The chanting in the street woke me before dawn, a chorus of hallelujahs wavering across the cobblestones of the main square, just below my window.

They were pilgrims, come to this small town in Luxembourg for the same reason I had -- an obscure religious observance for a saint I'd never heard of. The difference was that the pilgrims were there to participate, and I was there to watch.

I'd lucked into this event the day before, when a Luxembourger at a gas station asked me if I was going to the Dancing Procession of St. Willibrord. It was a fair guess: People came from all over for it.

"When?" I said, instantly intrigued.

Tomorrow, he said, in Echternach.

I am not particularly religious, but I admire people who are, so when fate puts a pilgrimage in my path, I go. It doesn't matter what religion. I scrapped my itinerary and headed for the little town, an easy detour because no place in Luxembourg is very far from anyplace else. Just before supper, I got one of the last rooms in Echternach that overlooked the square.

The procession called for pilgrims to dance through the narrow streets, wind around the heart of town and come out at the Basilica of St. Willibrord, where the saint was buried in 739.

He was an early Christian missionary, from England via Ireland, who founded an abbey at Echternach. That alone wouldn't qualify his tomb as a sacred site, but tradition says Willibrord performed miracles, once intervening to stop a pestilence. That qualifies. In return, people pledged to dance to his tomb every year.

The event was another manifestation not of human faith, but of the endless human desire to stitch that faith to geography. People don't just need someone to pray to, it seems, they need some place to pray at.

Proof is in the thousands upon thousands of sacred places all over the world, from the banks of India's Ganges River, sacred to Hindus, to the Catholic shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe outside Mexico City. They all draw pilgrims.

Some pilgrimages are huge and world-famous, like the great hajj, which every devout Muslim is asked to make to Mecca. Some are small, like Willibrord's.


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