Neither of us knew the other, but I had the advantage of having seen Ward's photograph on the back-inside-flap of the dust jacket of his book, Virgin Trails. Of course, I did not know that the smiling, youthful face was taken of Ward some years ago while, as a footloose, carefree bachelor, on a journey through Bali. Still, when I spied him, I recognized at once the now more mature version of the photograph as it came toward me. It was obvious that quite a few years passed since the shot was taken of Ward, now 39 and married.

Tired-faced, with a backpack slung over one shoulder, Ward sauntered slowly toward the entrance of the Marché. He instantly reminded me of his description of his pilgrimage along the Camino at the "extreme northwest of Spain." Yet, when he greeted me after I approached him and identified myself, his face transformed instantly into the same open, fresh smile of the book jacket photo.

Once inside the restaurant, we headed straight for the juice counter – it was one of those hot, humid July days that will mark 2002 as highly memorable for most of us. He picked a banana/strawberry mix, I a lemonade. Our drinks in hand, we made our way to a secluded table on the patio of the Marché and settled into the interview.

Ward, whose speciality as a writer until the publication of Virgin Trails had been travel stories for magazines and newspapers, also teaches English-as-a-second-language to adults. He had come to meet me after a long day of teaching; hence the drawn look. To give him time to relax, our conversation rambled on about nothing in particular. The Virgin Trails could wait a little.

Eventually we steered the conversation to why he, a professed atheist, ventured on a journey that followed the route of Marian pilgrims through France, Spain and Portugal, and then wrote a book about it. The credit, he said, goes to one of his professors at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. The teacher aroused in him the desire to look closer at the relationship between Western culture and Christian religion.

Ward admits to a lot of detours before he settled on exploring the phenomenon of pilgrims seeking places where it is said Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, appeared in visions to seemingly guileless young girls.

"I got out of the program, which was the most interesting for me," he said, somewhat ruefully, about his time at St. Michael's where he studied literature and religion. When asked why, he replied: "I got the idea that an English degree would get me in a better position when I set out to write a book." That degree he obtained from the University of Western Ontario.

When he decided to follow the trails of the pilgrims, he gravitated back to his original interest at St. Michael's. That is why on his pilgrim journey he observed not only the sights of the habitats and the landscape along these trails, nor concentrated solely on the people he met, but also kept his eyes closely focused on the art and architecture along these routes.

Just how much of a detour he made from his St. Michael's days is revealed through what happened to him after he received his English degree. Ward ended up in Japan, where he taught English for a few years. He had picked that country because it offered a chance to make a lot of money. This he needed, he explained, to fulfil his desire to visit Italy to pursue his original interest in the relationship between art and religion. Fate would have it that in Italy he met his future wife, of all things, a Japanese. They share a love for travel. She is also gifted in music and plays plays traditional Japanese drums, and as he pointed out, "she knows how to handle a kendo stick!" (Kendo is the art of Japanese swordsmanship)

After several years of a mostly long distance courtship, they finally decided that they were meant for each other. Of course, there was her family's initial objection to overcome, but her parents relented once they met him, and also realized their daughter's determination. One can see why the family relented. Ward has a boyish charm that easily captures ones affections.

He grew up as the youngest of five children in a household where the heroes – saints, as he referred to them in his book – were Norman Bethune, Tom Paine, Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck and Paul Robson. "Robert Burns rated a shrine," he wrote. "My parents were "lefties", and their saints were the saints of the workers’ movement and the Rights of Man, the ones who embodied the faith, died for it if need be." He had Scots Calvinist forebears, but by the time he grew up, his parents called themselves atheists and raised their family without a belief in God.

"I thought of these people as heroic when I grew up," he said of his childhood saints, then took a slow sip of his drink. "I can see their heroism, but I now don't believe in the same things. In retrospect, some of these people were monsters."

There is a considerable number of years between him and his older siblings, the eldest being 17 years his senior. This wide age gap, and a passage in his book in which he described himself as always having pressed his nose up against the windows of faith, prompted me to ask him if he was an outsider by nature. After all, it seems odd for a non-Catholic, in fact a non-believer, to study at a Catholic institution like St. Michael's.

My question made him think about his experiences a few years ago in Turkey during a visit to Gallipoli. He discovered there that it is "a natural shrine for Australians and New Zealanders." Something he had not realized since the famous battle of World War One took place long before his time. He said the Turks, then the enemy, were very gracious to these pilgrims from Oceania. "It could have been confrontational, but they shared a mutual honor of history. I started to wonder. I was an outsider (in this experience)," he mused.

When I repeated the question, he admitted: "In practice I want to be an insider, but it is hard to find a group. When I think about the Camino, there was an opportunity to walking with others. Some people I liked and I would walk with them for a short time, but most of the time, as much as I tried, I find I walked by myself."

There are other instances which made him aware if his outsider status. "I got some insight recently during the (soccer) World Cup watching the way the Korean community celebrated, watching the Brazilians and the Turks celebrate." He found that growing up in Toronto and being a WASP left him with a Canadian cultural upbringing that lacks a certain color. "They (other ethnic communities) seem to have a much more passionate existence."

He compared this experience to the Canadian response to the Olympic gold medal in hockey. "I put my finger on what was missing. Missing was music." Aside from the, to him, seeming lack of color in his own culture, he misses the way other cultures seem to fall easily into music when they celebrate. That is one of the reasons why he hopes to move soon from a more stately part of Toronto to the lively area of the Danforth, where a mix of various ethnic groups, but predominantly Greeks, provide a colorful human brew. Of course, he admits, he will be an outsider there as well, but he doesn't mind.

As he talked about his fondness of other people's cultures, and about his Italian friends from Milan, whose deep Catholic faith he admires, I began to feel that Ward is despite his skeptical, even pragmatic view of religion, a romantic at heart. The mystery of this faith, and its theatrical presentation, seems to have captured his imagination.

We return the conversation to his book and his unusual journey among devout and not so devout pilgrims in search of the healing grace of Mary. Was there a lasting effect of the journey on him?

"Yea. I think I am more open, that I can talk more easily, and talk more easily about spirituality. I found that it is more central to human beings. We have a need, an impulse to believe. I experienced I have a desire (to believe), but find nothing that is believable."

As a self-admitted skeptic, he said, "my first instinct is not to believe. I try to suspend that disbelief." While he observed his fellow pilgrims he discovered that the things they believed in "seemed totally alien to me." A little further on in the conversation, "Disbelief comes to me as natural as belief to those that I was encountering. When I really question myself, it is hard to say how deeply, how far I was willing to go. Did I walk on with a totally open mind? That would not be honest."

Is he finished with the pilgrimages now that he has finally had his book published? After all, the journey to complete the book and get it published was not easy. As he discovered, very few publishers would contemplate publishing what he had in mind and eventually wrote. He thanks a friend for introducing him to an agent. "There were a lot of rejections. Because I had an agent they came promptly." Not having to wait too long made it less painful, he found.

"This is my first book and I am still waiting for it to change my life," he said, clearly a bit bemused by suddenly being thrown into the limelight. "I am satisfied that I published this," he said quite firmly, and then expressed his pleasure at the manner in which Key Porter Books handled his material. So, back to the question of more pilgrimages. It seems that the subject is still on his mind, but this time he is thinking of secular ones. There was, after all, his experience in Gallipoli. As he sees it, visiting war memorials comes under the rubric of pilgrimage.