Understanding the Scope of the Church’s Mandate: Embracing a Pilgrim Consciousness for our Times
Pilgrimage is not just a spiritual praxis of self-awareness; it is also a sociological mode of being connected with the world beyond a person’s particular context. A pilgrim is also a student. She explores the world that opens up to her in a particular manner with such intensity and a naivete that allows her to soak in the experiences that open up to her senses as she traverses new social terrains. This naivete is grounded in a radical openness to the power of the Holy Spirit who orients the pilgrim to new encounters, awareness and consciousness to allow for new meanings and a sense of purpose to arise in the life of the pilgrim.
The experience of the pilgrim is radically a human condition even if one does not ground oneself in the domain of the spiritual. As social beings, each human person is inherently a pilgrim being. As a pilgrim being, the human person navigates the world by being open to all that the social world brings to its consciousness. This is the case even when the human person is opposed to the external influences from social stimuli surrounding her. To reject God or to see God as something to be curious about does not deny the fact that one is inherently a pilgrim being. Only through the curious wandering as a pilgrim does a person become aware of the richness of the life she is called to live and to embrace as part of the constituent marker of her existence.
To be a pilgrim is to embody two modes of existence – belonging and not-belonging. By entering the new social world, the pilgrim brings gifts from distant lands and cultures to the society she wanders into. Yet, because the vocation of a pilgrim is to embody a type of existential restlessness that refuses to be held captive by the orthodoxy of sameness, she must embody a not-belonging type of identity that allows her to delink from the orthodoxy of sameness that defines the already encountered world while linking at the same time to new social worlds that open up in the new horizon of encounters. It is these double modes of existence that defined how ancient Romans understood the pilgrim. According to Joan Watson, “Peregrini were those who lived among citizens of Rome but were not citizens themselves. They were protected but did not have the scope of rights accorded to citizens. They lived among citizens easily and usually unpersecuted but still set apart.”1
To be a pilgrim is to embody two modes of existence – belonging and not-belonging.”
But what does being a pilgrim have to do with being a church, especially for our times? In response to this question, permit me to invite us to reflect critically on what being a discerning church means from a pneumatological grounding. In His famous work, City of God, Saint Augustine begins by positioning the Christian community – the City of God as a community that “journeys as a pilgrim among sinners and lives by faith”(City of God, Book 1).2 . Augustine’s insight and the general understanding of a pilgrim have hidden qualities that define the pilgrim which are worth exploring. While the focus on a pilgrim within the Christian tradition may tend to shed light on turning away from the sinful realities of the secular world, the pilgrim must first embody a strong sense of discernment to see clearly and truly the world itself before she can decide to set her gaze on the new world that arises in and through a vision of the risen Christ. It is this grounding of discerning consciousness that is attained by the deployment of the senses as the Christian community encounters the world that instantiates the pneumatological turn in the faith life of the community. Furthermore, this entire process serves as the core of being church in the world by the followers of Christ. This point needs further explication.
The pilgrim must first embody a strong sense of discernment to see clearly and truly the world itself before she can decide to set her gaze on the new world that arises in and through a vision of the risen Christ.”
Christian truths do not fall from the sky. Rather, they develop over time. As John Henry Newman would rightly note, “an idea not only modifies, but is modified, or at least influenced, by the state of things in which it is carried out, and is dependent in various ways on the circumstances which surround it.”3 For Newman, doctrines develop over time and they are shaped through the mediation of human experiences and discernments. This does not mean that doctrines slip into the domain of relativism. Rather, it means that the discerning tool of the Holy Spirit plays out in the concrete context of lived human experiences. An example would suffice here. Belief in Jesus Christ as God did not arise from an abstract domain. It simply arose from the embodied encounters the first followers of Jesus had with Him and through their reflection on those experiences, they embraced the conclusion that only God can manifest what they have experienced in Jesus Christ. Something is worth stating further about human experiences as it pertains to encountering God. Experiences do not arise from the domain of being static. Rather, they arise from embodied encounters that play out in the concreteness of being social beings in a social world. Pilgrimage also resides in this domain of sociality. Consequently, human experiences are intricately linked to being a pilgrim being. Only as a pilgrim person can one speak of experiences that define one both as a being that belongs and as one who does not-belong. In a similar manner, experiences are always having the capacity of linking one to a community or a place or even an identity. They also have the ability to delink one from a community, a place, and identity and orient one towards a new horizon where a new community, place, and identity will be formed or embraced.
Furthermore, the rich understanding of doctrines plays out in the domain of historical time. By this I mean that over time, faith communities come to understand the multiple contours inherent in their doctrinal beliefs. These contours open up to their imagination via their concrete experiences and processes of discerning those experiences. With this in mind, it becomes problematic to think of doctrines simply as closed systems that are opposed to the context of historical realities. The pneumatological turn means that the Holy Spirit serves as the key that opens the senses to the contours inherent in doctrinal beliefs so that the living power of God’s wisdom is experienced in each epoch of human history. Consequently, such a history becomes a salvific moment of encounter with the living God who accompanies His people over time.
The Christian community within the Roman Catholic tradition has embraced a synodal consciousness as a mode of grounding itself in fidelity to the Holy spirit who invites all to embody a missional disposition that affirms God’s life in the world. At the 2025 Mass for the Jubilee of the Missions and of Migrants, Pope Leo XIV reminded the Catholic world to embody a missional spirit that “bring[s] the joy and consolation of the Gospel to everyone.” The content of the Gospel is not some abstract idea. It is experienced through an embodied proximity with Christ in the world.
Beginning with the disciples of Jesus themselves, who experienced Jesus as an embodied reality down to our era where Christians experience Christ through and in their neighbors, the Gospel serves as an icon of encounter that helps us to discern the concrete ways the Holy Spirit is leading us throughout history. This means that the power of the Gospel is mediated by the relationships we have with each other as embodied pilgrims in the world.
The power of the Gospel is mediated by the relationships we have with each other as embodied pilgrims in the world.”
Thus, when we encounter those who may be different from us or who may awaken us to different modes of thinking, the discerning effect of the Gospel that is mediated by the Holy Spirit ought to lead us to ask the question, what and how is the Holy Spirit inviting us to embody the joy of the Gospel in such a context? This approach moves us away from the unhealthy moralistic tendency that tends to quickly leap to the domain of condemnation of that which we are unfamiliar with.
If the contents of the doctrines of the Christian faith are revealed to us through the unfolding salvific history, then our discerning process that plays out through our experiences when we encounter others in the world must be guided by a sense of openness to the God who leads us as pilgrims in the world. Rather than reject others, we ought to embody the two modes of being a pilgrim – belonging and not-belonging. By belonging, we enter into a covenant of solidarity with all in the world, especially those who are in most need of God’s mercy and care. In this way, we join them in their struggles so that our joy can be their joy and our hope their hope. By not-belonging, we embody a prophetic vocation that invites others to detach from all that holds them hostage to that which is not of God so that they can journey with the God of the pilgrims into a new horizon of life and hope.
By belonging, we enter into a covenant of solidarity with all in the world, especially those who are in most need of God’s mercy and care.”
Finally, to be a pilgrim person is to take seriously the positionality of surrender. The pilgrim must allow the other, in this case, it is God in the world, to lead them as they journey into unknown territories. In this journey, they must reject the temptation of a quick leap to moralizing what they encounter along the way. The familiar God in the terrain they call home can also manifest Himself in an unfamiliar way in the new territories they traverse.
The right attitude that the pilgrim ought to embody is to surrender to God and to ask God to lead them kindly so that they can be surprised by the faith that exists in the experiences of their encounters with those along the way.
The hospitality, the habits, the terrain, and the language of those whom they encounter serve as the source from which their sense of belief in God must be crafted and not on some abstract idea. The risk they must take is that they are asked by the Holy Spirit to trust the process. God never abandons God’s people. This is the foundation of the Christian faith.
References
- Watson, Joan. “A Pilgrim People in a Passing World.” National Eucharistic Revival. May 6, 2026. https://www.eucharisticrevival.org/post/a-pilgrim-people-in-a-passing-world. ↩︎
- Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. Penguin Books, 2003. ↩︎
- Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. London: James Toovey, 1845
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