"Pilgrimages are undertaken because people want to move beyond their normal, mundane life," says Virginia Raguin, a professor at the College of the Holy Cross. Raguin is also the curator of a traveling exhibit on pilgrimages in Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

Actor Martin Sheen says walking the Camino de Santiago is “a journey of the spirit as well as the flesh” and a search for ritual as well as transcendence.

"Part of what's in a pilgrim's heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey," says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed's Warrior Transition Brigade.

Gidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East says the Jordan River, holy to half of humanity, has become a mixture of sewage water and agricultural runoff unsafe for the pilgrims who come to be baptized in it.

"Part of what's in a pilgrim's heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey," says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed's Warrior Transition Brigade.

St. John's University history professor John Rao, a traditionalist Roman Catholic, has made the three-day pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres Cathedral more than half a dozen times and says the experience is filled with ritual, ceremony, and spiritual fervor.

Read an excerpt from "In the Company of Christ: A Pilgrimage through Holy Week" by Benedicta Ward. She is a historian of Christian spirituality at the University of Oxford.

St. John's University history professor John Rao, a traditionalist Roman Catholic, has made the three-day pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres Cathedral more than half a dozen times and says the experience is filled with ritual, ceremony, and spiritual fervor.

It was a week of prayers and pleas for peace and gestures of reconciliation to all sides in the Holy Land.

In most of the world, the poor and sick are ignored. In Lourdes, they are number one, and people say they are drawn there because they believe it is a place of great faith.