pilgrimage on Spiritual Formation

Pilgrimage is a marinating process. The Bible is bursting with people who traveled to places of retreat where God seasoned and tenderized them, preparing them to take the next step of the journey. Mos...

I find when most people are honest about their spiritual pilgrimage, they admit to the difficulty of maintaining the habit of a spiritual discipline. What attracts me most about the Anglican spiritual...

Pilgrimage is centered around one thing—progression. God does not call us to be static saints, even if we cannot move physically. We are constantly on the move spiritually, evolving in our understandi...

A pilgrimage is a way of praying with your feet. You go on a pilgrimage because you know there’s something missing inside your soul, and the only way you can find it is to go to sacred places, places ...

For those who recite The Lord's Prayer on a regular basis, it can easily become a rote exercise. In this excerpt, Edwin Muir is on a pilgrimage when the prayer took on new significance: Last nigh...

Whether we are walking to a holy site or being mindful of our spiritual life, in both cases we can willfully embark on the journey or not. The choice is ours: either we decide to journey in hope of gr...

Billy Graham had a weekly radio show titled The Hour of Decision. Normally it was a tape recording of the service and message he’d given at a recent evangelistic rally. And at the conclusion of every ...

Religious faith is an embodied journey, not a protected cocoon of beliefs. It’s a pilgrimage.

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind—these are all a dr...

In his enjoyable little book on Christian pilgrimage, British scholar N.T. Wright shares three propositions on the value that pilgrimage can bring to a Christian’s life: First, pilgrimage to holy pla...

I believe my vocation is essentially that of a pilgrim and an exile in life, that I have no proper place in the world, but that for that reason I am in some sense to be the friend and brother of peopl...

Here’s a true story, from the year 891, of those who cast off in an embodied journey to live “in a state of pilgrimage, for the love of God.” Three Irish pilgrims, Dubslane, Macbeth, and Maelinmun, ma...

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

“It is good once in a while to feel oneself in the hands of God,” Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “and not always eternally slinking around the familiar nooks and corners of a town where one always know...

To pray is no small thing. It is nothing less than a sacred pilgrimage into the heart of the whole world.

The risen Lord comes alongside us this morning. He speaks the truth of Scripture into our waxing and waning hearts. He blesses us with his presence on our pilgrim journey through life’s often difficul...

Allow the presence of God to be the bridge through your uncertainty. The axis of uncertainty is disorientation, and let’s face it, who wants to be spinning in all directions while in transition? Resea...

In all our pilgrimages, we begin by going back to our roots. When Christians go to the Holy Land today, we do not go because God is present there in a way in which he is not in New York or Nottingham,...

Leader: How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! People: My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God. Leader: Blessed are ...

Saul of Tarsus did not intend to be a pilgrim when he set off to go from Jerusalem to Damascus. Indeed, why would any pilgrim make that journey? Pilgrims went to Jerusalem, not away from it. No: Saul,...

Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer journey. One can have one without the other. I...

Unimpeded walking is one of life’s most ordinary, least expensive, and deeply rewarding pleasures. With little effort, putting one foot in front of the other and going forward can provide a foretaste ...

Pilgrimage is a powerful metaphor for any journey with the purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler.

Pilgrimage happens when you’re not moving. You learn when you’re unlearning. Revelation comes in gulps that leave you gasping, but sometimes it seems to come in the slow accumulation of small insights...

O Thou, God of all long desirous roaming, Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing, And crying after lost desire. Hearten us onward! as with fire Consuming dreams of other bliss. The best Thou givest, ...

Pilgrimages are probably of ancient origin and can, indeed, be found among peoples classed by some anthropologists as "tribal,” peoples such as the Huichol, the Lunda, and the Shona. But pilgrima...

Pilgrim (parepidēmos) tells us we are people who spend our lives going someplace, going to God, and whose path for getting there is the way, Jesus Christ.

All joy, as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement, emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Out best havings are wantings.

“For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so Then people long on pilgrimage to go And palmers to be seeking foreign strands To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.”