My Accidental Pilgrimage

I'll be Damned - it took 27 years to take this trip

I just got back from two weeks in Europe: Four countries; Over 200,000 steps; A punk rock concert in London; A cathedral in the Arctic Circle; A stranger who almost helped me rescue a five-year-old boy off a Norwegian mountainside. I kept my facebook relatively up to date, so you can read all about it if you’d like - its all public so I don’t think you even need a facebook account.

I’m calling this trip “My Accidental Pilgrimage” because I didn’t set out to have a pilgrimage experience. I set out on a trip. A vacation. John, my ex-husband (who is still one of my closest friends on the other side of our marriage) got tickets to see his favorite band, The Damned, play their 50th anniversary show in London. He invited me because we’d seen them in the US a couple of times.

“How about we train and backpack across Europe?” I suggested, almost before I thought about it. He agreed to the adventure.

So that’s the surface story: Two old friends, one punk concert, a loose itinerary through Spain and France and England. And then, after John and I parted ways, a solo second week for me through Norway that would end with my brother and his family in Oslo.

That was the plan.

It wasn’t until nearly halfway through the trip that I realized that the truth is that I’ve been trying to take this trip for twenty-seven years.

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In 1999, John and I were supposed to go to Norway with my family. My siblings and I were all broke young adults, and so my parents were paying. The plan was to fly to Norway together, experience the Midnight Sun, dig into family roots we have there. This was going to be a unique, amazing experience for all of us. Special. Once in a lifetime.

We didn’t go.

A family crisis surfaced in the weeks before we were supposed to leave, and John and I made the decision (hard, clear, non-negotiable) that we couldn’t go on the trip. We backed out. It was one of the most agonizing decisions I’ve made and one that would still tie my stomach in knots over a decade later.

My parents canceled. My siblings still went. They turned it into a backpacking trip across Europe.

They have stories and photos from that trip that I don’t share. I watched from the life I had instead of the one I thought I was going to have that summer. John and I stayed home and painted our house.

For a long time, that was just… a thing that had happened. The outline of a story I’d started writing and never finished. A path not taken, but second-guessed.

So when John brought up the London concert, something in me jumped.

“How about we train and backpack across Europe?”

It wasn’t until probably Paris, day 5, that I realized suddenly: Oh! This is that trip. Same(ish) travel partner. Different world. Different me.

I hadn’t set out to reclaim anything. I hadn’t framed it that way. But there it was anyway, quietly reappearing in a completely different form.

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A trip takes you somewhere. A vacation takes you away from something. But a pilgrimage changes you. And here’s the thing about accidental pilgrimages: You don’t always know you’re on one until you’re in it.

I’m a minister. I’ve led pilgrimages. I’ve studied them. I know what they’re supposed to feel like - the intentional framing, the threshold you cross at the beginning, the transformation you’re seeking. I’ve told other people how to be pilgrims.

Pilgrimage, at its core, is a decision to be changed by the journey instead of just passing through it. You’re not collecting experiences. You’re submitting to them.

I didn’t think that’s what I was doing. Although, in retrospect, maybe I should’ve had a clue. Standing in the boarding line in Philadelphia on the way to Madrid, I met a young woman heading to Spain to walk part of the Camino de Santiago. Two women with backpacks, both between chapters.

The trip was already telling me what it was - I just wasn’t listening yet. Because this trip wasn’t framed as a pilgrimage. It was framed as a backpacking vacation with my friend, organized around a punk concert. I packed for a punk concert. I brought black clothes and red lipstick and plenty of paste for my hair.

But somewhere around Paris, I started noticing that the trip was doing pilgrimage work whether I intended it or not. Things kept happening that I hadn’t planned for and couldn’t quite explain away.

In Madrid, I wandered into an exhibit of Armenian sacred texts at the National Library - because I needed a bathroom. Two years earlier, I’d wandered into an exhibit about Armenians at the Immigration Museum in Buenos Aires, in the encounter that first pulled me toward my own Armenian heritage. And here it was again, on another continent, unexpected. My grandmother’s people, following me across the world. Not loudly. Just…stubbornly present.

In Trondheim, I walked into a kindergarten service at Nidaros Cathedral. There was a juggler. There were small children, one of whom was having a full meltdown. A woman priest stood at the front of a medieval cathedral and led worship like it was the most normal thing in the world.

And I cried. After the service, I told her why. How rare it still is, in my experience, to see a woman leading worship in a Cathedral. How much it mattered. She didn’t rush me. She just stood there and let me have the moment.

And then the Bishop — the Bishop! — took me into the octagon and showed me the stone roses. Bud to bloom, carved hundreds of years ago. Flowers of paradise, still opening, and she talked to me about how the church needs to serve everyone to help make the world a better place.

Later, I learned something that made me laugh out loud: Nidaros Cathedral is the endpoint of the official Norwegian pilgrimage route. People walk for weeks, sometimes months, to get there. Norwegians can declare a pilegrimsår (a pilgrimage year) and make their way across the country to that exact cathedral.

And I had landed there by accident, while thinking I was on vacation.

None of this was on the itinerary.

By the end of the trip, I realized I wasn’t just moving through places. I was paying attention in a different way. Letting things land that I might have moved past before.

I don’t have a clean way to wrap that up. I’m not even sure I fully understand it yet. But I know this: I came home seeing my life a little differently than I did when I left. Transformed - in a way I am only beginning to uncover.

So I’m going to keep following that thread here - seeing where it leads, and what it might have to say about how we live, and what we assume is fixed that maybe isn’t. Connecting it to my van life plans, my Minneapolis experience - because it’s all part of the same stew that’s been simmering in my mind and spirit.

If you want to come along for that, you are welcome to. I’ll enjoy the company!