The Sacred Journey: The Ancient Practices

When you imagine a book on Pilgrimage as a Christian practice, I imagine many of us would anticipate a romantic, beautiful, sweeping celebration of the pilgrimage of all things–how we are all pilgrims and how we might our lives as they are with pilgrim eyes. The book would be sweet and inspiring and encourage us to take the stairs instead of drive, be mindful as you walk to the bathroom each morning, or maybe commute with others to form a sort of pilgrim band.

This is not that book.

“The Sacred Journey” by Charles Foster is a provocative, rowdy, and challenging book that is drenched with the sweat, embodiment, and surprise that accompany real, true pilgrimage. It is devoid of sentimentality and sweetness. It refuses to be nice. It revels in smashing your theological assumptions and comforts in your life. This is not your mother's pilgrimage book.

Foster is clear: the whole “metaphorical pilgrimage” thing is BS. He actually wants you to leave your home and job and go “pilgrim” somewhere by foot and he adamantly believes there are depths of human/spiritual/relational life that cannot be reached otherwise.

Unexpectedly this book has a villain: Gnosticism–specifically its dualistic separation of body and spirit, which demeans or neglects our embodied physical lives for the sake of some abstract “spiritual” ideas. The book has no time for this and is on the hunt for every vestige of this in our lives, our churches, and our theology. It proposes that the best medicine for Gnosticism is pilgrimage: going to a place you do not know and walking for enough days that it grinds away all disembodied spiritual ideas. Memorably, Foster writes:

“The physical pilgrim has a number of advantages over the metaphorical pilgrim. He necessarily travels light, unless he is foolish enough to go in a car. He will find that he doesn't need as much as he thought he did. His ties with the tedious fripperies of life will loosen, and he will learn new pleasures—the pleasures of relationship, of rain, of conversation, of silence, of exhaustion. Simple food will have a taste that he could never have dreamed of in his Burger King days. Soon gnosticism will seem ridiculous. It is hard to believe that the only important thing about you is your spirit when you are straining in the bushes with amoebic dysentery, or if you eat the cheese at a farm I know in the antiLebanon range.”

I hope you can see there that Foster's writing is still moving and beautiful, even as he seeks to gut punch you out of your stupor. His approach and tone may alienate a lot of people. He is brash, speaks in absolutes, overstates his case, and (lovingly, but hilariously) mocks people who may disagree with him. But he is also funny, a great storyteller, self-deprecating, and maintains a universal affection for the dignity inherent in every single human person.

I started reading this book as my wife and I were planning our first pilgrimage, walking the Portuguese route of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. I didn't finish it before we left. So I continued reading it on the road, reading it out loud to my wife as we walked the varied terrain. It was a remarkable reading experience, as its claims (even some I was skeptical of) were being verified in real time as the days wore on.

In the book, Foster first deconstructs the Gnostic tendencies in our faith: our hymns, our theology, our tendency to spiritualize deeply embodied biblical realities into mere metaphor. He surveys the pilgrimage ideas and practices of many faiths pointing out that, on one hand, they are remarkably consistent with Christianity in how they speak of pilgrimage and its effects; however, Christianity is unique in its emphasis on how someone is changed by the journey itself, de-emphasizing the destination. Christianity has no Mecca, where people just have to get to in order to meet God. Rather, God himself is a wanderer and is found along the pilgrim way, not in any particular place. But we still have to go. We cannot have the “pilgrim way” in our minds or at our desks.

Foster continues with a survey of the entire Bible to show how God's people–and indeed, God himself, even in Jesus–have always been at their core pilgrims. He argues that bad things happen when people stop moving and they begin to settle. They begin to ignore the people and things on the margins, they collect more things and cling to them ever more tightly, they grow even more scared of death, and they become violent, angry, anxious, and full of prejudice and bias.

With the theology established, Foster acts as our guide for going on pilgrimage. He gives fairly practical steps and guidelines for each stage of going on a pilgrimage, and offers incredibly realistic depictions of what to expect externally and internally as we go. Along the way, he gives accounts from other pilgrims, ancient and modern, and discusses how church history has seen each aspect of pilgrimage, in both healthy and unhealthy ways.

The last three concluding chapters were the only real disappointment for me. They feel a little rushed and left me desiring more. Foster talks about the experience of returning home after pilgrimage–its disappointment, temptations, and possibility–and encourages us to just sort of figure it out on our own. Fair enough, but a little more guidance could have been helpful.

He then ends with two short chapters that seem more like consolations to his editor who felt like they needed to be there: one acknowledges and “responds” (barely) to people that criticize pilgrimage or feel like it's unnecessary; the other goes ahead and acknowledges there are some ways people can experience this pilgrimage mindset without, you know, actually going on pilgrimage. Again, they are brief and feel a little out of place, but they do no detract from the value of this book overall.

I cannot stress how gritty and realistic this book is. He romanticizes and sanitizes nothing, even as he is absolutely clear on the beauty and effects that pilgrimage offers. He wants to shake us out of our addiction to comfort, attachment to things, avoidance of the margins, and anemic theological sentimentalities. And he doesn't care how brash and loud he has to be to do it.

Phyllis Tickle, the editor for this series, writes in the foreword that she knew it was a risk to choose Foster to write this book. She says, “Let there be no mistake, though. Foster pulls no punches. Every one of you who reads this book will find at least one thing you totally disagree with and whole handful of those you want to question. Please do so.”

But she is also unequivocal in her ultimate judgment: “What you are now holding is, I suspect, as near a masterpiece of pilgrimage writing as we have ever seen. It certainly is, hands down and far away, the best book on pilgrimage I have ever seen.”

I couldn't agree more. It is not in any way the book I expected to read when I pulled it off my shelf in anticipation of my own pilgrimage. Masterfully, it embodies its own thesis. The book is a journey through the entire Bible, church history, and global geography. It is dusty, meandering, and often uphill. Foster is an eccentric companion with a lifetime of crazy experiences and stories. I still remain skeptical of a lot of what he has said.

And yet... I still leave this book challenged and changed, with new eyes and new stirrings to get back on the road once more.