What is a Pilgrimage?

I recently read The Idea of a Pilgrimage by Hilaire Belloc. It is good to understand what a pilgrimage is before deciding to join one, and I hope this short essay helps your understanding as much as it did mine.

I will visit the grave of a saint or of a man whom I venerate privately for his virtues and deeds, but on my way I wish to do something a little difficult to show at what a price I hold communion with his resting-place, and also on my way I will see all I can of men and things; for anything great and worthy is but an ordinary thing transfigured, and if I am to venerate a humanity absorbed into the divine, so it behooves me on my journey to it to enter into and delight in the divine that is hidden in everything.

Well, pilgrimage is for the most a sort of prefiguring or rehearsal. A man says: 'I will play in show (but a show stiffened with a real and just object) at that great part which is all we can ever play. Here I start from home, and there I reach a goal, and on the way I laugh and watch, sing and work. Now I am at ease and again hampered; now poor, now rich, weary towards the end and at last arrived at that end. So my great life is, and so this little chapter shall be.' Thus he packs up the meaning of life into a little space to be able to look at it closely, as men carry with them small locket portraits of their birthplace or of those they love.

Dr. Robert Hickson wrote “Hilaire Belloc’s View of a Pilgrimage.” https://www.scribd.com/document/129127358/Hilaire-Belloc-s-View-of-a-Pilgrimage