The Way Is Made by Walking

A few years ago I read a book by that title — The Way Is Made by Walking — written by a man who walked the entire El Camino de Santiago. An ancient pilgrimage route across northern Spain, ending at the cathedral of Saint James. Hundreds of miles on foot. Days bleeding into weeks. The destination known, but the journey anything but.

It stayed with me.

And then I came across a different kind of pilgrimage altogether. The ancient Celtic practice of peregrination — a journey taken without knowing the final destination. You simply… set out.

The writer John Philip Newell describes it this way. It often involved setting sail from one's homeland — from what was known and comfortable toward what was unknown and challenging. It was sometimes called seeking the place of one's resurrection. Leaving the familiar in order to experience new birth. Dying to the boundaries and security of home in order to be alive to what you had never imagined before.

No map. No guaranteed outcome. Just the willingness to go.

A pilgrimage doesn't always involve a physical journey, of course. It has also long been a metaphor for something that happens on the inside — a movement of the soul toward something God is calling us into.

And I want to ask you a question today that I find myself sitting with regularly:

Is there a pilgrimage God might be calling you toward?

Maybe it is a movement deeper into your own faith — a willingness to ask harder questions, to sit with more uncertainty, to go further in than you have allowed yourself to go before.

Maybe it is a journey toward healing — toward something that has hardened or been wounded in you over the years, something that has needed tending for a long time.

Maybe it is a calling outward — to engage the world in some new way. To serve, to give, to create, to respond to a need that will not stop pulling at you.

Sometimes that calling announces itself quietly. A story you hear that opens something up. An image that won't leave you alone. A moment when you think: somebody should do something about this. Or — I have to find a way to make sense of this. To redeem it.

Those moments are worth paying attention to. They are often the beginning of something.

The Celtic pilgrims set out without knowing exactly where they were going. What they trusted was not the destination — but the One who was leading them there.

My prayer for you is simply this: may you be open. Open to the calling. Open to the journey. Open to wherever the way leads next.

Prayer: O God, you are always beckoning us forward — deeper, further, into more than we have yet imagined. Give us the courage to set out. To leave behind what is comfortable when you are calling us toward something new. May our dreams and longings be ever in tune with yours. And may we trust, even when we cannot see the destination, that you know the way. In Jesus' name. Amen.

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