys — those made by tourists, people relocating for work and careers, adventurers and missionaries.

Pilgrimage Journey

The journeys that most interest us here, though, are the journeys that are undertaken for a spiritual purpose. They are journeys for personal or community renewal, searches for spiritual identity, searches for meaning, or searches for God.

The people making these searches we call “pilgrims”. A pilgrimage is not just a tourist journey for distraction and entertainment. Nor is it a purely practical journey by which we get from one place to another.

Usually, pilgrimage means a geographical journey intertwined with an inner personal journey. Sometimes we journey not in a geographical sense but in the same place — an interior search for a different way of being alive. In any case, as a pilgrimage it is a search for the divine, or for fulfilment, or enlightenment, or identity, or simply a personal and communal place called home.

Sometimes the pilgrimage may not be so much a human-centred journey as one where we immerse ourselves in the already existing journey of a particular place, becoming absorbed in the journey of the place itself — the land, the trees, the grasses, the wind, the animals, the birds and insects, the human house, the living ecosystem—in its own search for its Creator.

A pilgrimage needs a spiritual openness to the unexpected, the unwanted, or the undreamed-of. It involves living with some degree of anxiety as the familiar and the manageable recede from us.

It is often uncomfortable. It awaits a change of heart, like the call of Christ to the first disciples. Most importantly perhaps, a pilgrimage rests on a deep hope that in the end there is God all-compassionate who awaits the pilgrim with profound patience.

A Church in Process and Willing to Learn

The Catholic Church worldwide is currently engaged in efforts to implement what Pope Francis has called the “synodal way”, that is, people journeying together. Underneath and supporting this synodal way is the image of the Church as a pilgrim people.

There is a sense here of people listening and learning from one another because we are not quite sure yet of what we might encounter on the way. And a sense of reliance on one another to notice opportunities and dangers ahead.

It requires a trust in one another and in trustworthy leaders, but it allows the leaders to be wrong sometimes without catastrophic consequences for everyone else.

We are, or we could hope to be, a Church in process and willing to learn. The final document of the Amazon Synod of bishops, the most recent of these synods, is entitled The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology. In our part of the world, we could also hope to be a pilgrim Church seeking new paths together. 

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 269 April 2022: 6-7