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If you’re looking for a way to minister with young adults during this Jubilee Year of Hope, a pilgrimage is a very fitting, meaningful experience. Below are some things to consider when planning a pilgrimage as well as a sample one-day pilgrimage schedule.

Audience and Invitation

The first step to planning any ministry activity is to consider who you are ministering with. Something I have found helpful is an “examination of conscience” in this pre-planning stage:

• What is my motivation for planning this event?
• Have I included the Holy Spirit in my discernment and planning?
• Who will be invited? What are their needs?
• What do I hope participants experience?
• Why is this event important for the spiritual lives of the participants? Will they have an opportunity to encounter/spend time with the Lord?
• How will I minister if only a few people show up?
• How will I determine whether this event was successful?

Asking these or other reflective questions during the planning process helps me weed out any competing motivations for planning an event and instead focus solely on what the Lord wants for those who attend.

Once I know the audience, their needs, and my hopes for their experience, I can start to put together a schedule. For our pilgrimage, we decided on a low cost, one-day model on a Saturday to accommodate young adults who work during the week and may not have a ton of expendable income. These are young adults who might have a desire to go on pilgrimage and could benefit from a local, accessible, less expensive alternative to an international pilgrimage.

Once you have a plan in place, personal invitation is key. It sometimes takes a few follow-up invitations for someone to decide to attend, so be persistent (not pushy) and invite in a way that sparks curiosity or desire in the heart of the recipient.

Plenary Indulgence

One of the gifts of a jubilee year is the opportunity to obtain a plenary indulgence. When planning a pilgrimage experience, consider including the necessary conditions for obtaining the indulgence.

It’s also important to include some catechesis around indulgences – what they are; why we receive them; how they relate to the jubilee spirit of freedom and homecoming; the connection between indulgences, penance, purgatory, and grace, etc. We want to make sure that we prepare the hearts of our young people to view the indulgence as a divine act of mercy and love – not as just a checklist of pious activities or a “get out of hell free card.” In our one-day pilgrimage, we began our time together with a talk on the biblical roots and spiritual fruits of a jubilee year, including how indulgences fit into this bigger picture.

Prayer Experiences

A pilgrimage is a great opportunity to introduce young people to different forms of prayer that they may not routinely engage in. It’s important to begin and end your day in prayer but also consider ways to naturally weave prayer into the schedule. In our sample schedule below, you can see that we opened our day in prayer, then included an outdoor prayer walk (more information below), midday prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, Stations of the Cross, a Holy Hour, and concluded the day with Mass. Each of these opportunities included time for silence, interior/meditative prayer, and group prayer. We involved the body and the senses during the pilgrimage walk, Stations of the Cross, and incense used at Holy Hour.

Pilgrims were invited to participate in all forms of prayer but also given the freedom to tap out if they needed time away from the group.

Walking!

A pilgrimage would not be a pilgrimage without some sort of journey. We planned an hour-long pilgrimage walk that invited participants to pray for specific intentions at different sites around our campus. The intentions we chose are particular to young adulthood, and we did our best to coordinate the stops along the route with the intentions (i.e. praying for deceased loved ones at the cemetery, praying for an increase in faith at the Marian grotto).

There is no set formula for a prayer walk, which makes it wonderfully customizable to your space, time frame, and audience. Here is a PDF version of our prayer walk to be a helpful starting point for planning your own.

Sample Schedule (used at Saint Meinrad for a one-day pilgrimage)

• 8:00 – 9:15 a.m. Rolling Check-in
• 8:15 - 9:25 a.m. Drop-In Coffee Hour
• 9:30 a.m. Opening Prayer and Introduction
• 9:45 a.m. Talk: The Roots and Fruits of a Jubilee Year
• 11:00 a.m. Campus Prayer Walk
• 12:00 p.m. Midday Prayer
• 12:15 p.m. Lunch, followed by free time
• 2:00 p.m. (Optional) Stations of the Cross
• 3:00 p.m. Holy Hour with Confessions Available
• 4:00 p.m. Mass
• 5:00 p.m. (Optional) Dinner

One thing to note about the schedule is the mixture of social and spiritual activities as well as solo and group activities. There is plenty of space in the schedule for moving from place to place, as well as optional and required activities to help participants engage with the day according to their needs.

Final Thoughts

The ideas above are not the only way to plan a pilgrimage experience, but it’s the way that worked for us at Saint Meinrad. Our goal was to provide young adults with an opportunity to encounter the Lord among a group of their peers who are also seeking deeper communion with God and neighbor. Hopefully these ideas will spark your own! I invite you to reach out for a conversation if you want help planning your own event or have ideas and experiences from your own ministry to share.

resources

• Invitation flyer
• Stations of the Cross booklet
• Prayer walk
• Information on the Jubilee Year and indulgences
• Email for further conversation: cschutzer@saintmeinrad.edu