INTRODUCTION

      ‘Now is the time to go on pilgrimage.’ So said Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, and now does indeed seem to be the time when many people are going on pilgrimage. Record numbers of people are travelling to Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela. Cathedrals report burgeoning visitor numbers. Eighty-six percent of the British population go into a church for some reason or other during the year.

      There is something quite fundamental to human well-being about travelling somewhere together. People do it for many different reasons, but usually physical exercise combines with personal, intellectual and spiritual refreshment. There is a communal dimension as well as the opportunity to ponder alone.

      For Christians and other believers pilgrimage is a time to be with God in order to be more fully in life. It reflects in miniature the journey we take with God from birth to death, and then on to the heavenly city. Pilgrimage is therefore an inward journey as well as an outward one. Because it’s different from normal life pilgrimage puts us somewhat off-balance, and therefore, perhaps, we are more open to God.

      The purpose of this small book is to put into the hands of today’s pilgrims some prayers and reflections to make the journey more rewarding. They can be used at the beginning, middle and end of each day or at the beginning, middle and end of the whole pilgrimage, always remembering that our entire life is actually a pilgrimage with and towards God.

      May these prayers enrich the journey.

       +John Pritchard

       Bishop of Oxford

       TO BE A PILGRIM

       The idea of pilgrimage has a certain romance, but it actually emerges from a robust and demanding source – the intentional, and often challenging, journeys made by people of faith to significant places. Pilgrim, beware! The habit of pilgrimage has been well known for as long as faithful people have looked for a deeper encounter with God, whether travelling to the Promised Land, to Jerusalem, to the places of medieval pilgrimage or to a nearby cathedral in the present day. There is a deep and liberating compulsion in huge numbers of people ‘to be a pilgrim’.

      I was glad when they said to me,

      ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’

      Our feet are standing, within your gates, O Jerusalem.

      Jerusalem – built as a city

      that is bound firmly together.

      To it the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord,

      as was decreed for Israel,

      to give thanks to the name

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