A small pilgrimage around Nijmegen
“Believing in God is no longer necessary and the goal doesn’t really matter. So what motivates modern pilgrims to set out?” The magazine Genoeg devoted its summer issue to ‘the little pilgrimage’ and paid extensive attention to the Walk of Wisdom.
Genoeg used to be known as the Vrekkenkrant and is about being happy without wanting to have and consume more and more. The magazine developed the idea of looking for a pilgrimage close to home instead of in a faraway country with four different forms of ‘small pilgrimages’ in the Netherlands.
Read the article in PDF via Thema-Genoeg-113.pdf. You can read the full summer issue by taking advantage of the two-issue trial offer for €7.50 (normally €12.50). Check out http://winkel.genoeg.nl/
“For centuries in the Christian West, the meaning of a pilgrimage was fairly fixed: the journey to a holy place literally brought the pilgrim closer to the divine. In many cases this was also very necessary in the perception of the believer (or the confessor), because he had become very far away from God due to missteps. Under the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation, among others, the popularity of the pilgrimage declined rapidly after the Middle Ages, until a few centuries later – we will skip a small piece of history, until around 1990 – it still existed in the Netherlands mainly in the form of air and bus trips to Lourdes.
Since then, however, the classic pilgrimage – long and on foot – has been in the spotlight again and the number of pilgrims has increased exponentially [….] ”
Read the article by Jeroen Fierens in PDF via this link Thema-Genoeg-113.pdf.
Photo: Dolph Cantrijn
