7th June 2026 

A Pilgrim People

On holiday with family in Northumberland last week, I was fortunate enough to visit Lindisfarne, Holy Island. Lindisfarne was an important centre of Celtic Christianity under St Aidan, who founded the priory there, and then St Cuthbert who, reportedly, spend hours standing up to his knees in the cold North Sea, deep in prayer. I have wanted to visit for a long time so was excited to go.

I confess that I found it both beautiful and slightly disappointing. I had expected somewhere sparse, austere and deserted. We arrived by car on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in half term, joined hundreds of others in a huge car park and were assailed by ice cream stalls, fish & chip stands and souvenir sellers as we walked towards the priory. Far from being a deserted, wilderness place, far from being a "thin" place of encounter with God, it felt in lots of ways like any other seaside resort.

I was trying to explain this feeling to my non-Christian family over dinner, when my sister said something that challenged me . She pointed out that, back in the days of Cuthbert and Aidan, there's no way Lindisfarne would have been silent and deserted. Pilgrims would have flooded across the causeway to this holy place, drawn by its beauty and remoteness but also by the opportunity to receive wisdom and grace from holy people, the monks. There would have been a lot of noise, a lot of jostling for position, a lot of commercialisation - from those selling mead to refresh weary travellers (still on sale in the NT shop today!) to relics and souvenirs of the saints.

Her words reminded me that our calling as a pilgrim people is both to be "aliens and strangers" (1 Peter 2:11) in the world, seeking our home in God's new creation, and to be those who, in the power of the Holy Spirit, witness to the love of Jesus in the reality of the world as it is. Our pilgrimage will take us - at times - to places where we encounter the presence and grace of God in stillness and beauty and silence. But it will also take us to noisy places, to messy places, to very ordinary places, to people who we might not choose as our friends but whom God calls us to love.

In this season of "ordinary time", we are reminded that, filled with the Holy Spirit, we journey as a pilgrim people through the ordinary places and activities and among the ordinary people of our daily life. For it is to ordinary places, ordinary activities and ordinary people that Jesus came, and, in his presence, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. I pray that through this summer of ordinary time, we might become more and more aware of this extraordinary presence of God within the places, people and activities we encounter day by day.