A Canterbury Pilgrimage

A Canterbury Pilgrimage

J. Scott Jackson and Leah Gregg

This past January, we traveled to England to visit the Canterbury Cathedral.

The two of us had traveled separately to Canterbury before, many years ago, before we knew each other. Neither of us was raised in the Episcopal Church, though we both embraced the Anglican way as adults. But Canterbury is special for us in a distinctive way, for it is a birthplace of the Anglophone Christianity that has nourished and formed both of us.

With this trip, we hoped to connect or reconnect our own life stories with a larger one.

The Christian life, from beginning to end, requires living on the move, a pilgrimage by faith into that country we have never seen. Our model here is Abraham, who responded willingly to God’s call to leave the familiar comforts of his life in Mesopotamia to head for an as yet unknown destination (see Heb. 11:8-10). Though our journey of faith thrusts us into the unfamiliar, we know that we do not walk alone; like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, we travel in communion with a “great cloud of witnesses” (12:1)—the saints of God across countless generations. Our model and guide is Jesus himself, whose vocation culminated in his final pilgrimage from Galilee to Jerusalem, where he would endure rejection, shame, suffering, and death “for the sake of the joy that was set before him” (12:2).

Our fundamental journey is a spiritual one; still, physical travel can play a crucial role in the life of faith. Exploring new places and meeting new people challenges our preconceptions and expands our vision for life, offering us a new perspective on our everyday lives at home.

View of the Cathedral

Photo: J. Scott Jackson

The goal for pilgrims is not the same as the voyeurism of the tourist, who seeks to capture or domesticate the otherness of distant places by collecting photographs for a slideshow or trinkets for the mantelpiece. As pilgrims, we submit to the belief that God may be acting in places, in people, and in ways we have never imagined, and we enter in a small way into that saving drama.

For 1400 years— since Canterbury’s first archbishop, the Roman missionary Augustine, first landed on the southern shores of Kent and founded a cathedral and monastery—pilgrims have sought peace, comfort, and strength on these sacred grounds.

Two aspects of this trip, in particular, affected us—we were moved by the warm hospitality of our hosts, who greet travelers from all over the world on a daily basis, and we were inspired by joining in prayer with a community that has worshipped at this site for 1400 years. ♦

J. Scott Jackson is a writer and inde pendent scholar, and Leah Gregg is an outreach and campus minister. They live with their son in Northamp ton and are members of Christ Church Cathedral in Springfield.