Customer Reviews

The Place We Call Home: Spiritual Pilgrimage as a Path to God

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This is a remarkable book on pilgrimage offered by a Franciscan priest and pilgrimage leader. It takes story, ritual, and Spirit as the key features of the pilgrim's map, and combines these with the author's personal reflections on his own pilgrimages, both in his journey through life and in his visits to Rome and Assisi, Italy. The short chapters are not descriptions of places, but guided meditations on each stage of the inward and outward journey. The text is poetic, evocative, and full of crystallized observations about our travel towards God, viewing life itself as pilgrimage and pilgrimage as an enacted metaphor for our inward travel.

Bodo writes: "Pilgrimages are not about one place being more holy than another, for God is everywhere. Making pilgrimages involves a response to something inside us that longs to move *toward*, that seeks the holy *beyond.*" [9]

I bought this book on the recommendation of a fellow peregrino (those that walk the Camino de Santiago) and found it to be a lovely piece of work. It was easy to read and I could relate to it very well. For those seeking to do a pilgrimage or those just on the pilgrimage of life, I recommend this book.