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Assistant Professor of Christian Nurture at Duke Divinity School really needs no further introduction. Those of you who attended his spellbinding presentation last night can see why he is in great demand as a speaker, preacher, and teacher in the U.S. and abroad. This past November alone, Dr.

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Webb-Mitchell gave the keynote address at two different conferences, in addition to a third presentation entitled Martha Stewart, Emeril, and the Naked Chef: What Cooking and Dining Have to Teach Us About Christian Education. It is clear that among Dr. Webb-Mitchell's creative talents is a gift for generating provocative titles for his work. Let me highlight just a few more of them.

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And a football coach shall lead them, a theological critique of seven promises of a promise keeper, painted in real life. Six men and a cross. True kitsch is Catholic kitsch. And perhaps my favorite, snoring in Jesus.

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Was that a typo? No. Oh, OK. Well, I don't anticipate any snoring in the next hour as Dr.

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Webb-Mitchell speaks to us on his topic, School of the Pilgrim, Destination. Professor Webb-Mitchell. After singing that rousing hymn, I wanted to change the title for this last lecture, Stoney, the Road We Trod. It was wonderful.

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I begin with a reading of the words of the psalmist from Psalm 84. Happy are the people whose strength is in you, O God, whose hearts are set on the pilgrim's way. A translation from the Book of Common Prayer. The words of the psalmist sets the stage for this last lecture on the school of the pilgrim, and it is my hope

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That the vision of schooling like that of the school of the pilgrim occurs in a context in which not only the church, but the world is our context for understanding where, when, and what is education. In which the people of God, chosen by God in Christ, emerge as teachers, oftentimes as the unexpected teachers, teaching us, learning together the ways of God that boggle our otherwise finite imaginations. I want to take us away from the understanding that schooling needs to be hidden in a building, per se, though it may happen in a building. It is not necessarily with the one that was designated by some to be the teacher or the student.

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For the wonderful thing about the school of the pilgrim is that oftentimes there is that wonderful reversal, that figure, ground, switch, rue. in which teacher becomes student and student becomes teacher, depending on the particular context and what is to be learned. And the ways that we communicate go beyond talking at each other, to learning how to be with one another and learn from one another. A power dynamic that makes learning and teaching a shared venture, rather than a power struggle of teacher over student.

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It is a dynamic of learning that such educators as C.L.S. Nelson, Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, Maria Montessori, and dear old John Dewey himself would find something vaguely familiar in their own work. Through and in the School of the Pilgrim and the sets of experiences of pilgrimage, both those that we've planned as well as the unplanned, the unexpected, the unpredictable, we gain deeper knowledge, training, discipline, insight, lessons. bountiful lessons that are learned and savored of hope, faith, grace, and God's love, ingrained in mind, body, and spirit, which can, which will, if we take care of them, last a lifetime.

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The School of the Pilgrim has some sets of manners, perhaps a code of conduct, established though in rituals, rich and new, invigorated, recreated, that are intrinsic to the way that we live together as Christians, with hearts as well as minds and bodies set on the pilgrim's way. With that introduction, therefore, let me introduce to you the last three characteristics of pilgrimage on the School of the Pilgrim. This eighth one is the shaping of character amid the spontaneous moments on pilgrimage.

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One of the first classes I ever taught on the subject of pilgrimage as education did involve 6 white guys and a cross. All of us were either, myself included, one white angry man, a third of the class was that of people getting MDiv degrees in their senior year, and two masters of theology students. Throughout the semester, we had read book upon book of pilgrimage, and now at the apex of the course, we were actually going to go on a pilgrimage.

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We would walk twenty-two miles over 2 days through the bucolic fields and meadows over hills and dales of North Carolina. It is eternally green in this part of the country. even in December. We began our trek with one of my friends, a Presbyterian pastor, blessing us on our way at 10 o'clock in the morning from Snow Hill and Snow Camp.

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It was a late afternoon when we walked finally along Franklin Street and Chapel Hill. It is like your Guadalupe here in Austin, Texas. It is the main thoroughfare for the University of North Carolina. It is not a street unaccustomed to seeing protesters for one cause or another.

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Displays of exuberance, great exuberance when the university sports team wins, pray oh God it happens again this season, or other cultural public events like a Halloween parade par excellence or other public fads. I always love to go to the post office because there you always have the group of goths sitting next to the protesters with their tie-dye t-shirt sharing stories and tidbits from days gone past. Some university students, faculty and staff, townspeople, tourists, artists, bohemians, one and alike, adults and children, point at us as we walk silently on the sidewalk. We're carrying a six-foot cross.

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We're hard to miss. It is a roughly hewn cross. Now and then, someone would wave at us. Another person would stop in front of us and genuflect in front of the cross as we walked by.

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Yet others would give us the peace sign and other gestures that came along the way. In the city block, the main thoroughfare, the unexpected, though, confronted us. In a moment of shaping, of nurturing, of changing our personal character, our communal character, personal virtue, communal virtue infused us with new lessons on what makes a Christian community what it is, more apparent and more present than we ever anticipated. Three men, all African-American, older than our young group, held a small white box in one hand on which

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was written the message, we are homeless, we are hungry, and we need money for the coming evening. One of the men asked, have you any spare change? The students, especially the student holding the cross, stopped. We all fell into him, into his back, stopped in his tracks, and we stopped with him, almost running him over as if we were the Keystone cops.

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The white students, all of us, looked at each other. Well, what do we do? They all looked at me. A chorus then came up, I don't know, lasted at least a minute.

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And then the person who's holding the box asking for the money just kind of smiles at us, watches silently as we try to figure out what we're going to do. Then the student holding the cross looked at the cross itself. He said, you know, this is the biggest WWJD bracelet I've ever seen. That would be what would Jesus drive or what would Jesus do?

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We engaged the men in conversation. We asked, we listened to what they wanted and probably gave them what they asked and needed for, rather than telling them what we thought they needed. At that moment, the men asked for money. And so we each dug into our pockets, put some money in each person's box, and engaged in a conversation with each of the men.

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The importance of this unexpected lesson was lost on no one. I was surprised that it took so long for these students, all of them who were in their last year of seminary studies, all of them serious scholars, all of them getting straight A's in you know who's ethics course at Duke Divinity School, to figure out what should be done in this situation. Clearly, each student knew intellectually what it would look like to do an act of justice. They had played it out in paper after paper after paper.

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but it was a wholly other thing to do an act of justice, to incarnate, to act justly. While I wanted so dearly to tell them, this is what you do. Like telling the students, take the men to the nearest homeless shelter, I was held back by this thought. Paradox moment, Paulo Freire comes into the throes, let them figure out on their own what we need to do.

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It was a teachable moment, as Calvin would say, for all of us, in which the unplanned, the unpredictable, provided now an unknown wealth of educational opportunities into the concrete, the tangible, the enfleshing of the gospel and the gestures and the ways of Christ. And in those actions we took, we embodied gestures of Christly virtue. That evening, while we were preparing for an evening meal with two six-packs of beer by our sides, One theological virtue learned along the pilgrimage among these pilgrims was performing the gestures, they said, of the scripture Matthew 25, I was hungry and you gave me food.

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Whatever you do to the least of these in my family, you do so unto me. It was incredible. It was unplanned. I didn't ask these men to suddenly show up as if out of nowhere on the streets of Chapel Hill.

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It was a time for us to actively and hopefully successfully exegete the Gospel of Matthew, not on a piece of paper per se, but now to exegete it as a community in the throes of life itself. We acted here and we're all working together contextually and ecclesiologically. We were all exegeting the passage from Matthew in our very gestures. We were struggling with the passage of Scripture and how it fits our synaptic life of body as we faced those who were hungry and homeless, and we responded to their request by giving the money that they were asking whether we should or shouldn't go down to the homeless.

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culture with them got to be another point of talk that following evening. But our gestures were tied to the gospel, according to Matthew, in that very context of the Franklin Street life, and the opportunity of being there to watch, to listen, to teach. We were performing gestures of Christ narrated by scriptures binding and building the community of Christ together. A similar experience happened within the last month.

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I was driving down a long country Rd. near my house, driving a used truck I had just bought, a 93 Chevy S10 with 150,000 miles on it. $2,000, not bad. And I was still getting used to this truck and my daughter was with me and I was taking her to a youth raking project at church.

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Less than a mile from the nearest intersection with gas stations on each and every one of the corners, I ran out of gas. I looked at the gauge. It read empty. But you know how it is.

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Ever hopeful that it really wasn't empty. Didn't work this time. It was empty. Apparently in this truck, empty meant empty.

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So pulling over to the side of the road with the last of the truck, we got out, started to walk towards the gas station. One Caucasian woman in a large, beautiful, white, expensive Ford Expedition, brand new, was turning into the suburban cul-de-sac that we were passing at the time. We waved her down and she stopped. She looked at us.

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We looked rather clean and ordinary. And she said to us, I'm too much in a hurry. I can't take you to the gas station. I'm sorry, I need to go off.

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Bye. And off she went. We continued walking down the road. We came upon another gentleman, African-American, in a nice,

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but older truck. He rolled down the window, smiled, invited us both to get in, took us to the gas station, waited while we got a gas can, waited until we got the gas from the gas station, drove us back to the truck, waited until we had filled the truck with the gas can from our little jug, continued to wait until I got into the truck, my daughter got into the truck and actually turned the ignition. He wanted to be sure that we got off just fine. Seeing that we were fine, he waved goodbye and off we went.

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My daughter Adrianne turns to me and simply said that, this. Dad, that was the Good Samaritan, wasn't it? What could I do but smile? Nod in agreement, acknowledging the scripture parable coming true, exegeted ever so beautifully, so simply in the life events around us.

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The virtue of hospitality, of charity, of trust came to the forefront of both of our imaginations. While both of us had seen, heard, read, been sermonized again and again and again, the story of the Good Samaritan many times over. We were suddenly caught up in the incarnation, unaware of it being lived out in our very lives.

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Again, it was in the unpredictable. I wasn't, I promise you, planning to run out of gas that morning. in the unknown, in the incautious, in the unexpected cracks of life on the blue highways. It isn't necessarily along the major interstate roadways that the gospel lesson of Christ, of God, comes flooding over us and through us.

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My caution and my concern sometimes with how we educate in the church today. It is a way of teaching as if we understand that the Christian way of life is on the interstate highways of life. 35. You name it.

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The interesting stories, the places where the practice of certain virtues matter most or happen best, I think, is on what William Least Heat Moon showed us some years ago in his book, The Blue Highways, on side roads. Look on the map. They're usually marked with red or black lines. Sometimes it's just little dotted lines along the AAA maps.

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The School of the Pilgrim is a matter of finding and traveling on the blue highways of life in Christ. It is the places where we stop, we sometimes pick up a hitchhiker, or we are the one hitchhiking. We talk to a stranger, we have a meal in an unknown restaurant or diner, well-trafficked by other customers. We sit at Hardee's and drink a cup of coffee, buying everyone else around there another cup of coffee, another round or two, have a meal, sit, listen to the interesting, if not bizarre, comical, or tragic ways of life.

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Needless to say, I am drawn to these places, these people, when courage has been called for, and show courage, justice, love, in the unexpected moments. Sometimes myself, I don't know where the courage comes from. I'm too scared to figure it out, or where it is best taught, but it seems to come into action when it is called for. I remember my first true act of non-violent gestures when I performed them while working with a highly disturbed young teenager in a hospital for children and adolescents with emotional, behavioral, and developmental disabilities.

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There was going to be a fight in the therapy group meeting. I was the therapist in charge that day, and I stood there by a young girl who was very angry at another young girl because she's still my boyfriend. I almost got the one girl who was very angry, almost to the point of sitting down when a little boy who wanted to see a good fight came, knocked me to the floor, I got up, his punch came right into my nose, knocking my glasses. glasses off of my face, making them look like something that Picasso had created.

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I stood up, my nose now bleeding. The punch came into the cheek. I turned not only the cheek, I turned my whole body. I said, please sit down.

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Let's all sit down. We almost sat down again. The little boy wanted to see that fight so bad. He goes ahead and knocks me down.

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I'm down on the floor. The punch I stand up comes right into my other side of my cheek. I had no more cheeks to turn. The staff comes running into the room, puts the adolescents in four-point restraints, summons me to the staff room, and looks at me directly and severely.

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What were you doing? And I came back with the stupidest answer they had ever heard. I was turning the other cheek. Where are your cheeks, they said.

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And why are you turning them? I'm practicing nonviolence. At a time like this, now you want to practice nonviolence? It dawned on me then that I never had been taught the Gospel of Matthew with my body.

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And here I was performing the gesture of the body of Christ. No one had taught me those gestures in Sunday school. No one had taught me them in my Presbyterian youth group. No one had taught me them in Young Life, Intervarsity, Presbyterian College ministry programs.

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We talked a lot about nonviolence. But we were never prepared to live our lives with the complex gestures of non-violence. Kind of a rhetorical question. Did I learn the gospel anew that day?

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Yes. I embodied the gospel in ways that changed me, changed life forever. Could I have been better prepared for performing the gestures of non-violence? Yes.

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And that is what we need to assess in how we educate Christians today in the life of the church. How do we better prepare ourselves and one another for the surprising places, the incidences, the moments on the pilgrimage of life in which we will find much fodder for growth and discipleship? The ninth characteristic, the importance of solitude on pilgrimage. During pilgrimage, there are, to paraphrase, a time to be talking and a time to be silent, a time for community to be built up and a time sometimes just to be not with that community.

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A time of great action and a movement and a time for contemplation. I have found in my own life it is a balancing act that I am not very adept at. For I live more of my life in the sort of out of kilter dynamic act of this balancing act. I feel like that man who used to be on the Ed Sullivan Show, every few months they would get some character to go ahead with bamboo poles and put those poles with plates on the top of them and spin them and keep them spinning all the darn time.

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Now the pastoral therapist goes, let's talk about you and your bamboo poles. Such solitude and contemplation calls for us to put down the poles, put down the plates, and find out whether we're empty or full of God in our life in God. Solitude, I have come to discover, is a gift. It is a gift of time, of space.

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It is a gift that God gives us to be. To escape from the doing, doing, doing, doing of life to just being, being, being in God in Christ. So focused on the doing of life, on the works of life, on the works righteousness of life, the act, the gift of being in God, falling into God, relying on God's faithfulness and grace that God promises us is a gesture, is a discipline that also must be learned. For it is a most precious gift.

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And if we're not careful, we will drop that gift. Forget where it is. But it is true that the gift remains nonetheless. I realize how often I've turned God's request for me just to be who I am.

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Embracing the truthfulness of whose I am and whose we are, I set it aside. I fight back hard. I fear the silence. I fear taking off masks and costumes that protect me from being who I am.

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And that it is awkward and seems at first so non-productive. You don't get tenure that way by just being. You get tenure only by doing. But to plumb the depth of the love of God, to expand into the love of God for and with us, it's not a work, but it is a gift of grace that is to be learned, how we live in that, and that calls us home in Christ.

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For example, on the pilgrimage to Chimayo, there were these periods of 30-minute periods during the walk, yes, for talking, but then there were always those 30 minutes for prayer, for silence, for being. I always entered into those periods with fear and trepidation because I feared that, like a good Freudian analysis, that so much of my life had been able, I've been able to repress, to keep it down, every defense mechanism, keeping all of those things about my critical consciousness down, tame, located somewhere where I couldn't see it anymore. But with solitude, there is an increased sense of mindfulness, of consciousness, of all of who we are. We keep praying to God, talking to God, praying to God, talking to God, praying to God, doing all the talking, when God, out of desperation, sometimes says, Just...

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shut up and listen. We sit upon our dung heap with Job and his friends, and oftentimes it is then that we can listen, hear, are aware, conscious, or mindful of the God who loves us and speaks to us in the silence of life. Where our talking to God gets across to God and Christ, our neurotic willfulness, it is often in the silence, in the quiet, made audible by our silence that we are able to be more alive to the presence of God as Holy Spirit.

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For example, to take you back to my experiences of Lindisfarne as I sat upon the gate that I talked about in this holy aisle, it wasn't until I quit yakking to God that I started to be aware of the purposefulness of being a pilgrim of God. Having visited with all the tourists the grand halls of Canterbury made bare of shrines to saints thanks to King Henry VIII and Cromwell's raiders, I found myself crossing that country whose roots and sodden fields and sheep fields are full of the traces of pilgrimages past, now covered up by underbrush, sheep and cow dung, and made now these modern fragments of the past and current industrial revolution with all the new information age warehouses. But underneath it all are the traces of pilgrimage.

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It was there on that fence gate that I discovered. What makes a pilgrimage a pilgrimage? And what can kill pilgrimage? To a holy site, to a holy people making it now just a tourist attraction and an historic relic of what once was.

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I realized that while we can be a pilgrim and a tourist, not all tourists are pilgrims. While one can be a pilgrim and on a journey, not all journeys are pilgrimages. What came to my foreconsciousness is what necessitates converting a journey into a pilgrimage is a spot, a site, a people who gather together in whom Christ resides. The pilgrim knows that she or he is a pilgrim, either through some incident or accident, some strange quirk of life, or what everyone calls fate, revealing to us what we didn't know or presume possible, that we are on a holy pathway.

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a destination to God knows literally where we are going. In hindsight, always with 20-20 gaze, we begin to appreciate the people we've met along the way and the way that we became for them living signs and symbols and markers, instructing them on the way to go. In hindsight, I probably have put up more markers in the past out of gratitude for momentary glimpses of pilgrimage vision I saw but failed to believe in at the time. So blind am I.

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or perhaps unbelieving, or unprepared, unaware, helpless and deaf to the voices of pilgrims past. My silence does not necessarily equate into solitude. There is a time to be in the act of making music together as community and times to be quieter in the presence of God. In the Christian community of L'Arche, these communities, Christian communities for adults with mental retardation, Jean Vanier, the co-founder, insists that people become comfortable with just being who we are, just being in God, just being with one another, without the worry, without the hassle, without the cover of doing something to someone, for someone, unto someone, or letting them do something.

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Can you just be Brett? he asked many times. By being, the question was this, can you and I, can we just be the people that God created us to be? Or is the thought of such a thing too frightening?

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Too frightening so that we cover it up with all our activities upon activities, drinking in the milk of success, saying, see, all the things that I've done, that very same action we did in kindergarten when we wanted the teacher's attention? See, all the things that I've done and where I've been and what I'm doing? In the quiet, in the solitude, in the contemplation, God brings out, therefore, the uniqueness of us, and around us displays for all to see the holiness, the gift that is God within. Real contemplation, real solitude, doesn't take us out of reality.

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On the contrary, it puts us in touch with the world, with this world around us, and gives us a distance by which we need to see more clearly who and where we are. The Benedictine Joan Chittester writes this, contemplation or solitude is the ability, the capacity to see the world and to see us as God does. She writes, it is the sacred mindfulness of my, of our holy obligation to care for the world, for you, for myself, for all of us in our lives.

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It is a pursuit of meaning as we discover in the deep quiet a fuller sense of who we are in God and finding the will of God everywhere, everywhere and anywhere. The 10th characteristic, the destination of pilgrimage. I close with this story of pilgrimage, the story of going to the place where so many pilgrims gather. In fact, January is the time of great gathering in Esquipulas, Guatemala, around the story of El Cristo.

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Negro, the Black Christ of Escapulas. It is the destination for generations upon generations of pilgrims for over 300 years. The statue of the Black Christ is housed in a large, beautiful white basilica built over 300 years ago, commissioned by the then Bishop of Guatemala as a way of saying thanks to the Christ. The statue itself is over 400 years old and is housed there and maintained by the Jesus Christ crucified Abbey Benedictine monks.

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Around the basilica, there is crass commercialism of every kind. There is the Hotel El Padrino, or the pilgrimage hotel, advertising for all of the poorest people in Guatemala. We have TV, cable, and hot water right next to the basilica. No one can afford it, which is, in my view, one of the humblest and poorest.

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Within my view, though, as I look at that sign, it's the humblest and poorest of all pilgrims. who have saved all year for only one thing, to come to Eskapoulos, to give thanks to the Christ for the miracle or the blessing in one's life, thus keeping a promise that they made years ago to come back time and time again. I watch, I listen, I touch, I smell, I walk with this living procession of pilgrim pilgrims through time in a place in which the pilgrim's procession is the record of knowledge of the disciplined life of the pilgrimage, and the holiness of El Cristo Negro survives and is communicated from one generation to the next, not only through word of mouth, but by living example.

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Such knowledge is not to be found in books, not on a website, not in essays, not to be found with Rick Steves and his daily adventures on PBS, travel videos, computer discs, websites, or even still photographs. The knowledge of the life of one of Christ's pilgrims in this place, in this landscape, in this architecture, it is in the trinkets, the recuerdos of pilgrimages past, it is among the people that you find out about the holiness of this place. How do I know this is true? because for weeks on end I have watched, listened, conversed through translators with these pilgrims.

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Whether I am sitting in the choir stalls of the basilica with the other monks, walking in the park, the city park in front of the basilica, running along the city streets, stopping by a booth selling recuerdos and buying one or two for family at home, or interviewing pilgrims along the way, I am in awe of the gestures of faith and grace performed Either effortlessly or with great elan by these pilgrims, I watch and listen and see so much. For example, one morning during mass, I hear a shuffling of fabric against the hard geometrically designed flagstone and marble tile floor of the basilica. Coming through a corridor of candles cemented with wax to the floor, the floor itself looks like it is on fire with so much burning brightness.

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In a single row, I watch these women in typico or typical dress woven by the indigenous people in the mountains and hills of Guatemala around here. And I watch as these three women, one with a baby in the back, shuffling forward on their knees. Sister Stephanie whispers to me, they have come here for a great distance. For over a mile, they have been crawling on their knees to the floor.

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place. They had been shuffling through the front door of that basilica all the way to the altar, past the confessionals that looked like squat little brown wooden phone booths, past the statues of Mary, Joseph, John the Evangelist, Anthony of Padua, hovering over them, looking down on them. Their faces are the beautiful faces of the native or indigenous people, not at the Spanish conquistador. They murmur the rosary on their way to the altar rail, carrying candles in each hand forward to give thanks to the Christ.

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The baby yawns in the back of the one. Then without turning around, for one never turns one's back on the black Christ. They, on knees, shuffle backwards on their knees in single file without running into each other, out into the light of day in the basilica. Why have they come?

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They come to give thanks to the Christ for all that has and is occurring in their lives and will occur. To many, the statue of the black Christ, El Cristo Negro, is not, though, the Christ. Carved in native orange wood, the statue is now almost black over time with the same complexion of the native people of Guatemala. This five-foot Christ on the cross surrounded by Mary, His mother, Mary Magdalene, and John the Evangelist, is on a silver cross which is richly decorated with sculptured vines, painted golden leaves.

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The saying heard around Escapoulos is this, and I will never forget it because it sounded, my gosh, so Presbyterian. The Christ you seek, you will not find unless you bring Him with you. The Christ you seek, you will not find unless you bring him with you.

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For over a week, I watched the faithful stream as close as possible to the black Christ. You can get really close if you go the back way around a serpentine back entrance to the basilica that would make Disney World proud. Along this winding path, you pass a life-sized statue of the Christ figure on hands and knees, half-naked, with his back flayed open, bleeding from the whips that cut open his skin, his face caught in the utter pain, no sound coming out. When you approach the vicinity of the black Christ, you come from behind the black Christ.

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Then so as to honor the black Christ, it is customary that one leaves this moving tableau by walking backwards, never turning one's back on the Christ. The Christ you seek you will not find unless you bring Him with you. It is a foothold for me on the ancient Catholic practices that boggle my white Anglo-Presbyterian sensibilities.

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We pilgrims come with the Christ already here. Calvin would agree, Christ is within you. It is the Christ within us who makes this place, this procession holy. It is more than an inner gut feeling, an emotion, an intuition with a holy blessing.

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And it is more than a theological tourist treat. Created in the image of God, it is the Christ within us who gives each one of us pilgrims, the spontaneous impetus, the unspeakable urge, the burning desire, the unquenchable need to venerate, to bless, to hope in Christ. Outside of the basilica, I watch my burden of proof. the empirical data among the groups of pilgrims when I come upon a group of pilgrims from Livingston, Belize, Catholic and of African descent.

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From afar I was struck by the largeness of one woman and the slenderness of many of the men. The women wore bright colored clothes of yellows, whites, pinks, reds, teal blues, kelly greens that screamed at me. Each woman wearing a bandana over their head or some straw hat to cover their brow.

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Some women are easily balancing straw baskets or black luggage on the top of their heads, while others carry large cloth handbags full of recuerdos, remembrances, candies, cookies, crosses, small figurines, those little cakes of earth I told you about last night, of El Cristo Negro. And they stand roughly in two lines at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the sanctuary, praying out loud, fervently, singing songs. of praise in Creole. An older, larger woman, gripped by extreme passion, throws herself prostate upon the stone pavement, beating her fists against the hard stone pavement.

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The voice of the people around her continue to swell in volume as they chant and pray and sing in Creole with this woman who is gripped by the fervent appeal to the Almighty. Cure her, cure her, cure her, they cry. There is theological necessity during this time of what I came to understand about pilgrimage being, if you will, a divine extravagance being played out and performed among the pilgrims who gather here at Escape Pulas's basilica before the Black Christ. Why is it an extravagance?

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Think about it. It is divine madness to leave one's home far away in the hills of Guatemala, and to take leave because you're living and living only on a day-to-day basis. And you sell everything you have for the sake of visiting once a year the divine Christ.

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Many families, many people can literally not afford this trip financially. The divine necessity, though, drives these pilgrims from within. It is the belief bred within them, generation after generation, reaching back over 400 years, that all of life is a gift of God's giving, and that any healing of body, mind, or spirit comes from God alone, who in the person of Jesus Christ is the tangible present, and the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit, sides and advocates on behalf of the poor, of the oppressed, of the homeless, the widow, the orphan, the sick, Out of an almost unconscious holy habit, the pilgrims come this day, every day throughout the year.

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You will always find pilgrims there to give thanks to the Christ. That's it, but powerful it is. Venerating the Christ for over an hour or even longer, burning candles, worshiping God during the celebrations of the Eucharist. I remember sitting there one of the Sundays, and I am sitting there with the monks, and it is Sunday morning, and the people are crowding, crowded hard.

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against the metal fence that separates the altar from the people. And I watch as one man, his white t-shirt dripping with sweat, holding his hand up to God with a candle here and railing against God here and crying, crying and crying unto God. Such worship becomes a renewal. I go back to Duke Divinity School.

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My students don't act like that at all. But are we not all pilgrims? wandering sometimes by our lonesome selves, here in this community, we're members one of another of a community of other pilgrims. These people were no longer Guatemalans.

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They were my brothers. They were my sisters in Christ. We are part of now this ever-growing cloud of witnesses, the communion of saints who are ever before us, who come to this, the realm of God. To the place of Escapula, so powerful is its draw that Archbishop Romero would make yearly trips to this place.

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Mother Teresa, John Paul II, the same. But it isn't the Christ they come to see. It is the people who bring the Christ with them. in their hearts, in their lives, in their minds, in their bodies.

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It is the people who bring the Christ already in them to Escapulos, whose light burns brighter and warmer within and among as we gather and perform the gestures and receive the promise. Wherever two or three are gathered in Jesus' name, that one is Christ. In conclusion, I end with this thought. The journey, even when you come to the end of an actual journey itself, continues, continues to go on.

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The morning after I finished my first pilgrimage to Chimayo, I wake in the morning and I sing the songs I learned in Spanish, and I still don't know Spanish that well when I awake. After going to Escapulas, I smile at a picture of a man carrying a black cross with the black Christ on it. Where? In Panama.

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A picture I found the next day that I turned from Escapulas and looked in the New York Times. There he was. I still carry the rosary from Medjugoria that Brother Robert gave me from Escapulas, and I still have Presbyterian fingers and don't know quite what to do with it. After coming back from Lindisfarne, teaching my class the lives of

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Saints Aidan and Cuthbert, I bring out photographs of the Holy Isle, and I am flooded with emotions upon that time. Returning to the States from Ireland, I attend a conference of religious educators. At the table, I sit with two friends, Tom Groom and Kieran Scott, both Irish in descent, and they are amazed and they are open-mouth astounded. You found St.

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Patrick's Purgatory? The lesson learned is an easy one, but nevertheless hard to pull off. When one gets to the destination of pilgrimage, it isn't the end of the journey. In some regards, in a significant way, the journey continues always onward.

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The trick is finding or discovering or creating or constructing adaptive practices, the performance of gestures that keep us in our congregations and parishes open to the art, to the act, to the performance of pilgrimage in our daily lives. For we are pilgrims, seated here, seated in the other rooms around this seminary. We are pilgrims. It usually takes at least two weeks for me after such an awe-inspiring drop-the-jaw stunned into silent meditation on pilgrimage for the memories to start to fade and the residue to wear off.

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But the desire for me and for the church is this, to start to embrace the school of the pilgrim, to keep the door open on pilgrimage year round, and to welcome others and initiate them in the art, the act, the gestures of pilgrimage into the school of the pilgrim. My first lecture I shared with you, I began pilgrimage as a test of God. Isn't it fun when the creature tests the Creator?

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In a sense, I wanted God to prove to me that pilgrimage was everything that all these other pilgrims found out to be true. I wasn't sure. I did it quite scared. I went into my study.

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I went into the book carrels. I went into the bookstores with all my Protestant sensibilities and skepticism. No one in the United Methodist Church or the Presbyterian Church of my younger years taught me about pilgrimage. They really never mentioned the word pilgrim, except always as a historic factoid of Plymouth Rock, Thanksgiving, the naive natives who lived in that region we now call Massachusetts, who were won over by all kinds of diseases.

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A pilgrim for me in growing up as a young boy was a Puritan, wearing black and gray clothes with unfashionably big white collars and cuffs, large black hats, silver belt buckles to beat the band on black shiny patent leather shoes. In my Protestant sensibilities and upbringing, pilgrimage was not a practice to be learned or a performed gesture inherited. Rather, many Protestants Presbyterians, Methodists alike sit in our churches, ornate or simple, big or small, and we think that we have arrived in the Holy Land, with our pew, our sea reserved for years on end, with no one else who's able to sit there because, you know, that's my coveted spot.

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In the American colonial period, they went so far, these wealthy families, to almost buy their pew box, have their names engraved upon the gold nameplate for all to see and sign over. But for many years, I have watched just too many Protestant groups go on pilgrimage without really calling it pilgrimage. We just call it a journey to Paul and with Paul. I watch all my Lutheran friends make treks to Germany.

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They want to see, you know, that door. The Presbyterians run over to Geneva, to Edinburgh, to St. Giles, just to see, you know, where it happened. The Methodists, they go to London to Aldersgate Street and find the Barbican Center has taken it over.

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The Southern Baptists, they all go to Nashville. I haven't quite figured out why yet. And most everyone in the southeastern part of the United States always have what I have found as a northerner, a Yankee, somewhat endearing and fun. It's called homecoming.

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And even some alums return to a seminary to celebrate, to get together, to dance, to sing, to share memories of when they were at Austin Seminary. See, you're on a pilgrimage. Welcome. There is something deep within us that craves to go to that place, that building, those professors, that group of people, leaving the place which is our home to the place that first told us this is home.

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As I continue to worship with other Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, but especially with Roman Catholics and their churches from time to time, I am slightly buoyed when I hear the priest intone these words, the church is a pilgrim church. Though I am sure that only a few people have a clue as to... what such costly grace to be a pilgrim church looks like and demands of us Christians. Granted, we are more transient today as modern Americans, moving easily between churches, suburbs, and malls.

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I wish sometimes that we Presbyterians would do the same, that we would create or craft a hymn that was called Pilgrim Church Hymn or a Pilgrim People. Think of it, looks real cool on paper curricula for a vacation Bible school, Pilgrimage 2003. Pilgrimage can make for a nice benign metaphor that lasts a few months before the neat or next slick advertising campaign comes along the way until the new idea comes and Trump's the old one. There are dangers, as always, of pilgrimage becoming a fad.

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It is said that a pilgrim was walking with his donkey on the way to a pilgrimage site in some place in Europe, and the pilgrim's donkey dies along the way. Sad, the pilgrim buries the donkey, and rather than digging a hole for said dead donkey, piles rocks upon one another and covers the donkey's body and cries. Seeing the large mound of rocks on the side of the road, other pilgrims begin to slow down and they start to cry too. They don't know why.

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Soon enough, people slow down and stop and they begin to believe that something important probably happened here at this spot, you know, an apparition of someone, something holy. Word spreads and over a span of time, the place becomes a pilgrimage shrine for the donkey that carried the holy family on his pilgrimage to Egypt. Thus is born a pilgrimage site. Pilgrimage as life is, in the best and the worst understanding of the term, an art.

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For some it is a lost art, but it is a recoverable art. It is a craft. It is not rocket science that can be, if not practiced, forgotten over time. It is a choreographed ballet movement that disappears from our collective repertoire of movement and gesture if we don't practice it, if we don't embrace or are embraced by it.

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It is possible that if the practice gesture of pilgrimage language is too long, then everything about the artful gesture of pilgrimage may be lost. In our own country throughout...