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Last may I found myself at Houston's Intercontinental Airport, about to undertake the kind of journey I never thought I'd take—a group tour. At least we were calling it a tour; in reality it was a pilgrimage. I had allowed my husband to lure me into the company of 16 other travelers, all bound for England to visit former haunts of C. S. Lewis, the British writer who comes as close to canonization as any Protestant of the twentieth century is likely to. Nevertheless, I was nervous about committing myself to this enterprise.

Lewis was not the problem. He had been important in our lives for many years and many reasons. We had depended on a number of his books as moral and ethical compass points when we found ourselves struggling to regain our metaphysical bearings. We had read the Narnia Chronicles to our children and his adult fiction to one another. Other works had provided cogent cultural critiques. His autobiography describing the gradual conversion of an academic aesthete was a story with which we felt some affinity. Plus, he had sustained—at our present age—a love life worthy of a major motion picture.

In short, what Elvis Presley is to some people, C. S. Lewis is to us. It wasn't the man, but our mission—a pilgrimage—that made me uneasy. I cringed at a possible comparison between our little band of pilgrims boarding the plane and Elvis devotees entering the gates of Graceland.

Americans talk about pilgrimages these days but rarely make them. In fact, we use the term primarily as a metaphor, interchangeable with "spiritual journey." We mean the analogy to convey how our souls change throughout our lives, as if they move through time the way our bodies move through the countryside. While I respect the struggle to find some figure of speech to describe our groping for God, I feel about metaphors the way Hemingway felt about skiing: he said an athlete ought to earn the thrill of flying down the mountainside by first undergoing the discipline of climbing it, forgoing ski lifts. Metaphors, even more than mountains, need to be earned. Americans travel a lot today, certainly, but we generally prefer late-model cars, luxury cruise ships, and wide-bodied aircraft to the pilgrim's classic sandals, staff, and dusty footpath. Thus, the pilgrimage metaphor strikes me as chosen chiefly for its romantic, antiquarian—but unearned—charm.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that a pilgrimage is a journey to a holy place "undertaken from motives of devotion." Most Americans travel either for business or pleasure. I certainly had never been tempted to visit any place out of devotion, not even—perhaps least of all—the "Holy Land." A number of my friends, however, have sung carols in the Church of the Nativity and waded in the Jordan River, some more than once. For those, Galilee and Jerusalem are now old hat. These folk extend their range, retracing the footsteps of Paul through Turkey and John on Patmos—though in the air-conditioned comfort of cruise ships and motor coaches.

Some have even enlarged the scope of their travel to extrabiblical sites. One is booking her third trip to Assisi, the birthplace of Saint Francis. And yet another has just returned from Iona, the small island of the Inner Hebrides where in 563 Saint Columba founded a monastery that blossomed into the center of Celtic Christianity.

My resistance to walking where Jesus walked—much less Paul or Francis or Columba—stems from several sources, none of them very spiritual. I have tried for years to explain this reluctance rationally to my husband. To begin with, I tell him, the very term Holy Land puts me off. Aren't all lands equally holy, seeing that God made them and called them good? And wouldn't a visit to a barrio be a truer way of following in Jesus' footsteps?

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February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2