Travel has always been a way to confront and conquer fear, and to seek one's true identity. The Camino to Compostella in Spain and so many other journeys are really about spiritual transformation and discovery, spiritual change that takes place as the traveler walks in the physical world.
I happened to see an interview with Andrew McCarthy discussing his travel book, The Longest Way Home. His story too is about his traveling cure for childhood terrors that tormented him in a home that was not always loving.
I'm reading the Divine Comedy, Dante the poet's travelog about the pilgrim's journey to self-transformation and life. This is the only journey worth taking. Dante recommends we take it too, and the good news is that only we can take it. Yet the end is the same for true travelers of the spirit: a beatific vision of Christ who is love.
And so the true way is the "way" (of truth and life) into which Jesus invites us, which travels more or less a via dolorosa. The cross is the Christian image par excellence of divine love, sacrificial but efficacious to redeem: to raise us from death to life.
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