Pondering Pilgrimage Participation

We were in Costa Rica on August 2, which is the Feast of Our Lady of the Angels, honoring the country’s patron saint, popularly known as La Negrita. It’s estimated that as many as two million people—out of a population of 5.5 million people—participate in the Virgen de los Ángeles pilgrimage each year. That’s 40 percent of the country! Roads leading into Cartago (the old capital city) are overwhelmed, and part of how we ended up talking about the pilgrimage was our bus driver’s concern that we might encounter some of that traffic.

We didn’t encounter the traffic, but we did see several groups of people walking along the side of the road. (Unfortunately, I never had my phone in hand quickly enough to get a picture, so the picture above is of the Catholic church in La Fortuna, in another area of the country.)

Many people walk the 22 kilometers (13+ miles) from San Jose, the modern capital, to the Catholic Basilica in Cartago. More travel by foot over several days from across Costa Rica (which is the size of West Virginia) to Cartago. The pilgrimage is called Romería.

I’ve mentioned two New Mexico pilgrimages in an earlier post on pilgrimage. There’s the pilgrimage to Tomé Hill, south of Albuquerque, which I participated in when I lived there. There’s also the more well-known El Santuario de Chimayó, which I most recently visited in May on my way to Colorado. I hadn’t been there in ten years, and a lot had changed.

These pilgrimages are meant to be repeated, usually yearly, but others tend to be once-in-a-lifetime experiences. One of my fellow travelers in Costa Rica is planning to walk part of the Camino de Compostela in Europe next summer—something my aunt and several friends have also done. For Muslims, there’s the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. In Japan, there’s the Kumano Kodo, which, with the Camino, are the only UNESCO-recognized pilgrimage walks.

Over the course of human history, there have been pilgrimage routes to many places. One recently retired friend and his wife have taken several weeks-long pilgrimage hikes over the years, and they are headed abroad to complete part two of their Jerusalem Way pilgrimage soon. In addition to Tomé Hill, I have been a pilgrim in the Holy Land on two occasions, though most of my travel was by plane and bus!

There are also many ways to participate in pilgrimage. That fellow traveler I met in Costa Rica invited me to consider joining the Camino pilgrimage she and her friend are taking next summer. After prayerful discernment, I’m not feeling the call to do that. I sense that my camino right now needs to be more internal, as God is inviting me into a therapeutic season of remembering, processing, and releasing.

What does pilgrimage mean to you? What pilgrimages have you participated in—or longed to do but haven’t? How has a pilgrimage or other travel shifted your perspective or altered your relationship with the Divine?