The Pilgrims Way

Whilst walking one day last summer along the final stretch of the Pilgrims Way to Canterbury I came across a noticeboard with information about an interesting-sounding event.

The noticeboard announced that this was the spot where pilgrims would have got their first sight of the cathedral, seven and a half miles away. It also mentioned an annual pilgrimage from London to Canterbury over the May Bank Holiday weekend. It was organised by St-Martin-in-the Fields church to raise funds for The Connection, a homelessness project next to the church, and it partly followed the original Pilgrims Way, with three overnight stops in church halls en route.

My wife Yim Soon and I duly found ourselves and our sleeping bags (so too my guitar) in the courtyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields on May 26th 2023, the feast day of St Augustine of Canterbury. There were seventy of us setting off to walk the seventy-four miles, firstly along the busy streets of London and then through the beautiful Kent countryside, and we would be more than one hundred pilgrims by the time we reached Canterbury. Group leaders had been assigned and we chose our group according to pace.

There were eight in my 'fast' group, and we were as varied in personalities and backgrounds as a group can be. I was a bit unsure at first what I'd got myself into. There was one man who spoke incessantly, another who had his face covered with a scarf and didn't say anything at all, and a third who was wearing a superhero costume and whose only words seemed to be to tell others off if they were falling behind! 'Are these the people I'll be with day and night for four days?' I asked myself, rather uncharitably, and I even began to hatch a plan to change group the following day! But that's part of the rich experience of pilgrimage, and I would begin to connect with each person as the day wore on. Just as with Chaucer's pilgrims, a disparate bunch of characters had been thrown together on a long-distance walk. And by some miraculous process those characters slowly but surely began to form into a little community.

As I always find on pilgrimage, the most fascinating conversations are had, and sometimes they come as if from nowhere. So too are the most remarkable connections uncovered. Clarissa in my group had asked what had brought me and I told her about seeing the noticeboard. She mentioned that to Keith, our group leader, and he told me with pleasure that it was he who had conceived of the idea for that noticeboard.

I awoke the following morning in the slightly quirky but lovely church of St Mary the Virgin in Swanley as the first rays of light were appearing through the windows. That meant that I had managed, despite lying in a thin sleeping bag on a hard floor and amidst a cacophony of noise, to get two or three hours' sleep. It was enough; it was more than enough. One of the realisations of pilgrimage is how satisfied we can be with so little. I got dressed and went outside and saw on a clock that it was just 4.30 a.m. I realised that we were right in the centre of Swanley. It's probably not renowned as being the prettiest town in Britain but as I wandered its empty streets and listened to the birds and noticed the trees in leaf and spotted the long views over the fields towards the M25, it was the most beautiful place in the world. 'Another day in paradise,' I said to myself.

As I'm currently writing a book about pilgrimage I was keen to explore with people the difference, if any, between a pilgrimage and a long-distance walk. Certainly there is much in common. You walk, you carry your world for that day in a backpack, you meet people along the way and you have the most profound conversations. Indeed there is something about the act of walking together which draws out our story. We are in a kind of liminal space. We're away from our normal routines and out of our comfort zone, and we find ourselves in an almost in-between kind of world. We become a little bit marginal, and the most incredible and miraculous things can happen on those margins.

Several people commented to me how they find the experience of walking, eating and sleeping together a great 'leveller.' I counted five doctors in the group and there were at least the same amount of men who had themselves experienced homelessness and had needed the support of The Connection. For those few days of walking we were united in our sore feet and our blisters, and our joys and our irritations, and our need of food and shelter.

I had some fascinating talks with Kate (one of the doctors!). I suggested that the fact that we'd often on a pilgrimage route like the Camino to Santiago never see the person again was another key element of the rich and deep exchange that takes place. She agreed and said that when we walk together we have no past and no future. There is only a present, and that possibly makes us more receptive to things. Kate concluded that pilgrimage is "a little glimpse of heaven!"

But what makes a pilgrimage different to a long-distance walk? At our evening service at Aylesford Priory on the Saturday, one of the friars summed it up succinctly and well. "It's not just a journey," he said, "it's a bringing of our hopes and our dreams and our pains and our sufferings to a holy place." We were then treated again to the sublime voices of the little impromptu St Martins choir (who had also sung in the church at Swanley), singing in parts a sacred piece from the Tudor period, and I returned happily to the hall for yet more food. We ate very well over those days, and how my spirit and my stomach were fed!

We arrived at Canterbury cathedral on the Monday for a very moving service in the crypt. We then processed, singing, to the cloister where Dean David placed flowers on the grave of Dick Shepherd. Dick had been rector of St Martins at the time of the First World War and he had provided a ministry to soldiers going to or returning from the Trenches and, after the war, to homeless ex-soldiers.

There was yet more divine singing, this time from the whole of the St Martins choir, and then we went our separate ways. Many of us, like countless pilgrims over the ages, would have been transformed in some mysterious way by the experience. We had journeyed together and arrived safely at our holy place, we had visited holy places en route, and we had taken part in religious ritual. It is these three things, I concluded, that make a pilgrimage distinct from a long-distance walk. Hopefully too we would go back to our 'normal' lives with our eyes and our hearts a little bit more open to the beauty and the miracles that are to be found all around us, and not just at places designated as being holy.