12 August 2025
“Would you like to come on a pilgrimage?” I asked my four-year-old granddaughter while we were all holidaying together on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. Probably because she had no idea what I meant, she agreed, so we pinned our pink knitted scallop shells to our coats and set out, just the two of us.
Our first pause was on the threshold of our holiday cottage, where we discussed what it means to ‘Depart’. For someone just getting used to the idea of going to school, that had relevance. As we walked, we thought about ‘Rhythm’; we felt our hearts beating, we looked at the tide timetable, we agreed that just saying ‘Left foot, right foot’ over and over again can keep us going sometimes.
Then a new word as we considered ‘Horizons’ – very different here from at home. Big horizons can help us find our place in the world.
The habit of St. Cuthbert to escape from his monks to spend time alone on the tiny adjacent island led to a conversation about ‘Separation’ and how that can make us feel. Sometimes being away from other people is good, sometimes it feels lonely, but God is still there.
The little church houses a sculpture of monks carrying Cuthbert’s coffin – we studied their faces and thought about the ‘Devotion’ which led them to do this before we continued to another church with its tiny boiler room chapel, hidden down some steps at the back.
This was to be our place for ‘Prayer’ and it surprised me by being the favourite stop of the entire route – pilgrimage always offers the unexpected. I had to relearn the need to allow things to happen in God’s timing (and that of a four-year-old).
We paused in the Gospel Garden, where we sat in ‘Wonder’, surrounded by beauty, colour, scent and sound before finishing, as all good pilgrimages do, with hot chocolate and cakes in the Pilgrim Coffee Shop, sharing our pilgrim adventures with family members and noting that every journey’s end is the beginning of the next.