Embracing Complexity

In the summer of 2009, I visited Santiago de Compostela—not as a pilgrim, but in order to take part in an international conference in the field of the sociology of religion. For a researcher of religion visiting this widely popu-lar destination for religious travellers, the issue of pilgrimage nevertheless seemed topical and thought-provoking, and I therefore decided to take part in a conference session entitled ‘Pilgrimages Today’. During this seminar, I was introduced to an international research project called ‘The Pilgrimage Project: A study of motivations and experiences in sacred space’, headed by Dr Miguel Farias at the University of Oxford. Within this interdisciplinary project, Christian and pagan pilgrims in Europe were compared. The researchers had collected questionnaires and conducted in-terviews with persons taking part in pilgrimages, either to the predominantly Catholic sites of Lourdes in France and Fátima in Portugal, or to the neo-pagan sites of Stonehenge and Glastonbury in England. A particularly inter-esting aspect was the discussion on spirituality in this vast empirical mater-ial. It turned out that a majority, both among those taking part in traditional Christian pilgrimages and among those participating in the neo-pagan rit-uals, preferred to call themselves spiritual rather than religious. So far, the research team had not made any further analyses of how the term spiritual was applied in the material and if, perhaps, there was a sig-nificant difference between the ways in which spirituality was understood within a Christian frame of reference and within a pagan one. What was clear, however, was that the persons who undertook pilgrimages placed great value on personal development, emotional experiences of a divine nature, holistic health concepts uniting body, mind and soul and—more generally—of find-ing oneself and finding a deeper meaning in life. The physical and ritual pro-cess of becoming a pilgrim seemed to satisfy the need for a comprehensive experience linking age-old traditions with personal development and uniting a bodily and spiritual effort into a tangible and meaningful experience