“Bro, you stole my spot,” mumbled Marc at half past midnight on the steps of the Gesu, the main Jesuit church in downtown Montreal.

“I am so sorry! So sorry!” I quickly replied wrapped in a tarp on some cardboard.

“Oh, did I wake you up?”

“Sort of”

“Oh, well this is my spot but the door over is free. No one sleeps there. You’ll be safe”

What ensued was a late night conversation on the last night of my pilgrimage; a pilgrimage that changed me.

Steps of he Gesu, Montreal. Source: normframpton.com

Each May in the Montreal Novitiate, the first year novices go out the door with $75 dollars, a one-way bus ticket, and a lot of prayers from both their moms and their novitiate formators. The three rules: stay on continental North America, come back at the end of May, and contact the novice master once a week with the simple statement, “I am still alive and I am currently at _______ .”

This follows what St. Ignatius wrote in the Constitutions. That it would be good for novices to make “a pilgrimage without money and even in begging from door to door at appropriate times, for the love of God our Lord, in order to grow accustomed to discomfort in food and lodging. Thus too the candidate, through abandoning all the reliance which he could have in money or other created things, may with genuine faith and intense love place his reliance entirely in his Creator and Lord.[1]”

My pilgrimage took me from New York to Pennsylvania to Virginia to Washington DC then to Los Angeles to San Diego and back to Toronto before I made my way home to Montreal. I traveled by foot, ferry, hitch-hiking, carpooling, bus, plane, and train. As you can probably tell; by whatever means the Lord provided for me!

It is instinctive to be interested in places when the question of pilgrimages come up. The key grace though is often not the physical shrines that one visits and prays at but rather the people one encounters during the pilgrimage. The journey is always more exciting than the destination.

I remember trying to get to Washington D.C. to the Basilica of the National Shrine to the Immaculate Conception for Mass one Sunday from Leesburg ,Virginia (about an hour away.) Unfortunately, there is no public transit on Sunday as I learned at 7:30am that morning. So, it was back to asking at the gas station for a ride. I realize within the first 10 minutes that very few people are awake at 7:40am in the morning. At 7:45am a really nice Porsche pulls in, and a tall guy with shades starts filling up. I don’t even bother asking him.

Source: naationalshrine.com

A few more people pull in but are all going the opposite direction supposedly. The guy with the Porsche is now standing next to me eating some bananas. So I decide to ask him if he is heading to D.C. Of course, he isn’t (and even if he was, he would be a cheap rich guy like them all I thought). He was friendly though and asked me what I was up to. So, I explained the pilgrimage. He closed the conversation with, “Good luck and God Bless!” At this point in the pilgrimage, one really starts to understand what Ignatius meant by “Love is shown more by deeds than by words!”

Five minutes later though, he pulls up to me, rolls down the window, and says, “Hop in.” Of course, I do not understand as he just told me he was headed the other direction. He explains he is going to DC and was just being cautious. So, after clarifying that I was not going to kill, rob, or do anything suspicious (very clearly telling me that he had no cash on him) we sped off down the highway.

The joke was that this experience was not really walking with Christ poor as we raced down the empty highway. What ensued was a very spiritual conversation in which God used both of us to encounter God in the other.

And perhaps that what pilgrimage is all about – letting God open the individual to encountering Him in another. Who that “other” is, is guaranteed to be a surprise. I have met homeless, truckers, single moms, drug addicts, rich, poor, religious and non-religious. All who have taken care of me in some way over the course of my pilgrimage.

Source: gettyimages.com

Another key insight is that I was on a pilgrimage by choice, not a victim of bad circumstance. The situation of poverty during the pilgrimage is completely voluntary; whereas for many people the situation we find ourselves in during pilgrimage is their reality. This fact faced me hard while I took the train from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles.

On the train, I met a single mother who had immigrated from Guatemala with her young son. They were moving from Florida to California without a secure idea of their housing conditions nor if she could find a job to support them. At the end of the her strength, she often was crying out of exhaustion, stress, and gratitude for our strange community that formed on the train.

Source: videoflicks.com

This community was made up of a party-animal construction worker, an ex-drug dealer with a big heart, a rough character, and a smoker mother with a 20 month year old (whom I ended up babysitting at midnight during the smoke break) and myself. An odd bunch, but we were a community of support nonetheless.

Actually more than support; that train ride was the time I laughed the most during the entire trip! Still, it was heart-breaking to witness the impoverished circumstances of pilgrimage lived out in real life. A lesson that will live with me for life.

Source:: michaelbayphoto.com

Today I continue on this pilgrimage. A pilgrimage perhaps not to a defined place or in dire circumstances, but rather the pilgrimage to the shrine of the next person to cross my path.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[1] Ganss, G. E. (1970). Saint Ignatius of Loyola: The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. [67] Institute of Jesuit Sources.