Pilgrimage Sermon Church of Reconciliation August 28, 2016 Charlie Thompson First of all, thanks to Rev. Fran Olson and to Pastor Mark for suggesting that I offer these reflections on Pilgrimage today. I love the people of this church. Hopefully these words today will be a token of my appreciation to all of you for your support, particularly during Hope s and my six-week long sojourn this past spring. As many of you know, my wife Hope and I walked 500 miles in April and early May on the Camino de Santiago Campostela. We started in France at San Jean Pied de Port and walked across the Pyrenees and along the northern reaches of Spain, eventually making it to Santiago near the Atlantic coast. Our boots held up and so did our spirits. From the first day we told you about our upcoming sojourn, everyone at the Rec urged us on and then you welcomed us back with open arms. But we have to admit that when some of you talked of our sacrifice, your words humbled us and even made us feel a little sheepish in the end. Maybe some imagined the treks in the Wilderness from the Bible. Our pilgrimage was really not a sacrifice. First of all, we carried a feeling of profound gratitude for the time and money to do it. Yet when I realized, after planning the trip between Hope s birthday on March 30 th and May 10 th, that we would be gone for exactly 40 days, the biblical significance gave me pause. As you know, the number 40 signifies periods of testing, trial, and probation throughout the Bible, from Moses to Elijah to Jonah to Jesus s fasting in the wilderness for 40 days. Of course, the number 40 is not the only connection to faith traditions. We were reminded countless times of the medieval pilgrims who sacrificed to make this walk, leaving from points all over Europe and heading to the cathedral where Saint James, the first pilgrim in Spain, is said to be buried. Some of the first pilgrims in the Middle Ages walked there as penance, some as recompense, legal and financial, and some walked as a way of coming to terms with great loss. No one did it as sport back then. But not even the modern walkers, not even those outfitted with all the latest hiking gear and who don t believe so much in the power of shrines and reliquaries, can deny the depth of meaning that this pilgrimage still exudes. Along the way, the profound spiritual traditions force even the skeptics to stop and notice, as the movie, The Way captures so well. For us, the pilgrimage was, more than anything, a process of letting go of all of our securities and regular routines. To start with, as anyone who leaves on a journey knows, we had to consciously set aside our cares at home in order to leave on our trip. (Let me say here that without our dear friends, Sue and Rebecca, taking care of our house, our plants, and assuring us they were not about to let, as the Bible says, thieves break-in and steal nor moths and rust corrupt our things, none of this would have been possible!) 1
There is no such thing as a solitary pilgrimage. It s only thanks to our family of supporters, including you, that we were able to set out on an unknown journey, take up the staff, and walk. For forty days, our job, our calling, became putting one foot in front of the other, come hail (that s h-a-i-l) or high water. And we encountered both! Though we felt our sacrifice was minimal, we were humbled and encouraged by our foundation of support here, and by all of the ancient echoes of pilgrimages we began to hear and feel along the way. Your prayers during the walk added to the gravitas and the levity. As we read about ourselves in Celebrations and Concerns while on the journey, we were reminded that this trip connected us to something deeper. Your words told us we never walk alone on a pilgrimage, or, indeed, through life. Your spiritual companionship was key, and we are forever grateful. We began with a sense of foreboding on the last morning of March, as a man named Istvan drove us in his van across the French border in the dark. We left Istvan s hostel in Spain before daybreak so we could have all day to make our trek westward over the Pyrenees and to stay in an ancient monastery at Roncesvalles. That is a typical plan for the long-walk types like us. We learned there are two basic types of pilgrims, the ones who can take time to walk across the entire country, and the short-term walkers who have maybe a week and who pile into buses to arrive in Galicia and walk only the last 100 kilometers. Some of them are tourists, but many are muy Catolico (very Catholic), true believers in Santiago s power. Before it was over, the division between those who had the time to make the long journey and those who didn t, made us feel nothing but privilege. I realized we were not in North Carolina anymore when I started seeing the snowdrifts of March piled up alongside the Pyrenees road. Then rapid lightning and thunder began as we rounded hairpin curves. Sheets of rain fell on snow, as Istvan clicked the windshield wipers to high. I was sitting in the front because of car sickness and Hope was in the very back. I was hoping she didn t notice the horrible weather conditions. Maybe she was sleeping. Several people sat in the seats between us, so we couldn t talk. I was sitting there thinking that there was no way she d want to start out in that weather. I came up with an alternate plan. Istvan, I asked softly, Are you headed back on this same road this morning? We got out of the van at St. Jean with the other pilgrims, and it was then I asked Hope if she wanted to return to the top of the mountain in the van and just hang out at Roncesvalles until the rain passed. As lightning continued flashing at daybreak and thunder boomed in several directions, it would have been logical to go back. There is only one road, Istvan had said, and he was going right back up the mountain. He waited in the van for Hope s answer. Then Hope said, No, we ve come this far and we should start here. I knew then she was going to make it the whole way. She didn t know it yet, but I did, for this was a just another show of her strength that I d seen many times over the years. She is not one to quit what she starts. 2
The pilgrimage began officially at the Pilgrim office, where you get all the warnings about people who have died in the Pyrenees and all the procedures are explained by a volunteer who seems totally intent on your walk as though she hasn t done this thousands of times before, though you know she has. Then, with your Pilgrim s passport stamped, you set out on foot, walking through a medieval street, feeling everything is different now than when you tried your pack on back home. You feel every strap and lace knowing this time the fitting is literally for the long haul. We had walked a mere twenty steps when we noticed a bright-red, heavy-duty poncho on a mannequin out in front of a store to our left -- already open at daybreak. Hope mentioned maybe we should stop and consider one of those. Already feeling a sense of mission, I asked, can t we just wait till the next town? We ve only walked twenty steps, after all, isn t it kind of anticlimactic to stop and shop after one minute? After all, we had just bought rain gear at REI and even had rain covers for our packs. We continued walking, though I knew I d just taken on a new load of responsibility I hadn t needed. Why do I do those things? Frugality, I guess. Hope would probably call it something else! We continued on and it rained and rained and our clothes began getting wet. Then hail began hitting us in the face. Our rain jackets were failing. Our socks were squishing with water. No other stores appeared as the miles added up. That poncho back on the mannequin began to seem like our salvation foregone. I would be eating humble pie for lunch, I knew. Hope trudged on. I kept up. Though the few glimpses of scenery we had were beautiful, we kept our heads down to keep the hail and rain from hitting us in the face. I got to know my boots very well that morning. We met our first kindred spirits under a barn shed where we waited out one of the downpours. A mother and daughter from Korea. They were only the first of countless international friends we would talk and walk with, quickly having a shared sense of purpose despite language difficulties. We spent just a few minutes with them, and then wished them a hearty Buen Camino (one of hundreds of such fare-thee-well greetings spoken each day), and we walked on into the rain, only to meet up with them again totally out of the blue in a hostel in Pamplona a week later. The Camino is like that, a profound reflection on life writ large, a journey begun starting in the East with the sunrise and heading toward the western sundown, like birth and death. As in life, we stopped along the way to be with friends and then, inevitably, we departed from them and they from us, in all too brief, yet wonderful, interludes. People leave us, so cherish the moment; was the lesson. This kind of thinking was common. As one walks away the kilometers and the hours, there are long stretches of thinking time. There were so many times when we thought about Camino metaphors for life. All of life is a journey. The journey of a lifetime begins with a step. Etc. 3
When you see our photographs from the trip, you ll realize that our walking was hardly martyrdom. Many days we hiked from café to café, quite literally eating our way across Spain. As Hope is fond of saying, you can eat anything, anytime on the Camino. And we did. Everyday brought new food, new scenery, new people and after a week or so, familiar friends with whom we walked nearly every day. We were almost always with others, walking and talking with people anytime we wanted to. If we didn t want to visit, we simply walked ahead. Every day, another deep conversation. Before we knew it, we were getting to know our walking companions very well. And then, the next coffee stop, where levity was sure to follow. That is European hiking never a great deal of wilderness, with the urban seamlessly blended into the rural, and no real divisions between the farms and woods, shops and houses. Just a walk following little yellow arrows painted along the way with cows in the road and cars and cafés and houses and vineyards and warehouses and woods all of a piece. What an incredible privilege it was to be able to take six weeks out of our regular routines! We learned so much. Thirty people or more shared their lives with us. We knew more people than that by name and face. We heard deep stories that might otherwise have taken weeks to know. In the hurriedness of everyday life, maybe we would never have stopped to listen. A young man s mother had died and he was walking for her, he told us. A former police officer in England had just had chemo and was walking without waiting to find out if she was in remission. A young woman was trying to decide on whether to emigrate from Holland to the U.S. to get married. And on and on. This was our daily life. A family of walkers formed and we realized there was another family a day in front of us, another coming behind us. If we took a day to rest, we met a new family, and sometimes our old group told us where they were so we could catch them. We were among likeminded people from all over the world. All of us on a quest for something deeper, all of us slowly realizing that our pilgrimage was yielding a sense of kinship to people with many interpretations of faith and experience, and through them, new insights. Everything and everyone became more precious as we went. None of it dogmatic, everything connected. That is the magic of the Camino, as they say. Along the road somewhere, pilgrimage became more than a metaphor for life. Instead, walking with friends, we realized, was not an escape from life or something to teach us about life, but life itself. Putting one foot in front of the other was our existence. Where we placed our feet was no symbol. Walking was life, and walking never gets more present than on a pilgrimage. More important, we learned that the person walking beside us becomes our sister or brother for that moment and there is no other who is quite as present. So, we learned to cherish people in the moment, particularly knowing that could be all. We learned how to walk with more mindfulness, and also how to stop and listen and pray inside a church, sitting on a park bench, or in a field. We learned anew what it means to break bread, 4
drink wine, and laugh with others. We learned many times that not every act of kindness is done to gain something in return. We took on an attitude of radical present-ism, of being wholly present, to ourselves, the ground under us, the place surrounding us, the people we were with, as the past and future faded in comparison. But we were always aware of the promise of our return, to comforts and to loved ones whom we appreciated more than ever. And the reliance on return never left us so we stepped confidently forward knowing that our airline flight awaited us on May 10 th. We only needed to get back to Madrid on time. Along the way, our leaving and returning would become bookends framing our pilgrimage experience between two scheduled flights, with the middle period, a time of reflection and deep experience squeezed between. As our pilgrimage was coming to a close, with our growing awareness of where our feet trod every day, we started to gain a renewed sensitivity to the millions of travelers in many parts of the world who continue on the move as refugees. As pilgrims we were sensitized to them, but we knew that the great difference between them and us, is that they have no itinerary to follow. They have no promise of return, perhaps ever. Footsteps are different when you know your destination. Refugees can t plan anything for forty days hence. They wander in the wilderness without knowing. People who know me well know of my work about borders. I have written about those who live behind walls, in camps, or who travel through deserts as wanderers, migrants, and refugees. Being a pilgrim, meant that I began to feel these others in my bones, though I never became like them. I had a place to lay my head. As the scripture reading from Matthew shows, Herod was doing his best to kill Jesus. For that reason his parents became refugees, not simply pilgrims. They couldn t go back home, not during Herod s life, nor even during Herod s son s life. Not ever. The story I heard growing up didn t emphasize that part. Jesus s manger was kind of a comfortable place surrounded by smiling animals. But these verses from Matthew tell of homelessness, a theme we see again later in Jesus s life. A scribe, likely a comfortable man with a home, once told Jesus he d decided to follow him. Jesus turned to him and replied, Foxes have holes, birds have nests. But the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. That s the language of refugees and the undocumented. Pilgrims return home. Those without legal standing are still looking for one. A recent report from the International Organization of Migration says that in 2015, there were 65.3 million people in search of a place to lay their heads, a number higher than at the end of World War II. Also last year, 5,400 migrants died trying to cross borders, including our own, setting a grisly world record. 5
As we put one foot in front of the other on our Camino, it started to become very clear we were among the lucky ones with pretty good gear (we did eventually buy two of those ponchos, when we saw them again). Most important, we had a home to return to. The Syrians arriving at Lesbos about the same time did not. Some of the tears I shed as we arrived at the amazing cathedral in Santiago, having walked 500 miles, was for the human exiles, the expelled, and the deported. We arrived in Santiago and a woman who served us lunch found a room for us. There was room for us in the Inn, quite literally. As our feet trod an old pilgrim s way, we realized anew that our work in the world isn t merely to take time out for ourselves as pilgrims walking alone, but to turn our hearts to those walking with us, and also to those who are walking right now through deserts, or the ones detained at borders, being checked for papers, herded into jails and refugee camps, perhaps killed. They sound to me a lot like the sons and daughters of man who possess no places to lay their heads. We are all pilgrims in the sense that every one who heads toward a greater calling. But the human family is profoundly divided between those who have homes in this world, and those do not. My camino made that more real to Hope and me than ever. The question that leaves us is what is required of us now that we re back? I find myself asking, how do I continue to live in the radical present with those others in mind? My pilgrimage, I m convinced, is not just about me. 6