"PILGRIMAGE: a word from another time, perhaps—and yet perhaps an answer to the needs of today!" I found myself thinking the other day while sorting through the pages of "Insieme."
Congresses, study days, symposiums, round tables, seminars, debates of every kind! What profession, what political movement, what group doesn't have its days of gathering? They're regional, national, international, worldwide!
This immense hunger to come together, to exchange ideas, emerges from everywhere.
So isn't a pilgrimage—which is a meeting—also a response to the reality of 1978?
And besides, have we ever seen so many travel agencies?"
Who doesn't organize a group outing? How many set off on a journey on Sunday? Who doesn't dream of crossing a border, or save money to make that dream real? Travel truly seems to answer a vital hunger we feel more keenly every day.
So isn't the pilgrim—this traveler—a person of our time?
I thought my reflections were finished there. But then my mind turned backward, to look at all these efforts to meet in today's world: thousands of speeches delivered, tons of printed paper, translators, moderators, microphones, misunderstandings, words and words, millions of words.
Against this glut of words, against the limits of what words can do, doesn't a real need emerge—the need to restore the gesture, the act of "living together," the act of "opening our eyes"?
Isn't a pilgrimage a way to open the path of encounter to those who have no voice, and to bring the rest of us back to what matters—we who are glutted with words?
Nicole Schulthes, 1978