The Pilgrimage That Changed Everything

Stories

My First Pilgrimage – Where the Road Truly Began

I didn’t know it at the time, but my first walking pilgrimage to Jasna Góra was going to change everything. I set off with a restless heart and more questions than I could put into words. I came back with hope and the quiet certainty that God cared about my life.

Back in 1997, I couldn’t have explained it that way. All I had was a vague feeling that I needed to go somewhere, to search for something – something that might help me understand why everything I had learned in religion class and heard in church seemed powerless in my own life. Somewhere deep down, I believed there was an answer to my personal crisis – and that I wasn’t going to find it in the world. I didn’t even know the term “spiritual retreat,” but that was exactly what this journey was about to become.

Every August, pilgrims set out on foot from towns across Poland, walking for days to reach the sanctuary of Jasna Góra in Częstochowa for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Warsaw Pilgrimage is one of the oldest – the first group set out in 1711 in thanksgiving for the end of a deadly epidemic. For centuries, pilgrims kept walking through wars, political oppression and communism.

In my hometown, many people joined the Warsaw Pilgrimage until the Podlasie Pilgrimage was established. My sister walked that route – around 400 kilometres in two weeks. I had always listened to the stories with polite detachment. They spoke of joy, singing and deep prayer, but I had my life in the capital and no intention of joining them.

Until life pressed me so hard that I knew I had to go somewhere – not to see the sights, but to search for an answer. And I knew where that road should begin: walking with my sister to Jasna Góra.

The Weight of the Journey, the Space for God

uly 30. My home parish church, now run by the Pauline Fathers. During the Eucharist, I found myself wondering how I was going to make it. A ski injury months earlier had left my knee unstable – sometimes it felt as though it might bend the wrong way.

Not long after we left town, our guide, Father Mirosław, told us:

“Think about your intention. What are you walking for?”

And that’s when I realized – I didn’t know.

My life felt broken in too many places to name just one thing. I had no answer. And yet, that emptiness turned out to be a gift. It left room for God to give me exactly what, as I would later discover, I needed.

The days settled into a rhythm – prayer, singing, keeping pace with the group, aching feet, a sore back and the damp heaviness of tents. Each night I wondered how I would manage to walk again the next morning. And yet, every morning the strength was simply there. My knee never once hurt.

It was on the second Friday, during the Stations of the Cross, that the light came. Not a vision, not a voice, but a sudden clarity – a change in the way I saw my life. I knew it was the beginning of a new path.

When I entered the Chapel of the Miraculous Icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa, I was happier than I had ever been. Nothing spectacular happened there. And yet, I left Jasna Góra with an unshakable hope and a deep conviction that God cared about my life and wanted to help me.