Dear Readers,

Welcome to the Pilgrimage Issue. Christians have been taking pilgrimages for more than a thousand years, and comparing our spiritual progress to a pilgrimage for almost as long. We set out each morning in pursuit of God, asking, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, that he would “guide our feet into the way of peace.” It isn’t an easy path to follow. If you’re anything like me, you often come to the end of the day feeling you’ve gotten no further along the way than you did the day before.

And no wonder. Walker Percy wrote in 1991, “In the old Christendom everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it. But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony; which is to say, open to signs.” We’ve lost our collective way forward. And as Karen Swallow Prior argues in her essay on literary pilgrimage, though we moderns still like the notion of pilgrimage, the modern pilgrim is expected to set her compass toward whatever destination her heart most desires.

Yet as the poet Christian Wiman is fond of telling his creative writing students, we cannot go in search of epiphany. To put it in Percy’s terms, there is nothing to be gained by manufacturing signs. All we can do is prepare our hearts and our eyes to recognize them when they come. And then we keep walking, and we wait. For as long as it takes.

This issue is about the waiting and the walking. It’s about preparing for a sign. In the Fare Forward interview, Scott Cairns shares with us about how his twenty-five pilgrimages to Mount Athos have incrementally taught him how to pray, and about being open to detour, both in his writing and in his life. Collin Slowey, a senior at Baylor University, wrote about seeing our intellectual progression as a pilgrimage characterized by humility, a posture that allows us to be open to new ideas and insights. Three writers, David Henreckson, M. M. Townsend, and Justin Ariel Bailey, wrote in response to James K. A. Smith’s recent essay for The Christian Century—“I’m a philosopher. We can’t think our way out of this mess.”—in which he describes his own intellectual pilgrimage from the pursuit of philosophy to the practice of art. And there’s a lot more we can’t wait for you to read. Thanks for joining us in the search.

Fare Forward,

Sarah Clark

Editor-in-chief