On a true pilgrimage—one that is not simply a tour or holiday—you inevitably come face to face with your own life as you move towards your destination. You also discover things about yourself that you perhaps did not know and that unsettle you … as if you were a leper who appears healthy but is in fact infected, sick, sinful. And now, back home, you must reckon with this reality, because now the therapy must begin, which may perhaps lead to healing, if healing is possible …

It is easy to lose heart, just as it is easy to be afraid to begin a pilgrimage. This is what happened to St Francis in his youth. As he himself recounts in his spiritual Testament (no. 110), when he was still living a life of sin, he felt great revulsion when he encountered lepers, who in his time lived cut off from society. Yet the Lord, through these encounters, led him to experience an extraordinary sweetness.

As he constantly asked God what He wanted of him, the Lord allowed a radical change to take place within him. In a way that cannot be explained in words, one day he met a leper and felt that he had to embrace and kiss him; in this way he overcame his fear and no longer felt disgust. This seemingly mad gesture, filled with humanity and compassion, brought about a radical transformation that marked the beginning of a journey drawing him closer to God, to his brothers, and to himself.

In the encounter with the leper, Francis found the freedom to be himself and to live what God had created him for. In that embrace, Francis the leper was embraced in return by God’s mercy and received new hope; and with this new hope, he embraced humanity when, through the poverty he lived, he reminded humanity of what is essential: the redeeming embrace of Christ through the Incarnation, when He embraced mortal flesh so that our flesh too might rise to life on the last day.

The pilgrimage of hope moves in this direction of inner liberation and healing, perhaps not because we are completely freed from our leprosy, but because, like St Paul with his thorn, we recognise that God’s grace is sufficient.

Even if we return home not healed, a genuine encounter with Christ is enough to allow the grace of healing and liberation to work within us. And it is precisely because we acknowledge our illnesses and wounds—physical, emotional, spiritual, and so on—that we are then able to forgive and to embrace, with the medicine of hope, everyone who is wounded and afflicted like us.