Becoming a 'pilgrim'

What does it really mean to be a pilgrim?  To be heading to a place of religious significance is one answer. It might be Mecca, Jerusalem, Lourdes, Walsingham.  Part of it is the actual doing of the journey, whether walking or by other means.  But, as in life, what we do and why we do it are intertwined. On one level our reason is raising prayers, awareness and funds for Project Bakhita.  But there is an inner journey which mirrors the journey of life.  Ignatius' own camino through these villages, towns, countryside, getting closer and closer to Montserrat and Manresa, was a mirror of an inner journey which led him to reflect on his personal freedom, his detachment from worldly concerns and desires, and ultimately his indifference to what life would turn out to be for him in Gods plan.  And so it wAs at this town of Igualada, not named in his autobiography but most probably the 'large village not far from Montserrat' that he symbolically and actually shed his clothes to put on pilgrim garb.  Ignatius' journey appears to most of us to be very dramatic.  It is of his time.  But it's inviting us to reflect here on the trajectory of our own lives.  What is the equivalent of a pilgrim's sackcloth and sandals?  What do I need to let go of?  What do I at least desire to desire to let go of?  I like to think Ignatius was thinking and praying about this over this long journey along the same road we are walking towards Montserrat, perhaps talking as he did to the Lord's mother before whom he would lay down his sword.  And, like all of us, it was a struggle relying on grace and not so dramatic as all that but all part of the desire for the 'magis', for what gives greater glory to God and his creation, that is the call planted in our hearts as Christians.  So it was a great grace to walk these 26 kilometres today along that same road to Igualada and to celebrate Mass together at the 12th century hermitage chapel of St James where Ignatius surely prayed on the way.  In the Mass Fr Trieu reminded us of the popularity today of praying to angels as intermediaries as we celebrated the Feast of Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.  I suppose that speaks of how, however 'secular' our culture is portrayed to be, in our own time so removed from Ignatius', many recognise our lives are in ways we cannot understand not entirely in our hands.  Rather there is a journey all of us are on which requires us to ask why we do what we do, why we were made with our gifts, our circumstances, our vulnerabilities, and to discern how we live the life we are destined to live.  Maybe there's more to Ignatius 'the pilgrim' than at first meets the eye...