If it’s chariots or sandals,
I’ll take sandals.
I like the high prow of the chariot,
the daredevil speed, the wind
a quick tune you can’t
quite catch
but I want to go
a long way
and I want to follow
paths where wheels deadlock.
And I don’t want always
to be among gear and horses,
blood, foam, dust. 
I’d like
to wean myself from their strange allure.
I’ll chance
the pilgrim sandals.

-“A Traveler,” by Denise Levertov

Can we still “chance the pilgrim sandals” during these final months of the 2025 Year of Jubilee? Called by Pope Francis with the theme “Peregrinantes in Spem” (“Pilgrims in Hope”), the Jubilee already has drawn millions of pilgrims to Rome and to Holy Doors in various local churches to receive the Jubilee’s plenary indulgences. Beautiful images have filled social media: pilgrims all over the world who are solemn, vibrant, engaged. 

Every 25 years, the Roman Catholic Church, led by the pope, calls for a Jubilee. The first pope to do so was Pope Boniface III in 1300. Inspired by the piety of the people regarding the new 14th century, his Jubilee also served his political ambition to bring pilgrims to Rome. 

In his papal bull calling for the newest Jubilee, “Spes Non Confundit” (“Hope Does Not Disappoint”), Pope Francis, like Boniface eight centuries earlier, cited Leviticus 25, ancient Israel’s prophetic call for Jubilee. Francis also referred to Isaiah 61:1–2, the text that Jesus reads in the synagogue inaugurating his mission (Lk 4:18–19). With all this rich biblical heritage and Christianity’s long burden of history, what might it mean to celebrate the last months of the 2025 Year of Jubilee by weaning ourselves from the strange allure of chariots—and instead chancing the pilgrim sandals?

The History of Jubilee

The concept of a Jubilee Year (Lev 25:8–17; 29–31) is closely related in the Old Testament to the sabbatical year, which is found in three legal collections of the Torah: the Code of Covenant (Ex 23:10–11), the Deuteronomic Code (Dt 15:1–3) and the Holiness Code (Lev 25: 2–8). The important relationship between the Jubilee and Sabbath changed over time, from “a sabbath of solemn rest for the land” (Lev 25:4) to a “year of favor,” especially highlighting the release of prisoners and forgiveness of debts. The release (shemitta) becomes the center of a socially and economically changed environment. Importantly, the crushing cycle of debts and imprisonment for the poor formed the context of the reinterpretation of Sabbath and Jubilee. Both Sabbath and Jubilee are rooted spiritually in the understanding that neither land nor human beings can be sold because they belong to God (Lev 25:23). 

Since the Septuagint translates the Hebrew words yôbel (jubilee) and shemitta (release) with the same Greek term, aphesis, this term appears twice in Luke 4:18 (quoting Is 61:1-2). Luke uses this term to announce the programmatic beginning of Jesus’ public life. Luke’s Jesus calls on the combined traditions of Jubilee and Sabbath when reading from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor; he has sent me to release the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord” (Lk 4:18-19). 

This is a solemn moment, but it is neither jubilant nor triumphant. Its fulfillment entails various provocations: the release of prisoners and those oppressed by debt and, implicitly, the healing of the brokenhearted. The first reaction of the listeners in the synagogue is suspense and awe, because they take it as a reference to themselves: how the year of grace will bring release and healing for them. However, when they realize that this Jubilee applies to all those outside of the synagogue, “they were all filled with fury” (Lk 4:2b) and attempted to kill Jesus. How much do we actually include those “outside” in our celebrations? Are we guilty of the same fury as the insiders who wanted to kill Jesus?

Bringing in the Outsiders

The Scripture scholar and historian Sandra Schneiders, I.H.M., has argued that every religious order’s charism was born out of social needs—offering what one might say is a “jubilee hope.” Often, the ecclesial organization of the church itself could not address those needs. In some cases, it even participated in creating them. The founders of religious orders often felt that they had been pushed to the margins and had to become entrepreneurs in addressing those gaping needs.

In the early church, the desert mothers and fathers kept alive the witness-character of faith that was not always recognized as central to the incipient ecclesial organization. Centuries later, studying science and religion was at the heart of the early monastic tradition. Monastic education and influence was even accessible to women. Hildegard of Bingen, for example, preached from the pulpit in 1160 just before the catastrophic Inquisition began persecuting (especially) women. 

Later mendicant communities called to conversion popes and bishops who had fallen into the decadent grip of power and riches at a time when increasing urbanization left most people in abject poverty. St. Francis of Assisi heard God asking him to “rebuild my church,” something the ecclesial organization could not do by itself. 

In the 16th to the 18th centuries, more communities focused on the awareness of a personal relationship with God. The insights of the pilgrim St. Ignatius Loyola into a person’s inner movements helped promote discernment as a way of life. St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross both described the spiritual process as something available to all men and women equally. These movements proved crucial for a church languishing at the beginning of modernity. From the 18th century onward, especially with the possibility of women religious finally being allowed to move outside of the convent to help people in society, religious life helped build more important social institutions and ecological projects than virtually any other group.

This overly simplified history of religious life becomes complicated when abuse of power makes its inroads. Powerful members of religious orders were, in some instances, no less corrupt than their diocesan counterparts. The history of the church and its religious orders reveals that wherever authority gets conflated with power, influence or wealth, the result is tragic at best and horrific at worst. A classic example is the crisis of sex abuse that has overtaken the church in the past two decades, a crisis that has much more to do with power than with sexuality per se.

Religious Life and Jubilee

“The strange allure” of the chariots’ blood, foam and dust—to return to Levertov—is part of the “dangerous memory” of the church. We need this “dangerous memory” to unearth a Jubilee that heals the church and, through it, wider society. Luke saw clearly that Jesus’ sabbath/jubilee prophetic proclamation demanded a time for self-critique, a “holy pause” that leads to realigned priorities and honest memories. Herein lies our eschatological hope.

The Jewish philosopher Elie Wiesel talked about the importance of memory in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1986: 

Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living.… For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope.… The opposite of the past is not the future but the absence of future; the opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other.… The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history.

There is no hope without memory. This is not a romanticized memory of glorious battles or Baroque angels blowing their trumpets in gold-gilded apses. Religious life in particular can only walk in hope if it is steeped in the dangerous memory of its various foundations that were frequently counter-ecclesial, rejecting the chariots and choosing the sandals. 

Bernard of Clairvaux criticized the child endowments of the monasteries. Hildegard of Bingen removed the male dominance of the administration of her monastery. Francis of Assisi exposed clerical involvement with aristocracy and wealth. Teresa of Ávila courageously wrote even as a member of a converso family. Nano Nagle created a school system for all children, including Indigenous girls not supported by parishes that often focused only on their European heritage. 

Mary Elizabeth Lange, of Haitian descent, faced seemingly insurmountable ecclesiastical objections to her vision of a religious order that would witness to the full humanity of Black people. Mary Baptist Russell built a hospital system during San Francisco’s Gold Rush that kept thousands of immigrants of all races and creeds from perishing.

All these founders witnessed to the true meaning of jubilee, responding to the overwhelming need of the outsiders, as Jesus proclaimed. 

Today, various religious congregations still operate at the margins of the world. They often “go a long way” in pilgrim sandals to create paths in the world for people in dire need of social and spiritual support. The long memories and traditions of religious life resist and denounce the mingling of state and ecclesial powers.

When they choose the sandals, Christian believers (especially vowed religious) truly become pilgrims in hope. They protest the way power and wealth have ravaged the earth, polluting the water and air. They stand with migrants and refugees who need legal advocates, and serve as spiritual supporters for those who need food and a place to live where their children can grow. Hope shines whenever we locate ourselves in precisely those places that, from the perspective of wealth and power, appear to be the “garbage” left behind after the profitable extraction of natural resources—including the exploitation of human beings. As Abraham Heschel puts it, one cannot take hope and love, one only receives it by giving it away. Hope cannot spring forth when power and wealth control outcomes with algorithms.

When my small community in the Mission District of San Francisco prays, we too often hear gunshots just outside our walls. Living among the urban poor, we pray for the courage of pilgrim sandals. When we counteract fear and violence in our neighborhood by creating community, we do so in humble pilgrim sandals. How else? And when we educate immigrants, so they become their own agents, it is pilgrim sandals that carry us. 

Humble—and Dangerous

What a beautiful tradition it is to celebrate a Jubilee every 25 years. But how can this Jubilee allow us, in Jesus’ name, to prophetically proclaim a year of grace for the whole world? Having Boniface III’s political interest in mind, one might ask how the 2025 Jubilee reflects not self-serving interests but, in the words of the Old Testament scholar Helen Graham, M.M., the spirit found in the Gospel of Luke of “inter-human justice”? 

Another question: How can we be more inclusive in our celebration of Jubilee? The instructions for Jubilee pilgrims this year have been in Polish, Italian, Spanish, French and English but not in German (which caught my attention as a German missionary sister to the United States) nor in Swahili, Zulu, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese or any other African or Asian language. 

Our church urgently needs a Jubilee. Our world desperately needs a Jubilee! Each month throughout 2025, the church has welcomed a specific Catholic pilgrim group to Rome as part of the Jubilee of 2025. However, is that the goal of Jubilee? To separate us into affinity groups? Tightly separating the religious from the priest and seminarians and the entrepreneurs and evangelization? Keeping close boundaries on who belongs and who does not? Does this separation foster a church drilling its identity into unmovable safety, instead of actually listening to the voices mentioned above? 

Is there a possibility in these remaining months of the Jubilee of 2025 to echo Isaiah and Jesus in the proclamation of a precarious and dangerous sabbath-jubilee? Such a celebration might be neither self-congratulatory nor victorious but self-critical and prophetic—so as to show the world the humility that is so desperately needed in a world drunken with devil-speed blood and foam. The world needs pilgrim sandals more urgently in 2025 than ever before. Please, let us choose them.

Editor’s note: “A Traveler,” by Denise Levertov, from A Door in the Hive, copyright ©1989 by Denise Levertov, is reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

This article appears in December 2025.

Julia D. E. Prinz, V.D.M.F., is a German Verbum Dei sister, working in the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley with migrant populations.