In his autobiography, St. Ignatius Loyola wrote of himself in the third person as “the pilgrim.” As David Fleming, SJ, writes in What Is Ignatian Spirituality?, “Ignatius looked at his entire life as a pilgrimage. His journey seemed for a time to be a meandering one. For many years he pursued a goal indistinctly seen by him.”
“To Be a Pilgrim” is a hymn that captures this Ignatian spirit of pilgrimage. The words were written by John Bunyan in the latter part of the seventeenth century and they appear in Pilgrim’s Progress. The tune was written by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.
