The Community of the Saints

A traditional pilgrimage, in a medieval sense, often involves visiting the shrine of a saint. Saints are people throughout history who have been recognized as leading exemplary, holy lives.  Forest writes, "Reading the lives of the saints, one finds people who lived in poverty, served the homeless, devoted their lives to prayer, withdrew from worldly society, [and who] died rather than compromise their faith..." (55). These were unusual people who had a passion for God:

They were ascetic where we are hedonistic, spiritual where we are materialistic, self-sacrificing where we are self-indulging, God-centered where we are self-centered, focused where we are diffuse, single in purpose where we are scattered, absolute where we are relativistic, open-handed where we are acquisitive, full of gratitude where we are full of complaint... We do not want to live their lives, but we want very much something they seemed to have had - something we can't quite put our finger on.  Perhaps we want their clarity.  They were clear in their minds and hearts about the ultimate purpose and meaning of life. (Taylor, 74-75)

A shrine is a place recognized as holy through some sort of connection to a saint. Sometimes this connection is historical: the shrine is at a place where the saint once lived, worked or walked. At other times a shrine is associated with a saint because of a relic that is kept at that location: a personal item that either belonged to or that was part of the body of the saint.   Shrines play an important role in the tradition of pilgrimage, since they are places where people can experience "the visual and tactile embodiment of a reality other and higher than themselves, not just in a generalized sense of 'the holy', but in the form of contact with the continuing presence of the great departed" (Webb, ix).  They are places that allow us "to recall and revisit those experiences of great insight and human transformation" (O'Brien, 39).  The presence of relics at these locations "help make real what before may have seemed merely mythological.  They deepen relationships between us and those who have gone before us" (Forest, 51).  The shrine and its relics provide a tangible experience of the holy. No longer does God seem so far away because we are in the presence of those whose lives were transformed by the power of God.  The saints, for the pilgrim, are a link to the presence of God here on Earth. 

For hundreds if not thousands of years, saints have been both an inspiration and a companion for the pilgrim. Their lives inspire us to seek out places where their presence on Earth lingers. "The death of saints seems only to make them more present among the living. It is not simply that their memory is persistent, but that they become a leaven in many other lives. Their pilgrimage becomes intertwined with the pilgrimages of others" (Forest, 67).  Taylor writes, "the hope provided by the lives of saints comes not because they are unfallen but because being fallen does not prevent them from living faithful and powerful lives" (27).  On the journey, saints can become our companions.  They are a "cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1) whose lives inspire our steps as we seek to obtain even just a little bit of the clarity that they possessed regarding their own identities in relation to God.