WHY A PILGRIM

Why do I call myself a pilgrim? That's a story that has taken almost six decades to live, so it can't be told briefly. My grandfather's 1913 edition of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary defines pilgrim first as a wayfarer; a wander; a traveler; a stranger. It illustrates the meaning with Hebrews 11:13 in the Authorized (King James) Version: strangers and pilgrims on earth. A second meaning is one who travels far or in strange lands to holy places or shrines as a devotee. Both meanings apply to this pilgrim.I have come to see life as a journey to a holy place, but always as a stranger passing through various places. As I learned to phrase it years ago, being in but not of the world.

I received a sound religious education in Sunday School and from instruction by a decent, salt of the earth pastor of blessed memory, Ralph Riedesel. (Theres a picture of Ascension Lutheran Church below.) In my church, religious instruction slacked off markedly after confirmation around age 14. One was then qualified to be a teacher rather than a learner. What I have since discovered is that the years between 14 and 18 are really formative in growing an adult faith from the foundations of a child's faith. For the most part, though, we were on our own. Even for some one like me who was actively involved in church life during those years, there was so much to puzzle over. How did one live as a Christian day to day in the world? I knew there were moral principles involved, but there was so much more. How was a believer to regard science? Did religion have anything to do with politics? With money (other than making an offering on Sunday)? How did religion fit into history? One often got the impression that the history of Christianity consisted of the time of the apostles which was followed by nothing much until Luther and the Reformation and then nothing much again until the present, except a brief stop for the Pilgrims celebrating Thanksgiving at Plymouth. (No one happened to mention that the Pilgrims never called themselves pilgrims, by the way.) The church didn't seem to know much about the world.

In school I discovered that most teachers didn't understand much about religion. Oh, most of them probably practiced some religion, but they were often wrong about the rare religious topics they mentioned. For example, one teacher insisted that the people of England ate a lot of fish because they were Catholic.

I realize now that I cobbled together my own Christian world view from what I had learned at church, what I had read (I'll need another blog to talk about Albert Schweitzer), and also a few of things I learned in school. It's only in retrospect that I can see what they were. One part came in a biology class. The teacher, Miss A., was the typical biology teacher with years of experience and completely immersed in her subject. She had the inevitable task of teaching human reproduction as part of biology (the only time such a subject was EVER mentioned.) She managed to present the facts in such a dry, clinical fashion that she was almost able to convince a class of forty hormone-crazed adolescent boys to take permanent vows of celibacy. She also had to teach evolution. This was long before the current debate about evolution versus scientific creationism burst on the scene. She began the lecture on evolution by remarking that she believed there was God who was a creator. She was careful to say she didn't know what other people in the class believed and she wasn't trying to make anyone believe what she did, only stating what she thought. She then went on to explain evolution, never mentioning God again.

Even now I can feel the strange sensation that came over me. Here was a scientist who had religious beliefs that she didn't think were in conflict with science. She was, by the way, Jewish, not Christian, but it didnt matter. Because this thoroughly scientific person could believe in God, I knew I could as well. Since that moment I have never felt a conflict between science and religion. It would be a good many years later before I learned how to understand the Biblical accounts of creation as revealing truth without reporting scientific fact, but for that point in my life I had the piece I needed in my cognitive apparatus.

Another event was English III with Mr. C. He was a tough guy, not a tough teacher exactly, but a tough man like a prize fighter is tough. He taught English literature with a remarkable passion. It took something for anybody to get a class of 16 and 17 year old guys to read stuff like Beowulf and Macbeth. Mr. C. had no reservation about talking about religion when it touched on literature. How could you understand the pilgrimage in the Canterbury Tales without understanding religion? How could anyone make sense out the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" if they didnt understand sin and redemption? I suspect this was also the first time I was exposed to Pilgrim's Progress. He even threw in some readings from the Bible, Eccelsiastes. In his view, both the themes of the Bible and its language had influenced literature and couldn't be ignored. I suppose today he would be fired. He wasn't advocating his religion (he was Roman Catholic), or even advocating religion in general, just making sure we understood that it had an impact. How different that was from a course I had in college on Western Civilization that skipped everything that had to do with religion.

Those were a few of the elements that helped me understand faith as something intertwined with daily life and not some rarified spiritual pursuit divorced from the other aspects of life. I never seriously considered a life that had no sacred element in it. For me the struggle was the right relationship between sacred and secular. I slowly developed a middle way between a bifurcated life of sacred and secular realms that never touched, and a life where there was no difference between the two so that ultimately the sacred got lost in the world.

I eventually took the coward's way out of maintaining the tension: I became a professional religious leader, a Lutheran pastor. Fortunately, I have never thought that I learned all I needed in seminary. I have continued searching for the right spiritual path for myself. A important piece in my thinking came about 20 years in reading Joseph Campbell's books The Hero with a Thousand Facesand The Mythic Image.Christianity so often put the emphasis only on getting to heaven--the return home. If you were good enough, you got to heaven. And yet the story of Jesus focuses not on the time after his transformation (the resurrection and ascension), but on the time of struggle, from the temptation to the crucifixion. And that is exactly where the emphasis should be in the Christian life. That we will arrive at the final destination in the Kingdom of God is a certainty guaranteed for us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The issue is not how can we live lives good enough to someday deserve heaven (we can't), but how do we live lives now as people who are already destined for heaven.

So I see myself on this pilgrimage of life. And along the way I encounter other people. Sometimes we just cross paths for a moment, as I did with Miss A. and Mr. C., and I discover that they have handed me a map to guide me part of the way. Sometimes I get to travel with others for long stretches as I have with my friends Fr. George and Trish who meet with me every week for prayer, reading, meditation and discussion (God bless them). Sometimes I get the joy of meeting young people who are starting out on their pilgrimage, their eyes fixed on the path ahead (God bless them, too). Many times I am with people reaching the end of their pilgrimage, sometimes with their eyes looking backwards at where they have been sometimes looking ahead to the destination which is now in sight.

And so the pilgrimage.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne