More or Less

As we walked along the Via Francigena toward the small town of Ponte a Cappiano, we encountered a group of people on bicycles. “Are you pilgrims?” we asked. One of them replied: “More or less.” I knew, right away, that he was speaking the truth. It had nothing to do with the fact that they were peddling and we were walking. For me, the biker’s answer underscored the fact that none of us could claim to be purists when it came to our pilgrim identity. Even before leaving home, I came to this conclusion after reading and discussing an essay by Doris Donnelly called “Pilgrims and Tourists: Conflicting Metaphors for the Christian Journey to God.” When the author laid out clear distinctions between the orientation of a pilgrim and a tourist in the way we make our own journey through life, I kept thinking about how the two co-exist within me every day. Even on this very intentional pilgrim journey to Rome, I am still acting like a tourist in many times and places along the way. And, the flow of this can go in both directions. In Maggie Dawn’s book, “The Accidental Pilgrim,” she talks about what it is like to embark on a journey as a tourist and then discover that you really are a pilgrim. For her, it happened on a trip to Israel. The discovery that she was really a pilgrim along with the others in her group was, at first, unsettling. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be referred to as a pilgrim,” she wrote, “but then I remembered that Chaucer’s entire company of pilgrims, including – or perhaps especially – the professionally religious ones, had mixed motives.” All of this brings me back to that brilliant answer the biker gave to our question. It will serve to both inspire and humble me on the road that lies ahead.