Article

Belief

Change

13 May 2024

6 min read

What makes a journey a pilgrimage?

Travel may broaden the mind, but pilgrimage can nourish a soul.

Graeme Holdsworth

Graeme is a vicar of Marsden and Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire. He also cycles and juggles.

A country lane runs down a gentle hill between green and yellow fields under a cloud dappled sky.

The fields of Hertfordshire

Graeme Holdsworth.

On the recent anniversary of Chaucer’s pilgrims setting off to Canterbury, the British Pilgrimage Trust held a symposium on apocalyptic pilgrimage and spiritual tourism, in a London church – St James Clerkenwell. Nick Jones, the Editor of Seen & Unseen knows of my predilection for a spiritual aspect to travel, and recommended I go along. The only problem with his recommendation was that I live in West Yorkshire, and London seemed like an expensive journey for an evening sat quietly on church pews.

My nearest church is St James in Slaithwaite, and as St James is the patron saint of pilgrimages, it seemed obvious to turn the journey into a pilgrimage. The shortest walking distance is 185 miles and would take me a month to walk. Kosuke Koyama wrote that the speed of love is three miles an hour, the speed God walks. However, God has an eternity to travel, and I had to be back to lead Holy Communion the following Sunday. Cycling (the cheapest, easiest, and finest form of travel) would take me two days, if I took it easy and stayed in a hotel halfway.

I love the isolation of these high places, the wilderness-ness; it is a place for crying out, and place where only God is listening.

Not every journey is a pilgrimage. Sometimes people are just travelling. What would make this a pilgrimage rather than simply a long bicycle ride? I believe it is the intention of the heart that makes the difference - what are pilgrims hoping to achieve? Travel tends to broaden the mind, but a pilgrimage is something that might nourish a soul. There is no suggestion that every pilgrimage is religious, but when people undertake pilgrimages they are making a statement that they’re looking for something beyond themselves. For those who are religious, they’ve made space to meet God in the full knowledge that they may be disappointed. Dr Paula Gooder wrote that Christian faith sometimes focusses rather heavily on the state of a person’s soul, neglecting the state of their body. I hoped to enjoy some beautiful cycling, to re-engage with physical-prayer, and to worship God with my heart, soul, mind and strength in a whole body way. Racing cyclist Jens Voigt famously said, “Shut up legs” when the lactic acid began to burn, but what if my legs are speaking a non-verbal language understood by their creator God? Then let them shout: let the hydrolysis of adenosine triphosphate be my body praying ceaselessly, without words.

The beginning of my pilgrimage took me south and east along the edge of the Peak District. In my planning I had relied on cycling heat-maps to find the roads cyclists preferred. As I climbed a steep hill, I remembered that cyclists are a stupid bunch who often go out and find the hardest roads to cycle. I paused for breath at the top of the climb from High Bradfield; where the Agden, Dale Dike, and Strines reservoirs were stacked up into the distance, and the call of peewits pierced through the noise of the wind. I love the isolation of these high places, the wilderness-ness; it is a place for crying out, and place where only God is listening.

Bolsover castle was the last serious climb of the day, and from this point on the landscape became a lot gentler. Along the ridge after Bolsover, skirting around the west of Mansfield, I noticed the call of Skylarks, and that the fields had changed from drystone walled moorland to green and yellow crops, surrounded by hedgerows. Houses now had thatched roofs rather than the slate tiles of West Yorkshire. I also began to notice churches: Cottage-core villages with pretty gardens and pubs-on-the-green, their church buildings that seem well-kept, giving rural communities a sense of identity. It was around 7pm when I reached a Peterborough hotel.

Pilgrimages are often built around the destination, but I’ve found a real joy in the interim moment; the time between setting off and arriving.

Getting up in the morning after a long day of physical exercise is not easy. Although this day would bring an end to my mini-pilgrimage, I was looking forward to the symposium and meeting other pilgrims. Evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral was to begin at 5pm, and needed an early start to make sure I would arrive in time.

I passed a roadside marker with the distances to Huntingdon and London painted black on a white stone. The Milestone Society’ seeks to preserve these way markers which have a history stretching back to Roman times. I felt a sense of historical connection to those who would have travelled before me.

There was next to no traffic and I was alone with my thoughts and the songs I sing to myself when I’m happy. One of the lovely things about cycling is the activity itself: we’re doing the thing we want to do, and when we’ve finished we will no longer be doing the thing we want to do. Pilgrimages are often built around the destination, but I’ve found a real joy in the interim moment; the time between setting off and arriving.

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Graeme Holdsworth

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3 min read

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The traffic was increasing as I closed in on London, and I noticed another change in the housing. Here in the home counties the houses were getting a lot larger, further back from the road, and protected by gates and security systems. The sense of community that came from closely packed thatched cottages around an ancient church building was disappearing. Then suddenly there was an exponential shift in the cycling experience as I entered Enfield: cars, scooters, cyclists, motorbikes. The sound, and visual intensity of city living humanity swamped my senses.

I’m glad I didn’t just catch a train to London. I felt that I’d remembered the diversity of English countryside, the freedom of long-distance cycling, and made connections with like-minded pilgrims. I also refreshed my spiritual practice of physical prayer, and time alone with God in the wilderness.

It was about 2:30pm when I checked into my hotel near Kings Cross, unpacked the clothes I’d brought with me and freshened up before taking a walk south to the Thames embankment. After a pie and pint in a London boozer, on the banks of the River Thames, I walked to St Paul’s Cathedral for Evensong, then joined a walking-pilgrimage back to St James in Clerkenwell. St James Slaithwaite to St James Clerkenwell completed, arriving in time for The British Pilgrimage Trust’s symposium of talks and singing. Among the wonderful speakers, it was a delight to hear historian Tom Holland as he spoke to the apocalyptic call: to be a pilgrim.

He spoke about Chaucer, pandemics, black death, and the community aspect of pilgrimages. He joked that academic historians tend to be squeamish about attributing too much credit to religious or spiritual experiences as driving forces behind historical events. However, spiritual and religious drivers are significant: in 1033 there was a massive pilgrimage from all over Europe to the holy land, which came with an apocalyptic anxiety as 1,000 years had passed since the death and resurrection of Jesus. I reflected that contemporary anxiety of apocalypse is less focussed on the return of Christ and more on trigger happy world leaders in Russia, Israel and Iran…but I wonder if there will be a similar Christian pilgrimage in 2033.

Read a full account of Graeme’s pilgrimage ride on his blog.

Find out more about the British Pilgrimage Trust’s routes and resources.

Column

Belief

Creed

Education

6 November 2025

4 min read

Theology isn’t just for believers – and that’s the problem

As spiritual curiosity among the young rises, let’s change how they explore it

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Quizzical-looking students look across a tutorial to others.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

The Cambridge don told us calmly but firmly in answer to a question, probably mine, that: “You don’t need to have a commitment to study theology here, but it helps.” It was 1972 and I looked around me. I was surrounded by young blokes, dare I say it, of a certain type – tall, pale-though-uninteresting, spotty and a bit chinless. Very much like me in fact in those respects but unlike me, I thought, in one key respect: Blimey, they’re all going to be vicars!

I ran a mile – well, about 100 – to study something more fun at a redbrick, something that was also being studied by young women, which was important for me at that moment.

Little did I know that I’d take a theology degree some 30 years later, when I trained for priesthood. And, as it happens, very much alongside women, though this column really isn’t about that.

What it is about is the lingering academic assumption that theology is for the committed, the faithful; that it’s vocational and for people who are called to make a career of it. I wanted to study it as an adolescent only because I was academically interested (yes, how we laugh now).

I’m with C.S. Lewis when he says faith is either a fraudulent trick or an absolute truth but can’t be anything in between (“He has not left that open to us”). Either way, I thought, that’s a great story, a curiosity for stories that led me to journalism, since the latter choice – absolute truth – seemed to be the matriculation requirement for theology at university. And the idea that theology is for committed Christians still prevails.

It’s been on the news agenda again lately that religious studies at A-level and theology in further education have been collapsing as course choices, even as Gen Z (18-28) has shown an increasing propensity for a return to faith and church-going – the “quiet revival”.

That apparent paradox may be explained in a number of ways. The current college generation may not equate religious interest with academic study (as I didn’t, in a way). It may be that young men, in particular, are drawn to church by a resurgent conservative Christian nationalism. Or it may simply be that a spiritual consciousness is seen as a self-improvement technique that gets dropped by their thirties.

But there’s another possibility. Maybe we’re just not teaching theology very well. Maybe, perish the thought, we’re making it boring. Perhaps it’s like wanting to make music as a child and being sat down in front of a blackboard to be taught theory, bars and crotchets and whatnot.

Maybe the young are interested in the subject but not in the Church Fathers, scriptural hermeneutics and ancient Greek. They may be intensely interested in whence our western ethics, morality and culture derive, but then they have history and philosophy for that. Theology is dying on its feet even as the young are wishing to make it live again.

I have a proposed solution and it’s this: Contextual Theology. This is a school that examines the meaning of religious faith in its contemporary cultural and social contexts. It values human experience – otherwise revelation – as a valid theological source and recognises that scripture emerges from its own cultural circumstances and must be viewed with reference to our own.

What Contextual Theology emphatically isn’t is an attempt to make theology “fit” post-modern mores and fads. The fount of divinity is unchangeable – impassable, as theologians say – but we’re invited to interpret it through the prism of the world in which we live. It’s not so much about how theology works in the world as how theology makes the world work.

Contextual Theology is as demanding as it is illuminating. It’s the degree I took, as it happens, when I trained for priesthood in the early Noughties and it never did me any harm (Discuss).

This isn’t a replacement theory for classical theology. We need to understand it in its ancient context to re-interpret it in our technocratic political climate. The curiosity of our young generation seems to suggest that’s an appealing prospect.

Yet search for a Contextual Theology degree course and you search in vain. They’re only available on courses for ministerial training (like mine), validated by a university rather than taught by it. That means you can only really study Contextual Theology if you’re training for ministry. Which takes me back to that summer of 1972.

As Graham Tomlin, of this parish, asserts, we need theologians as well as ministers if the quiet revival among the young is to be properly supported. But we need theologians of all sorts, classical and contextual.

I like to think of the theologian who, struck by lightning, arrives at the Pearly Gates. “But I taught that God sends famine and floods on all those who sin,” complains the theologian. “Ah,” replies St Peter, “but I think you took him out of context.”

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