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Five feet! I'm thinking all the while, distracted from the don's analysis of Lewis's professional stance. Anthony Hopkins wasn't that short in the movie.

Professor Watson continues, simultaneously diffident and self-assured. His hands tremble as he holds his notes, though possibly more from age than stage fright, and he clears his throat frequently. He is quoting Lewis on the task of storytelling--"to help us climb out from under the net of conceptualization."

I glance across the room at the widow who just yesterday found three Britannia Beanie Babies. She is smiling warmly at George Watson—more charmed, I suspect, by his accent and donnish manners than his views on Lewis's literary criticism. And this, I realize suddenly, is precisely what Lewis meant by "the priority of instances."

Like medieval palmers, my husband and I brought our snapshots of Lewis's tombstone, his kitchen, his don's digs, back to Texas where we showed them to friends one Sunday afternoon. One fellow, something of a Lewis aficionado, asked half-jokingly if I had been overwhelmed by treading where the great man had trod. Did violins swell in the background? Did a glow surround the sacred spot?

No, I said, surprised at how my attitude had changed, it wasn't like that at all. As a pilgrim, I had not stepped outside of time into some magical Oz-like kingdom where the ordinary is rendered impotent. If anything, the experience of pilgrimage, with its mundane demands and discomforts, forces one to pay attention to details, to instances. At home, meals and beds are so familiar as to go unnoticed. But when you're a pilgrim, you have to concentrate on plane schedules or you miss your connection, plan for every meal or go hungry, find a bed before night or end up on the street. Paradoxically, the here-and-now matters even more urgently when you're far from home. Such acute attention to the physical present, strangely enough, also makes us permeable to the past.

The sun, I discovered, shines on Oxford—and no doubt on Jerusalem—the same as it does on Texas. The rain falls on the obscure as surely as the famous. That truth diminishes neither place nor time. In fact, it saves incarnation from being just another fancy theological notion. Pilgrimages make us realize that the water which washed over Jesus in the Jordan is still floating around the world somewhere and in some form today.

Human beings build shrines, hallow places, venerate objects, not in order to distance ourselves from our spiritual heroes, but to anchor us to them. Relics, whether your grandmother's cookbook or Lewis's coal scuttle or Saint Columba's coracle, are evidence of the physical reality they share with us. Like us, they are material, not virtual. Such is the power of stark matter, of palpable proximity.

Through grocery lists and baby teeth, instances assert their priority. The dirt on Addison's Walk and the Mount of Olives remind us—no, testify—that Lewis and Jesus lived, not on a mythical Mount Olympus or an internal Nirvana, but in the same world we do. And that, I discovered, is how pilgrimages hallow our lives.

Virginia Stem Owens is author of Daughters of Eve (NavPress) and Looking for Jesus (Westminster John Knox). She lives in Huntsville, Texas.

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February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2