A Time to Reflect, A Time to Walk
My upcoming sabbatical and the pilgrim’s paths ahead
From 28 June until 28 September, I’ll be on my first proper sabbatical since I was ordained nearly thirty years ago. Sabbaticals can take many different shapes. Some people use them as a pause from teaching or parish duties. Others take the opportunity to write, to undertake research, or to reimagine their vocation. Mine won’t be a break in the usual sense. Rather than simply stepping away from ministry, I hope to shift into a slower, more reflective rhythm: one shaped by rest, prayer, study, writing, and, yes, plenty of walking.
The idea of a sabbatical may seem quite modern, especially when it’s written into professional contracts, but it’s drawn from the biblical concept of shabbat—the Sabbath rest. In Genesis 2, we’re told that God “rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done”. It’s a striking image: the world created not in haste, but with a deliberate rhythm of work and repose. God doesn’t rest because he’s weary. He rests in order to delight in what he has made, to bless time, and to mark its goodness.
Norman Wirzba writes that the Sabbath isn’t a pause from life but a profound theological lens that enables us to get a better look at all of it. In this sense, Sabbath is about learning to see rightly. It’s a form of spiritual training that helps us embrace the grace of enough. It reminds us we’re not defined by what we produce, and it draws us back to a way of living grounded in gift rather than grasping.
In the book of Leviticus, even the land is given a sabbath—a fallow year every seventh—as a means of renewal and trust. Indeed, with the Law’s commands to restore alienated land, forgive debts, and free slaves, there is in the Sabbath a sense of new beginnings and new chances.
One Sabbath in Four Pilgrimages
Just as Sabbath invites us to step aside and see the world differently, so pilgrimage invites us to walk through it differently: attentively, prayerfully, and with open hearts. Each of the four pilgrimages I’ve planned for my sabbatical speaks to a different facet of the life of faith: contemplation, memory, beauty, and mission.
I’ll begin in Athens and Corinth, combining some downtime with periods for reflection in two places that shaped the earliest Christian communities. I visited Athens last year (my wife is an external examiner at a university there) and was much moved by the chance pray the daily office on the Areopagus, where St Paul once preached to the Athenians. Corinth will be a first for me, though it’s long been close to my heart. I’ve led countless Bible studies and retreats on 1 and 2 Corinthians over the years, and to walk where Paul once walked—to pray in the very landscape that shaped those letters—will, I hope, bring new depth to verses I’ve come to know so well.
Then comes a return to Cadair Idris, a ten-day trek from my home at Brecon Cathedral to the summit that first inspired A Pilgrimage of Paradoxes. This route, which I’ve mapped myself, will take me to churches and sacred sites, including Llanddewi Brefi and the ruins of Strata Florida. It feels right to mark the ten-year anniversary of that first, unplanned pilgrimage with one that’s far more intentional—a chance to look back, and to give thanks.
Exhausted yet? Well, then, you’re in trouble because we’ve not yet reached the climax of my sabbatical: two weeks on the Via Jacobi, a lesser-known tributary of the Camino, winding through Switzerland. I’ll be walking from Einsiedeln to Fribourg with my wife, beginning and ending each day with prayer, soaking in the glorious creation that will surround us. We trekked most of the Tour du Mont Blanc back in 2018, but I’ve not been back to the Alps since. I’m hugely looking forward to two weeks of being immersed in sublimity.
I’ll conclude my sabbatical closer to home with The Three Priories Way, a new pilgrim route I’m hoping to develop, linking Brecon Cathedral with Llanthony Priory and St Mary’s Abergavenny. These are places I know intimately, but I want to see them afresh—to walk familiar paths with a pilgrim’s heart, and to imagine how others might find God along them, too. The final step of this 45-mile trek will be across the threshold of my own front door.
I’ll have ended where I began.
A Time for Study and Writing
If walking forms one part of my sabbatical, then writing and reflection form the other. I’ll be carrying not just a rucksack but also a set of questions that I hope will take shape into work others may find useful.
The first involves a return to the Convivium initiative I launched at Brecon Cathedral back in 2018. Its aim was simple but far-reaching: to explore how Christians can live well with God, with one another, and with creation. The initiative produced a set of guiding principles: delight, community, hospitality, conviviality, sustainability, right relationship, and rootedness in memory and place. Though the initiative itself has largely wound down, I’ve never stopped believing in its potential. This sabbatical offers the space to revisit and reimagine it.
My plan for doing so is to place these principles in conversation with Catholic Social Teaching, particularly Laudato Si’ and Gaudium et Spes, with which there is much resonance. I hope this will help me to develop a theology of living well that speaks directly to the uncertainties and crises of our age. I want to offer something rooted in sacrament and place, yet fully aware of the social and ecological pressures that shape our daily lives. It may become a new book that offers a practical, hopeful vision for Christian life today.
The second thread of reflection will grow out of the pilgrimages themselves. Here, I’m not setting out with a thesis. I’ll carry a journal and allow the journey, the prayers, the encounters, and the landscapes to shape whatever emerges. I suspect patterns and ideas will begin to form. Perhaps they’ll become a sequel to A Pilgrimage of Paradoxes, perhaps provide insights to fold back into Convivium, or perhaps emerge as something wholly unexpected.
Lastly, I’ll return to an old project that I dusted off and revamped last year: Word & Sacrament: Living God’s Story of Salvation, a 12-session introduction to Christian faith and practice. Piloted recently at St Mary’s, it brings together Scripture, sacraments, and discipleship in a way that invites people to become protagonists in the great drama of redemption. I’ll be editing it for broader use, making it freely available to anyone seeking to walk more faithfully within God’s story.
Well-Tempered: Continuing the Conversation
Although I’ll be stepping away from presiding, preaching, and pastoral care, I won’t be going quiet. I’ll continue to write here at Well-Tempered, using this space as a kind of field journal to think aloud about the pilgrim paths I’m walking, to trace theological insights as they surface, and to offer the occasional reflection on the wider currents shaping Church and culture. The tempo may change, but the conversation will continue. I hope you’ll walk alongside me, wherever this leads.
Pilgrimage, after all, isn’t really about reaching a destination. It’s about being reshaped by movement, extended prayer, and the surprises of grace that arrive when we least expect them. The paradox is that the longest journeys are often the ones that bring us closest to home—not in the sense of geography, but in the deeper sense of spiritual orientation. Pilgrimage doesn’t just change our path; it changes our posture.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once pointed out that while the Sabbath was the seventh day for God, it was the first for humanity, which had only been created on the previous day. In that simple juxtaposition lies a profound truth: ends are often found in their beginnings. This makes me think of T.S. Eliot:
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
The Sabbath, in Jewish tradition, becomes a weekly rehearsal for the Messianic age: a foretaste of wholeness. On that day, we don’t manipulate the world, we marvel at it. We don’t assert ourselves, we recover our shared dignity. Sabbath reminds us that our deepest identity isn’t as doers or achievers, but as beloved creatures within a beloved creation.
That, in the end, is what I’m seeking during my sabbatical—a chance to listen, to walk slowly, and to recover something of that original harmony. Not so I can escape the world, but so I can return to it better attuned.
Now, I really must clean up my old boots.