Camino Moments/Holy Expeditions

The Camino Project will promote marking key moments in a young person’s and/or parent’s life with a journey or pilgrimage of some kind. 

At the birth of a child, for example, parents (and siblings) could take a visitation journey to those outside the family who will be important in the child’s faith formation, echoing the infant Jesus’ blessings from Simeon and Anna in Jerusalem. For the start of school, parents and a few family friends could take their child on a prayer walk around the child’s new school. And as parents begin new jobs, the family could mark their transition by journeying to the new place together, with words of blessing, home, and even lament. Families could use their vacation as an opportunity to explore a new or already loved sacred space. They could turn their neighborhood walks into a journey of looking for God in the world around them. 

Each Camino moment or Holy Expedition would give families an opportunity to elevate their gaze beyond the day- to-day, offering the potential to reframe even parts of “vacation” as spiritual exploration wherever they are. We intend to provide families and congregations with a menu of family pilgrimage possibilities, each appropriate to key moments and life stages. We can imagine some families walking a local labyrinth or a nearby Stations of the Cross. Others might visit spaces sacred to the family or the community, like a cathedral or civil rights museum.