O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
creeping things innumerable are there,
living things both small and great.
There go the ships,
and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.
These all look to you
to give them their food in due season;
when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit,they are created;
and you renew the face of the ground.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
may the Lord rejoice in his works—
who looks on the earth and it trembles,
who touches the mountains and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
Psalm 104:-24-33 (NRSV)

In our online Bible Study last week, we talked about journey (you can see the reflection video on our YouTube channel here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJSdzmbbVIM). Today, Trystan talks about Pilgrimage. Pilgrimage was a literal Christian journey, often to Holy sites. Pilgrimages were often done on foot, often taking weeks or months. Sometimes, even years. People would take up Pilgrimages from Britain all the way to Jerusalem. As these routes became arduous and increasingly dangerous, holy sites closer to home began to appear. Trystan talks about their experience of walking a pilgrimage route that is quite close to us, walking from Basingwerk Abby near Hollywell to the Bardsey Island on the far side of the Llyn peninsular. The route itself is around 140 miles, and is one that is still undertaken today. There are even groups in the diocese of St. Asaph dedicated to walking the route regularly, where people can join for all of it, or some of it. There are people who walk the route in segments, covering it piecemeal over years.

Walking has become much more important during the pandemic. Even those of us who are resistant to the idea of walking (like myself) have found ourselves driven out into nature to simply be somewhere that wasn’t the house or the garden. Perhaps not quite the pilgrimages of old, and I definitely didn’t go barefoot, but there was something quite spiritual about seeking silence after the business of a full house.

That sense of the God’s presence in the mundane is what John Henry Newman called the ‘illative sense’. Throughout the Old Testament and the Psalms, you can find examples of writers basking ecstatically in the glory of creation – both it’s magnificent terror, and it’s wondrous beauty. In the extract from the psalm above, you see the most terrifying creature known to the ancient Israelites: the Leviathan, and here we see it playing (sporting) in the sea. They see even in the warnings of volcanic eruptions (smoking mountains) the wonder of the power of God.

Trystan notes that walking is often referred hiking or rambling, though on their pilgrimage they adopted the word ‘sauntering’. A saunter is normally a slow walk, going nowhere in particular. However, Trystan was taken by the etymology (source of the word) given by the poet henry David Thoreau. In the Middle Ages, Thoreau claimed, walkers would pass themselves off as pilgrims as they passed through villages by saying they were going to ‘A la sainte terre’ – to the Holy Land. These walkers because known as ‘sante-terre-ers’, and so, saunterers. Journeying, and in this case walking, takes us always towards the Holy Land – so long as we keep our eyes open to God’s presence all around us.