Nobody romanticizes the boring parts of pilgrimage. The Camino memoirs skip the hours of sore feet on asphalt, the institutional meals, the small talk with strangers in six languages. But a recent reflection at Aleteia argues those hours are the point. Pilgrims learn something our entertainment-saturated culture has forgotten: how to endure without distraction, how to be present to the unspectacular, how to let boredom do its work.
What the article argues
The piece examines the gap between pilgrimage marketing (Instagram sunrises, dramatic cathedral moments) and pilgrimage reality (километры of uneventful walking, repetitive days, physical discomfort without narrative payoff). The Camino and other long-distance pilgrimages are full of tedium. That tedium is not incidental. It is formative.
Walking for weeks without distraction forces pilgrims to stop curating their inner lives. The mind runs out of content. The body keeps moving. In that space, something deeper than epiphany happens: a kind of patient attention that modernity has lost. The article suggests this is the spiritual fruit pilgrimage offers that a weekend retreat cannot.
Read the full reflection at Aleteia for the author’s full argument.
Why this matters
The spiritual life has always required endurance without reward. Desert monastics called it acedia, the noonday demon, the temptation to quit when prayer feels like nothing. Medieval pilgrims walked for months not because the road was beautiful but because walking was the prayer. Our devices have made boredom optional. We can scroll, stream, or skip to the next thing the moment attention flags. Pilgrimage reintroduces the old asceticism: you cannot skip the boring parts. They are the discipline.
The article does not moralize against smartphones or recommend everyone walk the Camino. It simply observes what pilgrims rediscover on foot: that formation happens in the unspectacular hours, not the peak moments. The virtue is not resilience or grit. It is a patient willingness to be present when nothing interesting is happening, which is most of life.
For Catholic readers
If you cannot walk a pilgrimage route this year, consider one weekly hour without entertainment: a Rosary without music, a morning walk without a podcast, a holy hour in a silent chapel. Let the boredom arrive. That emptiness is not the problem. It is the soil.
Sources:
1. Aleteia — original reflection
