Images and Pilgrimage: Christian Journeys

Lizzie Nelson

While we have focused a lot of nature based pilgrimages and specific destinations of importance in religious journeys, I have been wondering about the importance the journey itself plays and many major monotheistic religions. If we look at Eastern religions like Buddhism the journey itself is very important as Buddha traveled across India and much of southern Asia to help those in need and find for himself what the true purpose of life was. The destination was the journey for him, and it still is for many Buddhists today. I would be interested to see how people in the main three monotheistic religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity see the importance of the journey as compared to the destination. If you look at the Bible you can see that many important stories and values were develop while they were traveling, in fact most of the Bible is based in different cities across the Middle as they use this traveling to tell the word of God. However, it doesn’t seem very essential to the Christian religion. I find this to be a mistake as traveling along a journey of the soul allows an individual to spread their thoughts and ideas to many people across the globe as opposed to just concentrating these opinions in one area. It allows for and open mindedness and development of a religion that cannot happen if there are no new opinions to grow it.  

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