"The light looks as if it's leading the way to the altar. It changed my life," she said. She began academic work on pilgrimage.

The year after graduating from Harvard, Taylor completed a non-degree program in theological German at Harvard Divinity School, then began a secular sort of path as an "itinerant scholar," teaching at Wellesley for four years, Harvard for two, Assumption for one, MIT for one semester.

In the years since she arrived at Colby in 1994 she has proven herself on various professional boards and has published three books. Soldiers of Christ was followed by Heresy and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Paris: François Le Picart and the Beginnings of the Catholic Reformation and the recent Preacher and Audience: Sermons in the Reformation and Early Modern Period, a book she edited. Recently she was elected to the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association. Her reputation is international.

She was so focused on a professional career, Taylor says, that when she became ill with neurosurgical problems in her neck she was literally laid out flat. In a slough of despond, she read psalms, which, turning as they do on life and death issues, proved enormously comforting. This on the heels of her experience at Vézelay, Taylor says, was the turning point of her life.

"Where had my study led me? I wanted something more meaningful," she said. "I wanted to write more on spirituality, getting to know the people in the pilgrimages. I wanted to know things that have happened to people and have been turning points, obstacles that became challenges." She approached Father Phil Tracy, the Catholic chaplain at Colby and local parish priest, who worked with her on the catechism in her candidacy period. Confirmed, she took full communion in April 2000.

Her quick initiation into the church was "a personal pilgrimage," Taylor says.

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Debra Campbell, remembering the attention her students paid the day Taylor spoke in her course on the history and culture of the Catholic Church during the last century, says the term "pilgrimage" is used widely today "in the informal sense to refer to an individual's spiritual journey." Taylor's "journey" and "conversion," meshing with her academic study of pilgrimage, set her steps along the pilgrim path.

"A pilgrimage is a personal journey," Taylor said, "whether a person realizes it or not." People go because something in their life is wrong. They go at a time of crisis--perhaps a relationship breakup, perhaps a failure of faith, perhaps the recognition of not living up to potential, perhaps an emptiness like the "dark wood" the poet Dante comes to that sends him on his journey in the "Inferno." Taylor's crisis came by way of her medical experience.

The real journey begins when a person no longer knows where to turn.

"People talk about finding their way," she said. "But it's not always what you thought you were looking for. Every pilgrimage is unique and almost always what you don't expect it to be. I can think of no pilgrimage book I've read that doesn't say that."

Phil Cousineau's The Art of Pilgrimage, for instance, is replete with episodes in the lives of recent pilgrims who embarked on sacred journeys of regeneration or purification--a dancer to goddess sites, two poets to reinvigorate their love of literature, many to "reconfirm the "presence' behind sacred mysteries." While all the pilgrims experienced the same centuries-old pattern of the sacred journey--the "longing," the "call" that beckons a pilgrim onward, the drama of "departure," the treading of the "pilgrim's way" and beyond into the "labyrinth," the "arrival" and, finally, coming full circle, the challenge of "bringing back the boon"--they also experienced the unexpected. Cousineau calls it "a gift briefly disguised as a disturbance."

Taylor said, "You think you know what you're doing, only to find yourself on divergent paths, experiencing what you didn't expect to experience, not finding the things you did expect." A pilgrimage, then, should be not planning things far ahead; it should be a letting go of attempts to control your life.

At Mont St-Michel, in the Chappelle St-Aubert, a little chapel reached by a causeway and totally surrounded by water at high tide, she sat down to write in her journal. "I wondered why had I come there. I wondered what was to happen next," she said. "That's when I was inspired to walk in the quicksand--to take a little risk because of the tides."

She walked out and quickly felt herself sinking. People have disappeared in the quicksand.

"It felt like something I might not do in a safer circumstance. The tide came in like galloping horses," she said. It was as if the rock of faith provided the rock Taylor hopped onto to save herself.

On each pilgrimage, she says, you have to expect the unexpected. For some, the experience can be joyous, life-giving, renewing, but others come away in disarray, confused, their lives disrupted, asking new questions about where they are going because they can't go back to the place they came from.

"You're not quite the same after," she said.

Taylor walks everywhere. At Harvard, at night after her job at Mass General, she walked five miles along the Charles River rather than take the MBTA. She walks to and from the Colby campus, she walks downtown to mass or to shop. She took driver's education at the age of 44 along with 15-year-olds and finally got her license; parallel parking was easy, but traffic was a trial. "I've saved a lot of lives by not driving," she said.