Longest Pilgrimage to WYD

The Long Route

One young Australian has set out on what is officially the longest pilgrimage to World Youth Day in history.

Despite being devoted to his work with the Australian Youth Mission Team for the past 5 years, 28-year-old Sam Clear suddenly felt the call to something else.

In December 2006, after selling all his possessions and carefully studying world maps, he began walking around the world on foot, praying for the unity of all Christians.

Clear asks people he meets along the way, either face-to-face or via his Web site, to join his plight by setting their watches to pray for the unity of Christians at 4:01 each day, a reference to Ephesians 4:1.

I have been catching up with Clear via social networking sites where he has revealed what struggles he is offering up for the cause of Christian unity. The 6-foot, 5-inch former Australian Rules football player is logging an average of 20 to 30 miles a day, but some days he can clock up to 60.

"I've walked nearly 10,000 kilometers [6,213 miles] so far, and been mugged, robbed, held at gun point and been hit by rocks," he revealed in one letter to me. "All up it has been a roller coaster year typified by long, lonely days on the road with nothing to do but pray and sing U2 songs!"

My old friend continued: "I've had typhoid fever, salmonella, food poisoning four times, a stress fracture, and have come face to face with hungry, wild animals (ie. a Puma). ... But, I'm still walking on by the grace of God and stopping in churches along the way to extend that invitation to pray."

Interest in the walk has varied from place to place, Clear said.

"Some places rebuke me because I'm Catholic, while others extend the hand of hospitality. ... Some cities don't blink an eye as I pass through, while others come out with a full media entourage."

A mechanical engineer by trade, Clear says it was Australia's high rate of youth suicide which led him to work for the past five years in youth ministry, and observing the depressing affect of the international brokenness of the Body of Christ that led him to his epic trek.

"I'm not a theologian, I'm not a philosopher, and I don't walk pretending to be. I know I can argue pretty well, and I know my faith," he told me in another letter.

But most importantly, he the pilgrim said, it's following St. Paul's acknowledgement that they will know we are Christians by our love that counts.

"I've stayed with padres, archbishops, Pentecostal ministers, random people I've met," he says. "I've put my hammock up on a farm, and I've slept at the Venezuelan National Guard's station and I simply pray and show affection for each one of them."

Clear even followed Pope John Paul II's example by going to visit one of his attackers in hospital and gifting him with a holy card and rosary beads.

"There's a lot of visible discord and mistrust among Christians," Clear said. "And for many people, that's the witness of Christianity to them."

Clear admits that Christians may never be perfectly united, but it is still important to aim for perfect unity, as perfect unity is perfect love.

The final leg of his is trip will see him walking from Russia to Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, Spain -- one of the most renowned pilgrimage walks.

This young, determined pilgrim is due to finish his 28,000 kilometer (17,398 miles) globetrotting exercise just in time for World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney where he will be speaking at an event promoted by the Capuchin Franciscans at Bondi Beach on Tuesday, and then one of the key events on Thursday night.

But, as Clear will remind his peers, this is a task too big for one person to take on. But, he adds, "with the willingness in most people I've met to pray for unity ... well, I'm confident that if we're united in prayer, anything is possible."