Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2014 | Page 32

by Katherine Halberstadt Anderson ’90

Pilgrim House, Spain
“Blessed are those whose strength is in you, who have set their
hearts on pilgrimage.” —Psalm 84:5 (niv)

Pilgrims All
“For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so
Then people long on pilgrimage to go.”
— Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

T

he footfalls of pilgrims past. It’s easy to imagine faint
echoes when walking along the paths to Canterbury,
Santiago, or Jerusalem, where generations have trod. It’s likely
many of these pilgrims were searching, just like pilgrims
today, some simply for fun and adventure, others for forgiveness,
hope, and communion with God.
This idea of earthly pilgrimage—of a lengthy, at times arduous,
journey—has long served as metaphor for the Christian journey.
And for centuries, classics like Pilgrim’s Progress, first published
in 1678, have reminded us all of our own pilgrim status on the
journey toward the Celestial City.
It is this same pilgrim status that has captivated the hearts and
lives of three alumni who hope very soon to spend most of their
time in the company of travelers. Nate ’97 and Faith Wen Walter
’97 and Peirce ’03 and Christina Baehr are in the process of
beginning hostels—Pilgrim House in Spain and Pilgrim Hill in
Tasmania—to encourage travelers in their faith, to care for their
physical needs, and to invite them to follow Christ.
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Nate and Faith Walter hope to soon receive consent from city
officials to establish Pilgrim House as a welcome center in the spring
of 2014. Santiago de Compostela is a historic destination for Catholics
who come to pay homage to Jesus’ apostle, James, at the Cathedral of
Santiago de Compostela.
For more than 1,000 years, pilgrims have traveled El Camino de
Santiago, or “The Way of St. James,” highlighted recently in the
movie The Way. Since the time of Late Antiquity, priests at times
ordered parishioners on pilgrimages as a penance after confession.
And today for a variety of reasons, people from all walks of life and
faiths traverse the 800-kilometer trail that begins in the French
Pyrenees and ends on the northwest coast of Spain. The city of
Santiago reported that last year more than 192,000 pilgrims received
their “Compostela,” a certificate of completion of at least 100
kilometers of the Santiago pilgrimage.
Two of Wheaton’s Youth Hostel Ministry (YHM) leaders, Matt
LeGrande ’14 and Steven Palladino ’13, hiked 150 kilometers of the
Camino trai l last summer, after stopping in to visit Nate and Faith
in Santiago. (YHM is one of six programs offered by the Office of
Christian Outreach.) Along the way, they spent a great deal of time
walking with “nothing but the picturesque scenery and sounds of
nature,” says Matt.
Each night, they would partake in the “meal of the day,” a lavish
three-course dinner with fellow travelers. Matt had the opportunity to
ask deeper questions of a couple in their sixties, Bruno and Catolina,
an agnostic from Switzerland and a Catholic from Brazil. He was
surprised to learn that in their five years of marriage, they had never
discussed life after death. “Catolina playfully told her husband that he
needed to get his soul in check even as he assured her that we were all
headed in the same inevitable direction,” says Matt.
Conversations such as this one are at the heart of not only the YHM
experience, but also the hospitality ministries that Nate and Faith and
Peirce and Christina hope to establish.
All three alumni say the initial inspiration for their hostels came
from summer mission experiences with YHM, a 42-year-old
Wheaton program that has sent more than 600 students overseas
in the summers with the goal of ministering to the traveling
communities of Europe.
“When students are involved in Youth Hostel Ministry, I am trusting
that this experience will be transformational such that they live out
a lifestyle of evangelism for the rest of their lives,” says Rev. Brian
Medaglia, director of the Office of Christian Outreach.
Nate served not one but three summers with YHM, spending a
grand total of six months backpacking in Europe, enough to build an
understanding of the subculture of travelers. He says, “I love how in
a short time, you may go deeper with a fellow traveler than you do