Peace Won and Found with Pilgrim Cross
Richard Finn OP reflects that peace can be 'won' and 'found' on way to Walsingham.
Slowly, the long line of footsore pilgrims shuffles forward into the Slipper chapel. We sit or kneel to pray in silence before the Virgin’s statue and the empty tabernacle that marks this day as Good Friday. Outside, our wooden cross joins the others that have been shouldered and carried the many miles to Walsingham. I thank God that my ‘leg’, the Midland Leg of Pilgrim Cross (or Student Cross as it was previously known) has made it here safely for another year. Tomorrow night, we shall sing our way through the village from the Anglican shrine to the Vigil in the Catholic parish church, holding aloft our candles (if they’ve not blown out in the wind) in joyous celebration of the Lord’s resurrection. Two contrasting moments, each telling in a different way of the peace to be won and found on this annual pilgrimage.
There’s a peace to be ‘won’, because the success of the pilgrimage has to be worked for. It’s a joint effort. There’s the initial work of the lay leadership team before the week begins, contacting the parishes which will host us along the way, and the ‘recce’ of our route. The liturgy secretary and chaplains must identify a theme and put together a ‘Faith Pack’ for the week with liturgies and material for ‘group stations’ (discussions on the theme). On the week itself, there’s the daily business of loading and unloading the luggage, making sandwiches, and acting as ‘Road Leader’, or as Back or Front ‘Traffic’, who alert the group to passing cars and lorries. Each day there’s the opportunity for several people to offer an individual ‘station’ by the roadside or in a church (a brief reflection on the theme or on the pilgrimage more widely). Then, there’s the real work! My Novice Master, Herbert McCabe OP, wrote how ‘the experience provides a crash course in the meaning of Christian community: the difficult and extraordinarily rewarding business of learning to live with people with whom you are thrown together, ….those who walk too fast or too slow, those who complain too much or who try to organise everyone or who seem offensively immune to sore feet and aching muscles’. Yet, as Herbert wrote, there gradually emerges through the ‘shared hardship’ a ‘shared prayer and a shared vision of the gospel’.
So, there’s also a peace to be ‘found’, an unearned grace, gifts delighted in as the week unfolds. Something comes from the pace, as we enjoy the countryside through which we tramp - from the village of Keyham, just outside Leicester, through the rolling Rutland hills, across the wide-open (and sometimes bleak) fenland skies that begin beyond Stamford and continue for mile after mile to Crowland with its abbey ruins, and on to Kings Lynn, before we rise up once more into North Norfolk lanes. Then, there’s the laughter and the singing - as we walk, or at the pub in the evening. There’s the humbling hospitality and kindness of so many people who make us welcome, feed, and water us. There’s the gift of friendships formed, renewed, and deepened. There’s the insight, the compassion, the solidarity shared in reflection and conversation. And through all of this we sense the peace that comes from sharing in the cross of Christ and so the extraordinary, overwhelming, experience of meeting the Risen Christ at Easter. In the Tobbie Norris at Stamford on the evening of Palm Sunday, the room resounds with the raucous singing of ‘Let union be in all our hearts, Let all our hearts be joined as one…’ - and by the gift of God they are.
Richard Finn OP
Fr Richard Finn is a Dominican Friar and the former Director of the Las Casas Insitute of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.
This article was first published in Justpeace, the magazine of Pax Christi UK, the International Catholic Movement for Peace (Edition 353, July-August 2026.)
More about the work of Pax Christi can be found here.
Pilgrim Cross (formerly Student Cross) is an inclusive Easter pilgrimage for all Christians. More about the walk can be found here.
