Walking with Saints: What I Learned on Pilgrimage
A journey through Poland’s scars and sanctuaries shows men how suffering, beauty, and trust forge true strength.
Father Ian Hollick carried himself with the steady presence of a man who had seen both beauty and horror and still chose hope. A parish priest from Palm Desert, he joined the Heroic Hotline while on pilgrimage in Poland. With him, the conversation turned into more than travelogue—it became a meditation on evil, beauty, suffering, and trust. His voice was calm, but under it pulsed the grit of a man who knew faith is not theory. It’s a daily fight.
This was not a podcast about tourist stops or pretty churches. It was a call for men to understand pilgrimage as more than miles walked. It’s a way of seeing. A way of living. As Father Ian put it, “Poland in all her suffering has produced great and beautiful things.”
Evil and Beauty in Collision
The journey began in the shadow of Auschwitz. The camp still breathes with the memory of suffering. Father Ian described it with blunt honesty: “It was… evil incarnate almost.” He didn’t soften it, didn’t cover the ugliness with pious platitudes.
But then, in the same breath, he recalled entering Kraków’s St. Mary’s Basilica, where the great altar piece unfolded like a vision of heaven. Two worlds collided: the machinery of destruction and the architecture of hope.
“You find the two juxtaposed in history,” he said. “When you have great evil, you sort of see the human spirit rise up to match and conquer—because evil will never win the ultimate war.”
Men know this tension. Life brings moments that feel like Auschwitz—the weight of betrayal, failure, or loss—and moments that open like that altar, flooding us with unexpected grace. Both shape us. Both demand a response.
The Hidden Seminary of Suffering
The pilgrimage wound through Wadowice, the hometown of John Paul II. Father Ian read from Jason Evert’s St. John Paul the Great, pulling back the curtain on Karol Wojtyła’s early life.
“After my mother’s death,” John Paul wrote, “my father’s life became one of constant prayer. Sometimes I would wake up during the night, find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church.”
Father Ian paused. “His example was, in a way, my first seminary. A kind of domestic seminary.”
Here, the lesson was sharp. Holiness is caught before it is taught. Men shape men by the way we suffer, by the way we carry grief without letting it rot us from the inside. John Paul II lost his mother young. Then his brother Edmund died after contracting scarlet fever while treating a patient. Tragedy didn’t crush him. It forged him.
Father Ian reflected on that with the weight of someone who knows the sting of loss: “We have to move in this world with great trust. John Paul II didn’t become the beautiful saint, the beautiful pope that he was, without much suffering.”
Suffering is the seminary of manhood. It can make us bitter, or it can make us whole.
The Litany of Trust: A Man’s Weapon Against Despair
Then came the most striking moment of the conversation. While traveling between pilgrimage sites, Father Ian led the group in the Litany of Trust. The prayer, written by the Sisters of Life, isn’t flowery. It’s raw. It speaks straight into the masculine wound—the fear of failure, the obsession with control, the ache of not being enough.
He prayed aloud:
“Deliver me, Jesus, from the belief that I have to earn your love.
Deliver me, Jesus, from the fear that I am unlovable.
Deliver me, Jesus, from the false security that I have what it takes.”
For a moment, the podcast wasn’t a broadcast—it was a confessional. The cadence of the words worked like a hammer breaking chains.
Every man listening could feel the mirror being held up. How much of our anger, our exhaustion, our restless striving comes from the belief that we’re on our own? That if we don’t hold the line, everything will collapse?
“Deliver me, Jesus, from anxiety about the future,” the prayer continued.
This is the battle cry men need—not bravado, but surrender. Not swagger, but trust.
Pilgrimage as Training Ground
Why does pilgrimage matter? Father Ian explained it like a man who had studied the maps of battle: it’s spiritual training. A pilgrimage site, he said, is not just a holy place but a treasury of grace. Stepping into these sanctuaries is like making a withdrawal from the bank account of the saints.
He spoke of indulgences—not as relics of medieval superstition, but as God’s way of multiplying grace across generations. “The Lord wants to give out his treasure,” he said. “Like with the Lord, it multiplies as it goes out into the world. We need more graces.”
That kind of language should fire a man’s imagination. Pilgrimage isn’t about buying postcards. It’s about stepping into a battlefield where saints once fought, and drawing strength from their victories.
Hope: The Final Word
The Jubilee Year of Hope framed this entire pilgrimage. Hope, Father Ian explained, isn’t wishful thinking. It’s defiance. It stares despair in the face and calls it a liar.
“The great weapon of the evil one is despair,” he said. “Despair says, ‘I know what the future’s going to be, and it’s not good.’ But hope says, ‘I trust in my Father who keeps His promises.’”
He leaned on Scripture and saints, weaving in the image of a mosaic: up close, life looks like random fragments. But step back, and the full picture emerges.
J.R.R. Tolkien captured it with music. God composed a song, but one angel introduced discordant notes. Instead of erasing them, God wove them into the symphony, making the melody more beautiful than if it had never been disrupted.
That’s hope. It doesn’t erase suffering. It transforms it.
Conclusion: Men of Trust, Men of Action
By the end of the conversation, the message was clear. Pilgrimage isn’t just for Poland. Every man walks through Auschwitz moments—pain, loss, evil—and through Kraków’s basilica moments—beauty, grace, renewal. The question is: will we learn to trust through them?
Father Ian closed with the refrain that had carried them across Poland:
“Jesus, I trust in you… that my life is a gift. Jesus, I trust in you… that you will teach me to trust in you.”
For men today, that’s the call. Not to escape suffering, but to carry it with hope. Not to run from beauty, but to defend it. Not to build our lives on self-reliance, but to surrender into the strength of God.
Because in the end, manhood isn’t proven on the mountaintop. It’s forged in the valley—on pilgrimage, in prayer, in the ordinary trials that become extraordinary when lived with trust.