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The Way of Pilgrims in a Twenty-First-Century Cathedral

The title of my article is borrowed from the nineteenth-century spiritual adventure of a peasant on a pilgrimage through Russia, The Way of a Pilgrim. It is a classic devotional work that introduces the reader to the pilgrim’s search for the sacred, his or her desire to learn how to pray, and to find ways to encounter God. There are countless sacred places in the natural environment—pathways, mountains, deserts, and rivers—that evoke a sense of the holy other and prompt a yearning for establishing a relationship with it. One thinks of the Ganges River in India, Mount Sinai in Egypt, the road to St. James of Compostela in Spain, and Chaco Canyon in the United States. There are also built environments that are touchstones with the sacred. This essay is about how a house of worship, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, in Los Angeles, California, provides an avenue for connecting with the sacred. Since its completion in 2002 the cathedral has become a world-famous destination. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, it has become a pilgrim itself. Like human beings, places of worship continue to search for ways to reach for what is thought to be, ordinarily speaking, untouchable. Along the way, these holy buildings resonate with the stories of the people whom they serve just as they are agents of transformation for those pilgrims.