Living in Europe you can’t stumble for falling into a church, and many contain the shrines and relics of the saints. When I lived in the States there were a few shrines but these were scattered far and wide and you had often had to plan well in advance to see them. This past month I was in Paris, Rome, Vienna, and Brussels; in each place I either sought out or fell into a shrine or reliquary, and it got me thinking about relics, pilgrimage, and context.

While visiting the shrine of St. Peter in Rome I was struck by the sense of sterility it presented the visitor; behind a protective glass wall, almost two metres away from me I found myself disappointed – this after all was a designed to be touched, to be seen up close, experienced. I felt very much the visitor to a museum or exhibition. There is something in visiting a shrine that urges the tactile experience, sensuality even. The experience is somehow incomplete otherwise.

Standing briefly before St. Peter’s shrine silent, sparkling clean, and sterile behind its protective glass wall I recalled the enthusiasm of late antique pilgrims who in touching and seeing the sites and relics of our faith experienced the events and personalities as though they were witnessing them in real time. These places, their objects, it seems even now represent the living faith, they urge us to appropriate and experience the Gospel first hand, in real time in ways that cannot perhaps be conveyed through the “formal” study of theology.

Shrines it seems are meant to be “messy” places; they are the bastions of devotion and cult, rather than the refined rhetoric of theologians. These are the points of holiness that erupt into our very secularised “profane” world challenging us to think differently, to see, and touch the sacred. These places are to be experienced and not merely gawked at from afar.