During Holy Week one of our Sixth Form students joined the Pilgrim Cross walk to the shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham. Here is his reflection on his experience:

For a period before the pilgrimage, I remember being constantly on edge and nervous about the whole experience. Walking 70 miles over 3 days intensely while carrying a cross had never been something I imagined I would be doing. It was almost something massively outside my comfort zone although I had belief in myself and so did Fr Saju.

Once the day came around, I started to feel a sense of isolation and felt like I didn’t fit into life itself. I started to realise what the situation was that I was rapidly approaching. This wasn’t meant to be an easy experience. Clueless to what I was about to experience on this trip, I began to take time to reflect in silence.

When I arrived, I didn’t feel a sense of loneliness anymore even though I was with people I had never seen or been with before. The friendships I made with people before were unbeatable. I was able to have relationships with people I knew and didn’t know equally as we pushed through together. Those friendships weren’t just people on the walk but the volunteers who provided meals for us as we walked on through the day. The people who would give us support from cars as they passed boosted our morale and the songs we sang lit up a part of us we didn’t know was there. I acknowledged the brutality of the walk when I was awoken in the early hours of the morning to go out on our 70-mile walk. The day punished me and rid me of any pride I had left. God taught me a lesson that day. I learnt just from the first day that it wasn’t going to be a normal expedition-like experience. Acknowledging how brutal such a trip was, I pushed myself to do the entirety of the walk. Each day the walk humbled me and my sense of this being an easy task people were trying to convince me wasn’t. Throughout the trip, I pushed myself as far as I could and made myself achieve what I set out to do. I remember getting to Walsingham with blisters and agonising pain all over. I felt like a new person once I arrived. I collapsed onto my bed at the end of it and thanked God for the ability to complete the trip. The next few days I remember feeling a constant sense of victory and put my all into taking part in the Easter services.

After the trip, only then did I realise what I had accomplished but I also realised what it was that Jesus went through. While I didn’t have scourges and bled all over carrying a cross by myself, I understood the pain of just walking to the end point with the cross through my own injuries. We don’t seem to realise how painful it was for Christ with all the torment he had, and the end point he did. I had a comfy sleeping bag waiting for me and some hot food. He had impending death and still went on in pain. We had blisters, muscle aches and leg bleedings. He had that and worse. He was disfigured and worn to the bone, yet he kept going.

I recommend you undergo this character-building walk should you get the chance because it isn’t just singing hymns, visiting churches and being all religious all the time. While there are huge elements of that, it is also a perfect time for you to discover yourself and understand how traumatic people’s lives are when they take part in actions like this for necessary needs. It builds spirit and helps you gain a different look on life. You can also find out if your plan for you is what you think it is because God will act when asked and will guide when requested. Take the time to experience this because the person feeling nervous in the car going was a different weary person traveling home. They were two very different people with very different spiritual, mental and physical statuses.

(Joseph P. – 6^th Form Student)