BBC Radio 4 2016-05-23

Good morning and welcome to Becket week, so branded by the Hungarian Embassy to mark the arrival in London today of a relic of St. Thomas Becket’s from Esztergom in Hungary where it has been venerated for 800 years. This fragment of Becket’s martyred body will be displayed and celebrated before, at the end of the week, being transferred to Canterbury Cathedral where he was murdered in 1170.

Chaucer and TS Eliot have made Becket a well known figure but with events this week involving the President of Hungary together with the Archbishops of Westminster & Canterbury - at such high profile venues as the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey - you might be forgiven for asking what’s going on?

According to the Hungarian Ambassador, the devotion to St Thomas in Hungary demonstrates the deep cultural and historical links between our two countries so perhaps Thomas is being pressed into service to bind together the ancient nations of Europe? Or perhaps the current appeal of Hungary’s Becket is the way in which he became a symbol of the resistance of the Church to the limitations of religious freedom suffered under the communist regime? Or perhaps the revival of interest in pilgrimages and shrines more generally represents a reaction against the globalisation of culture and a yearning for the recognition of the particularity of place. Is this why the last part of the journey to Canterbury on Saturday will be done on foot?

Pilgrimage on foot is something I learned about as I walked the 500 miles from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in North West Spain in 2006. En route I met people who were walking for all kinds of reasons: for some it was the relics that mattered – those physical remains of a saintly person in whose presence they hoped to become whole again, whether in body, mind or spirit - for some the shrine was a place (in Eliot’s words) ‘where prayer has been valid’; for others this was sport or exercise or the fulfilment of a personal goal, whilst for many the journey provided time out from a frenetic world - to live at walking pace; to adjust to a life change; to make a difficult decision...

Whilst a pilgrimage may be undertaken alone and for one’s own reasons, I learned in Spain, though, that it’s not long before you come to rely on fellow pilgrims - for directions, for medical supplies, for company. Yet whilst we began by sharing the things happening to us, as we neared our destination we started to share also the things happening in us: those deep things at the heart of life that sometimes struggle to find a place – things to do with meaning and value; with death, with love…

Speculation will continue this week about what the procession of this relic means. Rather than puzzling over it in the abstract, though, my advice would be: go and walk. Join in with the committed and the curious, the Catholics and the Anglicans, the Hungarians and Brits, and walk - from Harbledown to Canterbury in the steps of that ragbag of pilgrims from Chaucer’s famous tales - and see what happens to you, and in you and amongst you along the way.