Skara Pastorat
Skara Pastorat
Kalender Gudstjänst och bön Dop Konfirmation Vigsel Begravning

Seven keywords for pilgrims


Freedom
To walk in the Swedish countryside at a slow tempo, without a diary, will enable you experience an outer and inner freedom from all the strains and stresses of modern life.
In the freedom of walking we can become aware of the joys and sorrows and indeed all the different layers of experience below the surface of our lives.

Simplicity
Keep the weight of your rucksack to a minimum. Water, some food and a change of clothes should be sufficient. Tou will also need a sleeping-bag and foam or inflatable food for comfort when sleeping in or out of doors. The very act of walking generates a simple lifestyle. Communal purchase of food helps keep costs down. The lighter your rucksack, the better you´ll get on.

Slowness
The symbol for the pilgrim is the snail rather than the rocket! Walk at a moderate pace, there´s no hurry. Give yourself time to appreciate what you are experiencing, time to look back over your life, time for thought and prayer, time for silence and reflection.
Steady walking, in rhythm with your heartbeat, will help you to make the inner journey where you meet yourself, with others and with God.

Silence
Even in a group it is possible to walk alone in silence, undisturbed by the sounds of voices, birds singing, or distant traffic in the background. In its form and content a pilgrimage resembles a retreat, except that it involves continual movement. The hunger for new information, experiences and sounds fades away in this “culture of silence”.

Relief
(understood as absence of trouble), happy thought!
On pilgrimage you can distance yourself from all the things that feel burdensome and make you anxious and troubled. The atmosphere helps you to see them in a new perspective. Gradually you come to see that “All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well”, and that no-one is helped by your worrying. In the perspective of eternity my burden is lighter than a feather and smaller than a pebble.

Sharing
On pilgrimage the barriers within us fall away. Differences in age, sex, knowledge and experience become unimportant. We are all pilgrims sharing everything with one another, bandages and water, food and chatting, prayer and massage, hard work and troubles, pleasure and rest, life-stories and existential questions.

Spirituality
Things earthly and heavenly, spiritual and material, visible and invisible, here too the boundaries disappear. All is one great whole having its origin in the unseen Creator. To walk on pilgrimage is to walk in and with God, THE ONE WHO IS. What matters most is not making or doing, but being. The landscape of mystery, that is the world of the pilgrim.
Skara Pastorat, Box 133, 532 22 Skara      Tel: 0511-265 00 Fax: 0511-188 25      skara.pastorat@svenskakyrkan.se