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of our midwinter lectures. Our opening hymn tonight will be number 543 in the Presbyterian hymnal, Abide with Me. Let us stand and sing. I'm Andy Dearman, academic dean and member of the faculty.

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It's a great privilege to welcome all of you here, either for the first time or as a return engagement for our series of lectures. If I remember correctly, it was the writer John Irving who observed that almost every novel has one of two things in it. Either a visitor comes to town or someone goes on a journey.

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It's an observation worth pondering in light of the lecture this evening and the way we Christians tell the story of our lives in light of God's leading. Surely, there are exceptions to John Irving's observation, but most certainly the narratives of the New Testament, namely the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, are not exceptions. What would be left in those accounts, my friends, were it not for the great visitor and all the sending that comes as a result of his appearance?

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Professor Brett Webb Mitchell has chosen the topic of pilgrimage as a way to talk about nurturing Christian faith. The model has long-standing roots in the church. If you heard his first lecture this morning, you will already know that he defines pilgrimage both broadly and positively, and with a lot of imagery and energy. Dr.

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Webb Mitchell teaches at Duke Divinity School and is the author of several books and many articles. The title of his second Robert F. Jones lecture is School of the Pilgrims, Companions. Professor, thank you for coming to Austin Seminary.

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We look forward to your presentation. Join me in welcoming Professor Brett Webb Mitchell. It is marvelous that you are here this evening when I know you had choices of listening to other news and other stories tonight. As I've kept on saying all day, well, there's the good news you could hear tonight or the other news.

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I want to begin tonight with a quote, and that of John Calvin. And it is this. Calvin says this in the Institutes. Christ teaches us to travel as pilgrims in this world, that our heritage may not perish or pass away.

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And I begin with this quote of Calvin's found in the Institute so as to say first that Calvin was not opposed to pilgrimage per se, nor to the language of pilgrimage. Many modern day writers in the Protestant church, historians and theologians alike, like to be exact, and they cite Martin Luther as the one who put the damper on the act and the art of pilgrimage among today's Protestants. Apparently, seeing the connection between indulgences, penance, and purgatory in the act of pilgrimage, Luther wrote out strongly against the practice of pilgrimage, seeing the crass commercialism and the near heresy that had bred in what he deemed to be corrupt and corruptible. But Calvin was different.

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He goes ahead and takes us into this language of pilgrimage. Second, the question for us this evening is this. What does Calvin mean? for us today that, quote, Christ teaches us to travel as pilgrims in this world.

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Obviously, he was referring to the then modern current day practice of pilgrimage to a holy site to be with the everlasting eternal search for the holy in the myriad of places that were around his world at that time. Both Catholics and Protestants were aware of the practice and the art of pilgrimage, in which his hope would be that we would persevere towards the heavenly city and persevere with the memory and the hope of the city of God. Third, what is also important to remember is that this wasn't a message to a special set of people. Calvin was referring to you and me, to us, to us here, to Christians, calling us pilgrims.

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We are pilgrims, us, we who are gathered here. We are called by God in Christ to be on our way. Therefore, in tonight's set of lectures, I'm going to focus on the us-ness, the we-ness in Calvin's claim that Calvin said we are pilgrims. Christ teaches us, he writes.

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Christ teaches us, desires for us, wants us to be pilgrims in this world, to perish, persevere. This morning I covered 2 characteristics of pilgrimage that I understand are all running conterminously with each other among 10 variables that I want to hold up to you as a way to understand nurture in the context of the church. The third pilgrimage

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The third characteristic that I wish to lift up tonight to begin with is that of the rituals of pilgrimage, or remembering whose we are. There is a difference, you see, between performing the ritualistic gestures of the Christian life as a choice and performing the ritualistic gestures of the Christian life as if it mattered to our very lives, as if our lives depended upon the gestures of the rituals. It was on pilgrimage that I relearned the way that I first learned about pilgrimage, that our life is bound together, that we reincarnate the memory of those pilgrims who preceded us along the way. The old adage may be true here.

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We may not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes for us as Protestants who are gathered here to come upon pilgrimage again. Instead, we have many things to learn from the memory the story of those who have already been on pilgrimage before us, who can tell us about the pilgrimage from their experience. And one thing has turned out to be true.

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The steady rhythm or the beat, the keeping one eye on one step at a time while keeping the other eye on the prize ahead continues to hold us, continues to draw us, continues to lure us forward towards the kingdom of God. For example, it is 5 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. I just arrived in Costillo, New Mexico, far from my home in North Carolina, scared, wondering what on God's green earth am I doing here, in a place that's very brown. I am surrounded by a group of men and young boys who are to be my community for the next few days.

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The mothers, the sisters, the grandmothers, the aunts of many of these young men have just left, many of them saying, good riddance, I can't wait to have a week away from you. Suddenly the word is cried out, formation! And I hear this word being shouted again and again above the rumble of boys and men getting ready to be on pilgrimage. Formation is bellowed again and I follow the throng to get into single file behind three standards that would lead the way. In front of us was the Gia, a cross with a wooden corpus of Jesus on it.

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is ever so dramatic. I see nothing like this in any part of North Carolina. On this, the corpus. His head is bent downward.

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His chin is touching his chest, while his mouth is wide open, as if screaming in pain. A crown of thorns is thus placed firmly upon his head, causing a perfusion of blood to cascade down from his brow, over his bowels, down to his feet. The hands and feet are frozen in spasms, an agony of pain as nails go through his palm and his feet. The corpus is followed by a large, colorful flag with the impression of Our Lady of Guadalupe, also known as the Mother Mary of the Americas, followed by a large wooden puzzle piece that was to be the heart of Jesus.

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And so we walk single file to the small church, Adobe, of course, in Costilla, and we perform a ritual to be repeated time and time again throughout the journey. As we come closer to the chapel itself, singing a simple song always in Spanish, a band of members from the church are singing another song and they carry in front of them a large banner with the image of the patron St. of the church on it. Beautiful, bright, big, bold colors, none of the Presbyterian pastels.

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And along this pilgrimage, we start to see banners of St. Anthony of Padua, St. Joseph, St. Geronimo, St.

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Teresa de Jesus, and of course, always somewhere in the throng, Our Lady of Guadalupe, not Guadalupe. Once the pilgrims holding the Gia and the church members meet together, the singing either continues and we sing louder, or sometimes it ceases altogether. And we pilgrims kiss the image on the banner. I've never kissed so many banners in my life.

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As the church members kiss and venerate the Gia also that is before us, the church members then turn towards the small adobe church with the pink interior and the banner and the people of God lead the way as we file single file into that church. At the doorway of each church, a curious encounter takes place. The parishioners divide and they create a corridor for us to pass between. They reach out as we come through and they touch us gently on our arms and they smile and they ask the question, bless me.

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An older woman, far older than my grandmother of 86, touches my hand and raises it to her wrinkled forehead, brown, wrinkled forehead. In order for me to give her a blessing, I take my thumb and I place my hand and only by instinct do I make the sign of the cross upon her wrinkled, weathered brow. She smiles knowingly. Another young boy before me, 13 years old, does the same thing.

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She whispers in my ear, you are a St. this week. You are most blessed this week. Imagine, 13 years old, being told the very same thing.

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You are a St. this week. You are most blessed. A holy blessing has taken place.

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Gestures, rituals, commingled together. The pilgrim is considered the blessed one by God because of the sacrifice that we have come to make on this time, in this place, on this pilgrim. We are welcomed as if we are saints, given small slips of paperwork. with petitions that we are to pray throughout the week.

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We are treated as royalty. Suddenly, 1 Peter comes to mind. We are a chosen race, God's own people, chosen to proclaim the wonderful acts of God this week. Such rituals bond us together quickly as we concentrate on all the quirks, all the intricate tasks that we are to carry out this week.

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Don't run before the Gia, even if you need to relieve yourselves on the side of the road. You always have to go just a little bit before it, but always wait for it to go back. Be sure the Gia enters first, not you, before you enter a place to rest, eat, or sleep. At 6 o'clock in the morning and 6 in the evening, you pray the Angelous, chanting, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with you, blessed are thou among women, and bless the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, as fast as you possibly can.

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Before every roadside cross, every cross on every church we pass, at first it began with only the Catholic ones, and near every Catholic cemetery, we take off the hats we wear, protecting us from the hot sun, and walk by in silent devotion. As I said, we started the week off, we pilgrims, taking off our hats for the Catholic institutions. But by the end of the week, I was sure that they were all doffing off their hats for the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the Methodists. And before we enter into a chapel, we stop, take off our shorts, put on long pants or sweats.

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We pray before every meal with a ritual of blessing, bowing, bending, crossing of bodies, constantly before us, singing to the women and men who have prepared the meal with the singing of this prayer. May the blessings of God be upon you. We then get on our knees, and the people who prepare the meal, they bless us and sing to us. And before we leave each place again, more slips of paper come into our pockets.

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And so by the time that the pilgrimage has ended, our pockets are full of petitions of prayers to be deposited in the holy place of Chumayo. At St. Patrick's Purgatory, in Ireland, I am thrown into a swirling bath of ritual waters as I jump right into the rituals of St. Patrick's Isle, again, Presbyterian, Protestant, and lost and confused among the holy Catholic mess.

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I was lost with the rituals, not knowing where to begin or what to say. I had a pamphlet in my back pockets that they handed to me on the beginning of the boat ride over from the mainland, but I was left alone until an elderly woman who traveled over on the boat took notice of my quandary and said, you don't quite know what to do, do you? She came over and she explained the pattern for the prayer sequence they called a station. A station.

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A station is a form of prayer that involved these physical gestures. You walk slowly, you kneel, you work the rosaries like this, like it's going out of style. I've never kissed so many crosses, metal crosses in all my life. Accompanied by a mantra type of rote prayer, usually so many Our Fathers, in which I said so many debts, because, you know, it made it go faster that way.

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Hail Marys, usually concluding with one verse of the Apostles' Creed. Nine stations are to be completed over each death. day, or over three days, beginning at certain hours of the day, it would take me an hour and a half to finish one station, and by the time I finished St. Patrick's Purgatory, I could do it in less than an hour.

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My first time around the station, my inaugural run, if you will, was full of doubts, and my steps were tentative, full of spirit, but also naive bungling and deep sighing between childish giggles of embarrassment, saying, I can't believe what I'm doing. I leave the Basilica, the safe enclave that it is, and I head to St. Patrick's Cross, which is a small cross mounted on the top of a three-foot slender stone column.

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I say, one Father, one Hail Mary, one creed, kissed the small iron cross, as have generations of Christians before me. Now I have it cold. Then I go over to the cross of St. Bridget, carved into the walls of the basilica, and I announce, I renounce the world, I renounce evil, and I renounce Satan.

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And then I look at the pamphlet to see what I'm supposed to renounce next, and I walk around the basilica slowly four times, saying either a decade of the rosary, which I barely knew, so I just sing Amazing Grace really slow. Then one leaves the basilica to continue the prayer sequence around six small circled beds of stone, with a three-foot black metal cross, a corpus, of course, on that cross implanted in the middle of the circle. The crosses look like the Excalibur of Arthurian legend, a sword in the stone. Each circle was a name of a saint that I never really knew before, St.

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Brigid, St. Brendan, St. Columba, St. Patrick, St.

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Devog, St. Molaise, each saint having some kind of connection with purgatory. The priests on this aisle would stand back, their arms crossed like this, as if they were aerobic instructors telling us, work the stations, man, work the stations, that's it, work it. And after a while, I wasn't sure if I was working the stations or they were working on me.

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I felt like I was lost in an aerobic practice of prayer. The station concluded with one more visit to St. Patrick's Cross, give another kiss, along with 300 other people waiting in line. I sit down on the side of the basilica, smiling, exhausted, ready for a break.

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Rituals. It is the rituals that we perform daily. hourly, minute by minute, Protestant, Catholic, it matters not, in which who we are and whose we are is established, blessed, nurtured, performed. It is in the sacramental gestures of baptism, of Eucharistic intinction and cups of wine

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and broken breadcrumbs, washing the feet of strangers we've never met before, welcoming someone we don't know in a soup kitchen, the homeless shelter filled with tired children and abused adults, the prisoner who yearns for a letter from a friend or anyone, extending the right hand to fellowship and passing the peace of Christ with our enemy, laying hands on the newly ordained elder who is disabled, that we not pass on just a tradition or the ritual one more time, but more powerful. we pass on Christ. Christ embodied in us, then fleshed with Christ, Christ to and with one another, becoming Christ-like in the presence of one another. The 4th characteristic, the building of community of Christ and the companions along the way.

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Much of what I've shared with you already in these talks, and we'll share further in this talk, has to do with the centrality of community, of relationships, of the one-to-one meetings that we have with one another. We hear those words wherever two or three are gathered. There is Christ, so rings true. Again, I was taught that there are some pilgrims who are loners, like the pilgrim Christian in Bunyan's Tale of Pilgrim's Progress.

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Though Christian keeps bumping along, finding people all along the way to the celestial city. Then there are those of us, myself included, who understand themselves as members of the body of Christ as part of a group of pilgrims, more like Chaucer's Mary and diverse group of Mary Bungler pilgrims on their way to Canterbury to pay homage to the relics of St. Thomas of Becket.

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It is among the friends and acquaintances that we come across along this route of pilgrim and pilgrimage that we learn best the art, the act, the performance, the gestures of pilgrimage. And what is absolutely incredible is that it is the school of friendship in which we might find the place that the school of the pilgrim may well best be taught, for there really is no other systematic way of teaching a pilgrim how to walk or move along the pathway than in the act of friendship. This is based upon the model friendship that Jesus bestows on us.

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Jesus, who calls us friends, bringing us ever closer in love to the one who is the pilgrim God. One profound story of discovering community on pilgrimage occurred when I was on this pilgrimage to Chimayo. On the second day of the pilgrimage, we are moving from Cuesta to Taos in New Mexico. We arose at the incredibly early morning hour of 3 o'clock.

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It is dark as night. By 4 o'clock, we are to be on the road to Taos. The previous day's walk was relatively flat terrain as we hugged the side of the mountain east of us. But this day's walk is on rugged earth with plenty of gradual inclines and steeper declines to test our already sore legs and aching feet.

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We walk out of the artificial glow of streetlights in Cuesta into the dark maw of cold night before us. Spooky doesn't quite capture this morning's walk to Holy Chimayo. By 7.30 in the morning, the vehicle traffic increases dramatically. Suddenly,

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An old, white-haired man, his hair sticking out like this, with an angry scrowl on his face. His craggy face slows down in his 1980 white Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan. He rolls down that window on the driver's side and then also on the passenger's side, his hand shooting out of the car as he points to the Christ on the cross. He leans slightly out of the car and shouts, angry at us, he ain't on the cross anymore! He jerks his head inside, nervous, scared, stares straight ahead and

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pulls up the windows as fast as he possibly can and guns his engine. It is as if he is afraid that we will run after him, catch him, and beat him up with our cross until he is dead. Well, all of our heads turned to the insulting driver and we stared blankly. Our mouths open wide in response to the angry comment hurled at us.

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It was like a Molotov cocktail. It exploded all over us. On the first day of pilgrimage, we were instructed, don't wave to anyone who drives by. Don't engage drivers in conversation for fear of an accident.

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Now who was having the accident? A growing murmur arises among the pilgrims during a stretch of road in which we have been instructed to remain silent. But the word went around. What'd he say?

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Did he say what I think he said? asked the younger pilgrims, also known as peregrinos. As the lone Protestant, the lone gringo, I was stunned, I was dumbfounded by the vitriol of the driver. Such anti-Catholic sentiments were foreign to me.

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I mean, no one goes around North Carolina yelling at Protestants. Clearly, the driver is a Protestant like myself. Yet amid my Catholic brothers, I am one of them. I am now part of their community, they are part of my community.

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And amid the angry epithet, we all discover community. The theological discussions quickly arise, more ferocious, more important than anything I have ever found in all of my teaching for the last 10 years at Duke Divinity School. On the one hand, I am told that many Catholics can't seem to get past Good Friday and instead worship a Jesus, who always seems to be stuck in the grip of death with no hopeful sign of resurrection. But I have to say, sadly enough, too many of my friends who are Protestant tend to forget that Jesus was ever on the cross before he experienced resurrection himself from the dead.

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A resurrection with no sacrificial death is the Jesus we worship sometimes. It is then that I discover that I am not a pilgrim by myself. It is not a profession. It is not an identity, solely mine.

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It is a role, though, that I cannot choose to be my own. For the pilgrim is always one chosen, called by God in Christ, whether we are aware of it or not. And the blessing of pilgrims on their departure from the prayer book we were given on the way to Chimayo, the words of the intercessory prayer was like this. Lord, be the companion of our journey.

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The word companion is from the French word companion, which in French is either a bread fellow or mess mate, one with whom we break bread with, associating it with a person whom we travel with. On pilgrimage, it is also oftentimes attributed to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the saints of pilgrims today, who, when breaking bread with a stranger, realize that this is the one none other than Jesus himself. And poof, he's gone.

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Fifth, the role, the place, a pilgrim guide, and becoming a pilgrim. In Paulo Coelho's book, The Pilgrimage, the story of a modern-day pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, there is a guide in the novel whose name is Petrus, or Peter, the rock. Petrus emerges as if out of nowhere in the life of the pilgrim of this story, who is Paulo. Petrus tells the pilgrim, who at the beginning of the story is so lost, that the quote, true path to wisdom can be identified by these three things.

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First, it must involve agape, and I'll tell you more about that later. Second, it has to have practical application in your life, otherwise wisdom becomes a useless thing and deteriorates like a sword that is never used. And finally, it has to be a path that can be followed by anyone, like the road you are walking now, the road to Santiago. End of quote.

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What is amazing about the character of Petrus in Paulo's story of going on pilgrimage is that he is so unexpected. by Paolo. He didn't expect to meet a Petrus along his way. Petrus, we are told in the story, was a real, in real life, a prize-winning European industrial designer.

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Their meeting, though, was not by coincidence. Having been on this pilgrimage before, Petrus was a natural for leading someone else on pilgrimage. Petrus's job is to lead this pilgrim along the road to teach him the practice of pilgrimage. And at a certain point along the journey, the pilgrimage, Petrus will leave Paolo, the pilgrim, as Paolo comes to the place where he is now the pilgrim that he was called to be.

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Now for me as an educator in the body of Christ, the amazing point that I cling to in this little bit of educational pedagogy is this, and I have found this true in my own life. At the end of the time with Paolo, Petrus tells Paolo that the secret that has to be experienced in order to be understood He writes and says, you can't understand the secret of pilgrimage by reading it in a book. It must be experienced.

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The secret of pilgrimage is the following. You can only learn about pilgrimage by teaching it. You can only learn about pilgrimage through teaching it. We have been together here on the road to Santiago, but while you were learning the practices, I was learning the meaning of those practices.

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In teaching you, I truly learned. By taking on the role of God, I was able to find my own true path. He writes, Life teaches us lessons every minute, and the secret is to accept that only in our daily lives can we show ourselves to be as wise as Solomon and to be as powerful as Alexander the Great. But we become aware of this only when we are forced to teach others to participate in the extravagant gesture of pilgrimage.

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Along pilgrimages I have been on, I too have experienced the wonderful providential hand of God in bringing people to me who lead me, care for me, teach me the act, the art of pilgrimage. I've looked around. There is no sign-up board as we would find in a church basement. There is no room pre-assigned.

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There is no label on a doorway saying pilgrimage here. And the pilgrim guides, they just seem to appear. The teachers seem to come at the right time, in the right place, during the right circumstances. And likewise, they leave at the right time, in the right place, during the right circumstances.

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You can call it serendipity, you can call it spontaneity, you can call it the unexpected, the unplanned, the uncautious, but it seems to me... more than anything else, it is God and Christ. Much like Christ revealed Himself to those two disciples on the way to Emmaus, they weren't expecting it. For example, on the first pilgrimage I made to Chimayo, I was encouraged to go on the pilgrimage through a community of friends who didn't know each other but knew of Chimayo.

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When I arrived in Taos, New Mexico, the spiritual director, the priest of the local Catholic Church, Father Ed, greeted me as if I were a long-lost brother, big arms, heavy arms, grabbed me and brought me ever closer to him. His parents were there. Here's my friend Brett, he said, to his mom, his brother, his sister-in-law, his niece, his parents, as I prepared to go to Costillo with Ed to the beginning of the pilgrimage trail. And throughout that trek, Ed would take me aside and teach me about the nature of the land, the people, the local historical lore, the current problems facing the natives at Taos Pueblo, the story of the specific pilgrimage itself.

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I remember one morning outside of Taos, Father Ed brought all of us pilgrims outside of the National Guard Armory where we had slept that night to a patch of brown earth that was largely void of prairie grass where we formed a large circle. Father Ed instructed us all that the earth is the Lord's, a belief that his ancestors held firmly as he was native to this land, and as did the people who lived in this part of the country before there were white settlers. Ed himself has many different bloodlines of different tribes running in his body. Ed then dropped upon the earth a leather pouch of tobacco as a gift to the earth, or as what we call a commodity in North Carolina.

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With a clay bowl full of water, he blesses the earth by sprinkling the good creation, sprinkling that brownish-red soil, leaving dimpled marks upon it. He places the large bowl of water in the middle of our circle, and with his right hand, he scoops out some of the water from his bowl and wets his big, burly body. First, he touches the areas of his body that includes the five senses. Then he wet each one of his limbs one by one.

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Finally, he drew a ladle of water from the bowl and he drank the water from that ladle. And then invited each of us to participate in the same ritual with Father Ed, giving us the ladle of water at the end of our soaking, concluding with this prayer upon each of our lips. The earth is the Lord and all who inhabit it. We became the psalmist.

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Thanks be to God. On my treks to Escapulas, Guatemala, I was surrounded by a community of guides. I went with a Benedictine sister, Sister Stephanie from St. Joseph, Minnesota, who told me of this pilgrimage site.

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There we met Brother Robert, a Benedictine brother, originally from New Orleans, who had spent 43 years of his life so far in Guatemala. Robert taught me about the life of the Benedictine brothers in Guatemala, helped me figure out what is Spanish, who is Spanish, what is Spanish, the origin of the monastery there, and through his love of children he taught me Christ. There were two sons of Guatemala, Oscar and Miguel, who were my translator and guide along the Pilgrim Way in Guatemala. Oscar and Miguel were constantly translating for me, teaching me about the people of Guatemala, the history of the other, providing charity with all my gaffes in Spanish and American habits.

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At St. Patrick's Purgatory, outside of the purgatory itself, my guide was a wonderful woman by the name of Mary, who ran a B&B bed and breakfast in her farmhouse called the Carn. Mary is a widow. Her husband died some years ago at the age of 52.

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And she lived most of her adult life in this large house, raising four children, all without her husband, all the children without a father. The house was surrounded by no longer cows, but large trees, wild grass, and a fantastic, magnificent garden in full summer bloom. Mary had just returned that morning from her pilgrimage to Lourdes in France, yet she had enough vim and vigor to feed me a great, hearty breakfast of kell oats, cornflakes, Weetabec, cereal, fresh milk, sausage, bangers, tomatoes, bacon, ham, eggs over easy, tea, toast, jam. at 11 o'clock at night.

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Her nighttime conversation went on and on for hours. Mary herself had been on the pilgrimage to St. Patrick's Purgatory 12 times. She promised me, if you go three times, legend has it, you don't have to go to purgatory at all, but straight to heaven.

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I added it up. I told Mary she could go back and forth to earth and heaven at least four times without ever having to see purgatory. She smiled. Protestant, aren't you?

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In her generous hospitality, I found that this Mary embodied the Mary, the Mother of God. I am advocating, I guess, a way of re-engaging all of us in the call to be teachers in the body of Christ along the Pilgrim way. I want to challenge the presumption that warm bodies alone can teach each other in the body of Christ. What I learned was that teachers of pilgrimage were sometimes not aware that they were teachers until they themselves were on pilgrimage's way.

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And then next time, bringing someone along, they taught them pilgrimage and learned the meaning of pilgrimage behind it all. And in the teaching of pilgrimage, they learned something new they had not known before about themselves, about pilgrimage. One caveat, the learning of pilgrimage as Christian life is taught only in relationships with each other, shaped and formed through gestures of the Christian faith by using a host of different ways of communicating the faith.

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The idea that some communicate and know the world, each other, themselves, and God through various moments of communication, be it the arts or music or literature, math, physical motion like gestures, or helping relationship is as old as the church itself and old as the people of God. There is no limit except for our imagination, for all of the ways that we can express and be on pilgrimage with one another in this life. Six. presence of the communion of saints.

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In the Apostles' Creed that we use at the church where I am currently working, every Sunday, or the Nicene, we Protestants confess that we believe in the communion of saints. I know that I have repeated these words since I first heard them in worship, memorized them in third grade, won a hardball for learning them first and third grade in Sunday school, and continue to lead congregations in this very bold claim. But as I ask my students, what on God's green earth does it mean? The way of the pilgrim is made clear by seeing where other people's feet have trod.

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Though there are many times that we are caught up in Robert Frost's fork in the road, have to make a choice between the two, taking the road less traveled by, if not blazing a new trail, for God is always doing a new thing. A Reformationist's belief that God is always forming and ever reforming us. We are born and baptized among a people who are already on the road, the pathway towards the realm of God's love. Pilgrimage is not something new.

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If we were to start doing this, we would be doing something quite old. Rather, for us, the choice is this. Can we build upon the traditions, carrying with us the stories of the past, while focusing today on the continuing movement of God's grace, of God living in the world today, as well as focusing on the God who guides us, leads us, gives us reason to hope for the future, keeping that prize with our eyes set upon it? It is in the best sense of Wendell Berry's sense of honoring the past while carefully examining the traditions of that past in the light of today's concerns and issues.

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Of course, the more things change, we also know, the more things stay the same. I came face to face with a witness of saints when I was on Lindisfarm, or what people have called for centuries the Holy Isle in northern England near the Scotland border. Famous for being an island with which once housed a very large Benedictine abbey.

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It was once home to Saints Aid and Cuthbert, real-life characters, real-life saints that the Venerable Bea wrote of. Having read them in church history courses, I thought, nice story, cute, wonderful little things, put it away and got on to current American church history. But as I started to walk those shores of that aisle, drinking its famous mead, taking in the pub nearby and drinking the Holy Island bitter, I started to stay more awake, aware of the saints, and staying away from all the bird watchers who are now there because it has become a sanctuary for birds.

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Earlier in my journey to England, that week that I went to the Holy Isle, I went to Canterbury Cathedral. What was interesting was I didn't find any pilgrims there. Just a lot of tourists. They came from Canada, the States, from France, from Germany, via the Chunnel.

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I found the cathedral an empty shell of its once former proud self as a place of holy pilgrimage. Though many still come to worship on Sundays, the palatial grounds are now filled with a haunted pass of a life long gone. I sit in one of the pews in between three different tour groups that were all around me. Each tour guide had a different version of Canterbury Historical Guide in their back pocket and they were telling different stories.

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I sat there listening, thinking, oh my gosh, it's not even stereo. And leaving the grounds of the cathedral, I passed through the only exit that I could find on the grounds, through the gift shop. And Lindisfarne and I took a warm bath on a cold, very cold, northern England night, and I followed a strange impulse to go to the Holy Isle's graveyard wearing a hat, a Polartec fleece vest, and a raincoat, always the raincoat. The rickety wooden fence that is usually open is now closed and curiously locked tonight.

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There has been a scare in this part of the country because of mad cow disease, and many of the open pastures are closed off and off limits to us tourists. I sit on the gate myself, swinging my legs to and fro like a small child, and I peer deeply into the cemetery until my eyes are used to the darkness, with some light given by the glowing milky moon. A small blue searchlight from a fishing boat in the harbor nearby swings and casts a steady stream around the grounds every 20 seconds or so, glancing off the cemetery's inhabitants and their tombstones. For a moment, I am in the middle, it feels like, of this cemetery scene

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from Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I expected Emily Webb to suddenly show up, black umbrellas in place. I've read Alice Sebold's story of the lovely bones. I expect to see some ghosts coming through at any point.

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It is here, though, that I find myself strangely talking to saints. I start talking to them. I start yelling at them. I start asking them questions.

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Why am I here? I say to them as if they are alive characters. Thank you, Aidan. Thank you, Cuthbert.

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Thank you, Oswald. I say, matter of factly, assuming all the while, they are listening. They hear my voice. They sense my presence.

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You know, I'm a friend among friends. I believe in you. You're here somewhere. You know my name.

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I thought it was only fair to start off with a note of gratitude to their saintly presence. Thanks a lot, I said, bringing me out here. But then out loud, I started to turn my questions into an interrogation. because of the nagging feeling that I had wasted time and money and effort in coming all the way up to Northern England to freeze my buns off.

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I mean, where on this rocky shoal are all the other pilgrims? My voice begins to rise in the darkness. Irritated, I start to spit out my anger, my anguish, believing that someone somewhere will answer, why'd you bring me up here? I've been to more active places of holy pilgrimage.

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The only possible pilgrims I can find here are people in the pub, and they're all drunk, and possibly two women who look like Catholic nuns because they dressed alike. Silence. So I listen deeply to the silence. I reflect.

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It is solitude. It is haunted solitude. It begins to dawn on me that this incredible impulse to get out of the warm bath, sit on the cold fence, is either an irrational, impulsive trip, and I'm losing it, or an interesting stirring that has led me to sit on a gate in silence of a full, full night and listen to God. with only the white full moon hovering overhead, with cold tombstones as sentry.

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Suddenly like doors on a damn welded shut, but now free, I sense the movement from inside out, looking out of water, gushing forward, pushing me, flooding over, benign inquisition, stagnant creativity, giving way to revelation and uncontrolled discovery. Christian pilgrimage is not something we can create. It's not our creation. It is our calling.

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Pilgrimage is a repertoire of gestures. We are to perform that we inherit from those who are traveling with us, before us, as if we are part of a holy communion of saints, we sinners as well, whose story leads us on the way to Christ. The way of the pilgrim has already been trod by Jesus Christ himself, whose birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension into heaven is done in order for what?

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The Paraclete, the Advocate, the Spirit, descending, walking with us, showing us the pilgrim's way over here. One commentary writer writes this. He says, pilgrimage and the Holy Spirit are like this. You're there somewhere in the moors of Scotland, and suddenly you're there, caused by the thunderstorms of life.

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It's dark at night. And now and then, there is that crack of light That thunder goes, and with that crack of lightning, suddenly you see where you are, everything is exposed, and you take one step forward. It's dark again, and you wait until this lightning comes again.

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That's what it's like sometimes to be on the pilgrimage of life. So in his path, in his footsteps, if you will, he who blazed the trail that we find ourselves now walking upon is still with us. Though some underbrush ways, those steps are there, some vines still hanging down that now need trimming, we are doing ourselves some trail clearing here, if you will, restoring, rediscovering, remapping the terrain that Christ has already led us on. And the best part of this story was to take place the next day.

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Now, with a newfound enthusiasm, eager to find out what happened to St. Cuthbert's body, because you know what happened? They took his body back and forth, back and forth, because the Norse were coming over to escape. Cuthbert's body was sainted, because why?

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It wasn't decomposing. So all the Benedictine brothers were running around England with this guy, carrying him around. I get in my car the next morning. I travel to Durham in England, up to the cathedral doors.

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I grab the map of the interior of the cathedral, and I run down the nave, down to St. Cuthbert and the venerable graves. He's in the back. I go down to Cuthbert's grade.

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I sit there, I go down. I found his stone slab marked Cuthbertus in medieval script. I fall on my knees, and I pray a prayer already written on front of his graves. And then I whisper this, because it was the most wonderfully haunting thing.

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I whispered, Happy feast day, for this was the day of Cuthbert's feast day. In the small museum, in the same cathedral, two women who run the operation, the museum, I told them, I said, I'm here to find Cuthbert. They said, Well, his coffin's in the back, you want to see that? I said, Sure.

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Go on back, honey, just go on back. And so I went back, and there's Cuthbert. It is the feast day of Cuthbert. I quickly go by Venerable Bede's tomb and mouth the word, Thanks.

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Thanks for Cuthbert. Thanks for Aiden. Thanks for writing it down. I don't know if you heard me.

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I don't know if anyone heard me. Perhaps God did. But thanks for preserving the tales, the stories, the hope of Cuthbert and Adent in the hands of the venerable Bede. I leave Durham smiling a knowing smile as my pilgrimage has now brought me to a resting place

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this evening, staying with friends in Cathorpe outside of Nottingham. And we take a nice little walk down the village pathway. And what do we do? We come upon a little church out in the middle of England, St.

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Aidan's. All the church historians, theologians, ministers, well, heck, all Christians must agree that we are forever on the edge of hubris, thinking that our story My story, your generation, my generation's, we're one of the country's best, the favorite, the only ones. Anti-intellectualization is the great evil if it means this, the intentional forgetting and thus elimination of stories, symbols, rituals, pictures, musics, dances that have brought us the wealth of knowledge and hope and awareness that we are part of a gathering of saints.

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My friend Richard Rodriguez writes this, we are but the latest link in this kinky, clinking, clanking chain of life. We are the most recent set of turtles in a whole line of turtles on each other's shell. We are related because of God and Christ to a mess of people. We are related to the slave in the South, as well as known as Sojourner Truth, as well as to the slave master, the suffragette, as well as the chauvinist, the explorer, the homesteader, as well as the conquistador, the saint.

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as well as the sinner. Seventh is the land. Psalmist declares, the earth is the Lord's. The creation of the earth is God's gesture.

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But instead of amen, our response again has sometimes been, well now what do we do? We look around our congregations, we ask, has anyone seen the Manual of Care for the Earth? Because I had it at home, but I can't seem to find it anymore. Because instead of a care manual with operating instructions, the stuff of earth, sky, land, and water, well that's...