What It Means to Be a Pilgrim: Guy Hayward interviews Satish Kumar on Walking, Peace and "No Destination"

There is a kind of teaching that only happens over porridge. In a low farmhouse in Hartland, on the far north coast of Devon, Satish Kumar bakes his slowly in the oven – hot water, oats, half an hour to itself – and serves it with marmalade his wife June makes each year from a recipe she learned decades ago from an old friend near Stroud. The garden beyond the window is left deliberately wild. He won't run a mower over it, because the machine burns petrol and the wildness, he says, is the point: nature brings you this, and you cut it all down.

I have spent twelve years with the British Pilgrimage Trust, circling the idea of pilgrimage through festivals, conferences and the same ‘scenes’, without ever once sitting in Satish's kitchen. This spring I finally went to record a series of conversations with the man about to turn ninety, and to ask him what it means to be a pilgrim?

Being a pilgrim versus going on a pilgrimage

The distinction Satish keeps returning to, and that I have not stopped turning over since, is between going on a pilgrimage and being a pilgrim. They are, he says, two sides of the same coin. You cannot walk to a holy well every day; you go from time to time. But being a pilgrim is a state of mind you can carry into any ordinary morning – detachment, acceptance, humility, and intention. You meet whoever you meet and you accept them. You take the weather as it comes.

Life itself, he told me, is like the weather: never the same twice, sometimes sunny, sometimes cold, sometimes smoke. As you accept the weather as it arrives, you accept life as it arrives. And this way of being is not something you switch on at a trailhead. "I was a pilgrim before I went on a pilgrimage," he said, remembering his years as a young monk who walked with little or no money. It comes gradually, slowly, slowly, never as a sudden arrival, and never with the sense that the job is finally done.

What makes a walk a pilgrimage?

If being a pilgrim is a disposition, what then separates a pilgrimage from an ordinary walk — or from simply drifting? Satish is clear that meaningfulness is the difference. A person wandering the lanes and sleeping in hedgerows is not, by that fact alone, on pilgrimage; that can just as easily be aimlessness. What lifts a walk into a pilgrimage is intention, and the spirit in which you meet what you meet along the way.

Holy places matter too. If you only ever walk from post office to pub, it is not the same as crossing barefoot to Lindisfarne through the rising tide, as Satish has done, or sitting in the small cliff-top hut at Morwenstow in Cornwall where the eccentric Victorian priest-poet Robert Hawker once prayed for fishermen and for the fish. He returns to that hut several times a year. Iona, Assisi, the sacred wells – places charged by centuries of devotion charge the soul in turn. A destination, in his understanding, is only ever a kind of metaphor: worth walking towards, never the point at which everything is complete.

No Destination: the 8,000-mile peace pilgrimage

To understand why Satish speaks this way, it helps to know how far he has walked. He became a Jain monk as a boy of nine. As a young man, after a dream, he slipped out of the monastery in the middle of the night and ran away, monks are not permitted to leave, to join the Gandhian movement for peace and land reform, walking for years with his teacher across India.

Then, in 1962, with no money at all, he set out on foot from India and walked some eight thousand miles for peace – to Moscow, Paris, London and Washington, the four capitals of the nuclear powers – carrying nothing but a message and trusting the kindness of strangers to feed and shelter him. He was sent off with a small ceremony, mantras read as a prayer for peace and harmony. He later told that story in a book: No Destination.

He means the phrase literally. There is no goal, no end point at which the walking is over. (for more on this, see our article on coddiwompling). It is a process; it is a life. I thought, as he spoke, of the Bodhisattva who keeps returning until all beings are freed, knowing the work is never finished – so you simply stay on the path, and the path opens and opens and opens. When I mentioned that even the Archbishop of Canterbury walking a route with us would not mean the task was suddenly complete, he agreed at once. There is no destination to any of it. Only the walking, done well.

"Doing comes out of being"

The deepest thing Satish gave me was his answer to a worry I confessed. The world is going wrong so fast, I said — and here I am, spending my life persuading people to walk slowly. Isn't that indulgent? Shouldn't we be doing something?

His reply reframed everything. "Doing comes out of being," he said. Unless there is being underneath it, the doing is not real. Change your focus from doing to being – from anxious action to a settled way of existing – and the action will emerge naturally, and in a kinder form. Mother Teresa's action was not Gandhi's; a poet's contribution is no less than an activist's. You do not have to know in advance what your doing will be. You have to be your true self, and let it come.

This, I suspect, is also why he has such extraordinary energy at nearly ninety – more, frankly, than I had after a single long day on foot. Worry, he told me, dissipates energy; contentment is its source. "Take as your mantra," he said, "I will be contented. I have enough." For someone forever told by the world to grow this charity’s membership and build the reserves, that was relieving. Celebrate what you have, he says, rather than grieving what you lack.

Inner and outer pilgrimage are inseparable

None of this makes pilgrimage a retreat from the world. Satish insists that inner and outer cannot be separated. A house only exists because there is space outside it, yet inside it must hold rooms; the two depend on each other entirely. In the same way, outer transformation without inner change is hollow — real justice, he argues, changes the values within people, not only their circumstances.

I see this most clearly in the communal river pilgrimages now growing out of wider movement – along the Medway, the Wye and elsewhere. On these walks the individual inner journey unfolds beside genuinely practical action: citizen science and the cleaning of the river; the legal campaign to win a river the rights of a living being; and the spiritual dimension of offerings and songs sung to the water. It is pilgrimage touching every level at once — and, I think, an example of what Satish means when he speaks of Martin Luther King and "radical love." It is genuinely radical to persuade councillors to grant a river legal personhood; that it can be done with love and offering, rather than confrontation, is the whole point.

Pilgrimage is a practice, not a belief

If there is a single sentence I take from these conversations, it is one Satish returned to again and again: religions know it all in their heads, but they do not live it. Going to church on Sunday and preparing for conflict the rest of the week is not, to him, being Christian. The test is always practice, never profession.

Pilgrimage escapes this trap because it is a practice, not a belief system — which is exactly the ethos of the British Pilgrimage Trust's "bring your own beliefs" approach. You need not sign up to any creed to set an intention and walk. June offered a lovely image for holding more than one tradition at once: you keep the root of where you were born, and you may grow a second root as well. And the pilgrim, crucially, makes no claim to be saintly or morally superior. That, Satish says, is the most freeing thing of all. You only have to be humble.

The river of culture

We closed, as we had begun, in the kitchen. June offered one last picture that has stayed with me. The river of culture, she said, is made of many tributaries. You do not have to judge whether you are a good enough poet, or whether your particular contribution is large enough to matter. You only have to flow, and join the river.

That is the invitation, in the end. You do not need to walk eight thousand miles to four nuclear capitals. You need one path, one intention, and the willingness to accept whatever the day brings. Begin there, and slowly, slowly, you will find you have become a pilgrim.

By Guy Hayward, in conversation with Satish and June Kumar.