Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture Pt. 2

What happened to pilgrimages for the Christian? In our reading we see that in the High Middle Ages pilgrimages to national and international shrines was, pragmatically, as much a pillar of Christendom as the hajj was, theologically, for Islam. But, today it is not all that common to find entire families in the Christian tradition leave all they have to pilgrimage to the Holy City (or any variant of it). It seems that the pilgrimage to the sanctuary every Sunday is enough of a pilgrimage for the average Christian these days. Interestingly, Islam made of Mecca a center of “normative communitas” and thus transformed liminality into its opposite. Islam is ideally conceived as a vast communitas of cobelievers. Muslims go to Mecca where they may be unified in journey. In Christianity the “crisscrossing” of pilgrimage ways formed by these devotions of international repute must have had bonding effects on the entire sociocultural system of Christendom. There is a degree of unity in values, standards and social customs that is created. However, within Islam this unification comes from a central umma or communitas. For the Medieval Christian or modern Catholic, the structuring of diversity according to uniform principles. Perhaps it is the displacement of this principle in modern Christianity that we miss the importance of pilgrimage today.