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Today, like a participant in Tennessee Williams' culture of mendacity, because we have lured our lecturers here to Austin Seminary from North Carolina and Chicago and Canada to Texas with promises that it is always 78 degrees and sunny in January. You just can't believe anyone today. I want to welcome you to the first of the Robert F. Jones Lectures in Christian Education.

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The Robert F. Jones Lectures were established in 1949 by the women of the Church of First Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, Texas, in honor of their pastor, Dr. Robert F. Jones, who was pastor there from 1944 to 1978.

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These lectures are funded by them on an annual basis. And we are grateful indeed to them making this a gift to the community. It is my privilege today to welcome, as our Robert F. Jones lecturer for 2003, Brett Webb Mitchell.

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Dr. Webb Mitchell earned his PhD in 1988 from the University of North Carolina. THM in 1985 from Harvard University Divinity School and his MDiv in 1983 from a small Presbyterian school on the East Coast, which will remain nameless. He currently teaches Christian Nurture at Duke University Divinity School and has authored five books, including Sacred Seasons, Journey Through the Church Year,

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unexpected guest at God's banquet, welcoming people with disabilities into the church, and his most recent book, Christly Gestures: The End of Christian Education. And I assume you mean the goal. We'll see. Which will be coming out next month from Erdman's Press.

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In addition to his academic work, Dr. Webb Mitchell is an active member of New Hope Presbytery, where he currently serves as pastor for a congregation in Durham. His CV runs 19 pages, and though I was tempted to read it all to you, I have decided not to. Instead, I want to read you a couple of comments from his peers, and I find that most impressive.

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Dr. Webb Mitchell's concern for people with disabilities has lent him a unique perspective that can broaden the horizon for all religious education. This perspective comes to harvest in Christly gestures. Here he urges us to be faithful to the Incarnation, even in our mode of teaching, to make flesh the word we teach,

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engaging bodies to embody the gospel in daily life. That from Thomas Groom at Boston College, and from Michael Warren at St. John's University, I consider Brett Webb Mitchell to be the most creative voice in Christian education today. Brett, we are honored by your presence, and we look forward to learning from you in these days.

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Thank you for being with us. It is indeed an honor and a joy to be here, to be given a reason to write a book. And this lecture series has provided just that. So it is a joy to be here with you today and to try out some new ideas.

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I hope they work for you. They've been working for me for quite some time, and I just thought, well, let's write it down and see what happens. I begin with this odd claim. I am a pilgrim.

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I am a Christian pilgrim, to be exact. It is odd, if not a comical confession for a seminary professor, for an ordained clergy person in the Presbyterian Church USA to make. I've looked in the back of the book of order, and there's every other kind of calling in there but that of pilgrim. My 14-year-old daughter and my 10-year-old son, Parker, look at me in a quizzical manner.

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You're a pilgrim? What's that supposed to mean now, dad? as they watch me leave on yet one more weird journey to a place they've never heard of before in which they're not invited to come. The hope is that a t-shirt will be forthcoming.

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In the scope of their experiences, the closest thing to describe a pilgrim outside of the biblical stories like Jonah or that of the Apostle Paul is by referring to hobbits and the Lord of the Rings who make a quest that makes sense to my children. And in many of our congregations, that would also be the case. Pilgrims, those... little people with huge, hairy feet.

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That's normal for my children. That's normal for some congregations. But dad being a pilgrim, that's not quite right. It's just downright odd and strange.

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Perhaps if I were smaller and had hairy feet, we're climbing snow-capped mountains and the rugged terrain in New Zealand's terrain. In looking through books on pilgrimage, like the images of the pilgrims from the older copies of Chaucer's Pilgrim's Merry Tales to Canterbury, or the Pilgrim Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, there are the ubiquitous woodcut carvings of a pilgrim, oftentimes male wearing a necklace with a scalloped shell, leaning on a wooden staff, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, walking in a pair of leather sandals. I, on the other hand, have learned the more fashionable, more modern, more Abercrombie and Fitch look of pilgrimage. a small backpack, a water bottle, granola bars, t-shirts, of course with no one else's name on it, shorts, sweatpants for the evening, walks into sanctuary, suntan lotion, bug spray, baseball caps, sometimes a hat with a broad brim, running shoes, definitely Nike, or hiking boots, and a kit with foot powder, moleskin, needles, and petroleum jelly galore.

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Now why all this talk about clothes? Because being and becoming a pilgrim is like being and becoming a Christian. Which is like putting on a set of clothing items and growing into them. The Apostle Paul writes this to the Colossians.

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Seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with a new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. Paul says again to the Colossians, clothe yourselves with love, which girds everything together in perfect harmony. Clothe yourselves, he writes to the Ephesians, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. And in Romans, Paul writes this, put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Clothes, you see, are being put on us that do not necessarily fit when they first arrive, when they first come, as we would expect today from a modern day clothier. Rather, the clothes of the Christian, the clothes of the pilgrim, are baggy, maybe uncomfortable at times, hard to get around in, dragging behind and sagging in all the wrong places. That's because we live in the now, but not yet times as Christian pilgrims. We are on the way.

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but not quite there yet. There is no hand-in-glove fit. There is only room to grow into the clothes of the pilgrim, into the clothes of the Christ, into being a Christian. It is analogous to John Calvin's admonishment that we should baptize our children as infants so that they can grow into an understanding of their baptism and, quote, thus be fired with a greater zeal for renewal from learning that they were given the token of it in their first infancy in order that they may meditate upon it throughout their lives.

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As I will propose later on in these lectures, I understand that our baptism is a time when we celebrate publicly What God in Christ has done, is doing with us, and will do with us, a message all wrapped up in the sign and seal of the watery, bodily gesture of grace. God is setting us on our way, amid a band of pilgrims who precede us, who follow us to the realm of God's love. An analogy, as a father, as a parent,

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I kneel down before Parker, my 10-year-old son's growing feet, and place my thumb upon the right new shoe. Usually a running shoe for soccer is the only reason we buy shoes. And he will soon outgrow them or wear them out. I squeeze around the shoe's toe box.

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I am satisfied that there is plenty of room to grow into. There's a lot of room to grow into. And then the educated guest born of experience. Like these shoes, I won't be fitting these pilgrim clothes anytime soon, not until journey's end.

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For the time being, I am, I must be satisfied with the process of growing into the clothes of the pilgrim. With time, with experience, with knowledge, with companionship, with physical training over many miles, meeting strangers, eating strange foods, Hearing news stories, practicing ancient gestures and timeless rituals, sacrament as daily food, with spiritual discernment wrapped in solitude, the destination before us, the journey celebrated along the way, I grow, we grow into being one of God's pilgrims and grow among a people called to be a pilgrim church. One of the first questions that always comes to my students' mind when we start down this path is, what defines A pilgrim?

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or a pilgrimage. Martin Robertson writes this, A pilgrim uses travel to a particular place as a means of exploring the deeper questions of life in general and life and God in particular. The pilgrim uses the travel to a particular place as a means of exploring deeper questions of life and God in particular. Robertson continues that the act of pilgrimage echoes questions that come to us

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from that deeper journey of the heart, mind, and body, such as, what is the reason for my being? It is no coincidence that so many of us who go on pilgrimage are at that critical stage of life, the transition from childhood to adulthood, or from adulthood to that at the start of our retirement. Sometimes pilgrimage really isn't going anywhere at all. It's trying to figure out, am I pointed at least in the right direction?

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Christian pilgrimage, you see, is as old as the church, and then some. write that there isn't the indication that pilgrimage took place long before Abraham and Sarah ever came into our lives and left their homes in the era of the Chaldeans. In Luke 2, verse 41, we read of the holy family's journey of its ancestors, descent into Egypt. Later we read that the children of Israel would take pilgrimages and travel to holy places of worship.

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Jesus, some say, is the pilgrim par excellence. Already in the infancy narratives, we find Jesus constantly traveling to and fro between Nazareth and Galilee, Judea, Bethlehem, the city of David, Jerusalem with its temple. Brother John of Tezai writes that Jesus, in the context of the story of Abraham and that of Sarah, is akin to the pilgrim God who we speak of and worship. And then only that person who is the human being hearing the divine word and conforms to the existence of God.

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In the early church, people went on pilgrimage because of the possibility of incarnation, the hope deep inside of witnessing the physical presence of Christ in a present time, in a present place. And people still go on pilgrimages today for all kinds of reasons. The first pilgrim is believed to be Melito of Sardis, who visited Jerusalem in AD 170 to see the place spoken of in scripture. Later, Constantine's mother Helena took a similar journey, and that was only accompanied by a growth of what has become to be called a desert spirituality, with people making all kinds of pilgrimages for all kinds of reasons.

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Anthropologically, Victor and Edith Turner outline 5 characteristics of medieval pilgrimage, First, it is believed that all pilgrims were called and pilgrimages were called to be places where miracles had once happened, were happening, or could happen again. They considered it a place which was a hotline to God. Second, the purpose of the pilgrim, and the pilgrimage was to get out, to get away from the place in which there was an occasion of sin that may make up so much of our Christian life experience.

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Third, there were the hazards of life met along the way in which pilgrims were performing a kind of penance for their sins. And 4th, the pilgrims were never found to be alone. Knowledge of the pilgrimage site was passed on and shared among all the pilgrims who were coming to that place. And finally, pilgrims left a certain place and went to a certain destination, though they may not have known what adventures were ahead of them on the journey, nor what to expect at the point of arrival.

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My personal understanding of pilgrimage is that I am a pilgrim. And more important, that the Christian life in all its thickness, intricate complexities, roller coaster swirls, the unknown length and unparalleled breadth of life is a pilgrimage. This wasn't a splashy, brilliant light like firework display or the warning lights of an ambulance in my life. I myself am uncomfortable with revelation or moments of epiphany being a once-in-a-lifetime affair.

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For me, such a discovery and recovery of the identity of pilgrim and pilgrimage as a Protestant lacked that blinding, fabulous, ferocious, dramatic flair of the Apostles Pauled, falling off the horse, hearing the voice of God event, or the simple Augustinian chanting of, Pick it up and read, pick it up and read, pick it up and read, on a continuous feedback loop in his head. My discovery of the act and art of being a pilgrim and being on pilgrimage, along with its innumerable gestures and intricate rituals, has come through what St. Benedict would call a process of conversacio, a daily nurturing, along a community of friends, met along the path of one's life on pilgrimage. It has been what the Catholic writer Paul Wilkes describes as a slow, gradual, turning-around process towards the presence of God in life, in all of life, in which one discovers the very person we are in the body of Christ.

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Wilkes cites St. Benedict's and writes that this conversion process is a process in which God's grace opens each other, opens the person to the self-constituting good, the holy, responsible person that God has intended him or her to be, in God, in Christ's body, by God's grace. Another way to explain the process of pilgrimage as conversion may be described as an increasingly intentionality in all of one's life, a growing mindfulness, or opening and expanding awareness of the presence of God in Christ.

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all parts of this world and our lives made possible by the Holy Spirit. To quote John Calvin, the Holy Spirit was given to the Apostle Paul in order that his teaching may not be unprofitable. Teaching moments were there abundantly for Paul.

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For example, he reminds the readers that you, Galatians, you yourselves receive the Holy Spirit by the hearing of faith, thus making Paul himself a co-worker of God. The Apostle Paul, curmudgeonly soul that he was at times, opens up for us a renewable vision of the thick, sometimes conflicting, oftentimes harmonious, yet always unpredictable act of growing in the body of Christ. This grace-inspired revelatory process began for me over four years ago. It started as an act of intellectual curiosity.

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For some years, I was curious as to all the ways that we call and understand growth and change and development within the context of the body of Christ. Granted, there were all these theories of human development already in place in the world and in the church. Yet those who challenged the modern, now standard understanding of growth and development and change were those people, for me, whom the world calls disabled, and sometimes those that the world calls gifted and talented. Particularly, though, for me, it was those people whom the world calls developmentally delayed.

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In other words, this was a group of people who were often set aside by most of us in society, in modern society, because why? They simply don't fit into our current way of understanding growth or the milestones of development as promoted and narrated by the theories of human developmental psychology, which rule the roost when it comes to our understanding of growth in the life of the church today. As I dug into and explored the various permutation of the theories of human developmental psychology, I started to explore its origins, which are, by and large, Platonic, Darwinistic, and Enlightenment-oriented and bound. Now, for a chance of being open to criticism that I am being too simplistic and too reductionistic in my critique, let me go ahead and dig a deeper hole.

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By platonic, I mean that in these theories there was the hope that we would discover that there was an individual who was just waiting for someone, anyone, to bring a light to our dark caves, revealing the foundational and universal truths of life that crosses all ethnicities, time, place, and people. By Darwinistic, I mean that these theories are tending towards the possibility that human development really is a survival of the fittest mode. in which one must either adapt or die, because you are an individual who must grow, or if you don't, you are considered delayed, disabled, different, difficult, deviant ones. In the earlier part of the last century, we used to call them feeble-minded, moronic, idiots.

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By enlightenment-oriented, I mean thought of all these theories of human development is that we all have the capacity to solve problems using our mind through logic and rationality with little room or understanding for a motivism. I began to understand how these social theories and philosophies were embodied in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, the philosopher John Rawls, Robert Keegan, Jim Fowler, Jerome Kagan. On the one hand, these theorists gave us a language, a story, a way to follow an understanding of the structural pathways that were mechanisms of change, providing a way that many people here, included, could understand how we change and grow in our thinking over time, from our earliest days on this earth, infancy, to our sunset years.

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Single-handedly, these theorists gave us a better understanding of the life of the child, and the chaotic complexities of retiring and growing old. But on the other hand, if one does not conform and fit into any of these highly structured stages of growth, followed in a stage-like sequence in which you have to fill all of the requirements in order to get on to the next stage, or consider that there is a lag in your own life, you are considered odd, deviant, difficult, disabled or special.

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In the early 1960s, the question started to be, and has continued to resonate for the last 40 years, if special education is so special, why doesn't anyone want to be in it? I began to understand exactly why people with disabilities, especially those who are considered developmentally delayed or considered mentally retarded, didn't fit into these upper middle class, Western, white, straight, male models of development, which began to look more and more generic, regimented, and even to my poor Calvinist Descartes, predetermined or predestined pathways of development and the process of change. In other words, these theories were born out of a certain context from certain people promoting a certain particular context and a way of life and setting the context for us in the future. Each one of these theories considers themselves and is a power to be reckoned with, an enormous power over other people through the power to predict and therefore control someone else's actions and what we think of other people.

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Among the many promises and problems with these theories of... human development, one aspect that was most bothersome to me as a Christian, as a theologian, as a teacher in the body of Christ, was that the ideas of human development appeared to cast all human beings, all nations, throughout time as separate individuals, always using communities and groups of people to help the growth of the individual rather than the other way around. How do we participate in the life of helping others to grow in the Christian community? But the claim

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of radical individualism that many of these theories wanted to promote. This kind of understanding that we are able to separate ourselves from a group and think for oneself if we hit that universalizing stage of development. By the way, Jesus never did hit the universalizing stage of development. He died at the age of 33, therefore being stuck at Larry Kohlberg's stage three of development.

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Poor guy. Nevertheless, The understanding is that we will grow like the rest of the members of the group that we are part of, because the hand of human development has now become hidden and secretive. And we continue to go through one-dimensioned understandings of predetermined levels of stages or periods of growth from the lower all the way to the higher.

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No one wants to be at the lower stage. This is where capitalism comes in. Everyone wants to be at the very top, so we'll do everything in order to get up there with the ladders of success. Such growth, such success is possible because what I'm able to think my way to the next stage of development, with a modicum or a growing sense of the freedom of choice within limits, within the context of the group.

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The other nettlesome aspect is as follows. Throughout these theories, there is a false sense of universalism and foundationalism, which are the twin cornerstones of human developmental theories. These theories, you see, can be applied to all human groups throughout time, making meaning of all human intentions and actions or gestures. Moreover, in these theories of human development, natural religion reigns supreme, or the lack of religion or faith system.

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One doesn't necessarily have to believe in anything, or grow into anyone, or change. towards being any better, necessarily according to any god, as long as you believe in yourself and the potential that you have to do what the military services promises us that we can do, be all that we can be. A serious caveat. The Lone Ranger approach to growth in these theories of human development, save for Fowler's theory of faith development, is not necessarily for the advancement of world religions or faiths.

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Theorists like Piaget and Erikson note a role for religion to play out only in the earliest stage of development, while Freud himself argues time and time again that understanding ourselves being created in the image of God is quite useless, for we should consider that we create God in our own image. More than anything else, these theories of human development celebrate and still celebrate the importance of the mind, That one sense, that one dimension of being, to intellectualize, to embrace Descartes' axiom, I think, therefore I am, whereas Garrison Keeler likes to always say, how did Descartes die? He once said, I think not.

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Good, you got it. Intrigued with the mystery of change and growth raised by these theorists and the kind of critical edge brought against these theorists by the very people who were considered and are considered by this world to be disabled, these theories, desires of seeing what growth is by bringing the Holy Spirit into the equation, well, when you bring the Holy Spirit into any of these theories of human development, it sends it all off kilter because now we've gone beyond a one-dimensional self and truly a three-dimensional or four-dimensional understanding of the self. And so I began to look for or create a constructive and thus a creative alternative.

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I desired to discover or create an alternative to these theories of developmental theories that was more theologically informed, while keeping an awareness of the latest research in the growth of the social sciences, like psychology, anthropology, neurology, keeping in mind the wide varieties of human growth that abounds in congregations, whether we're mindful of it or not. For example, I wanted to break out of the radical individualism of the theories of human development. and consider growth and change with a deeper understanding that as Christians, we are not individuals. We are not separate aggregate individuals, separated from one another, but we are part of a community, members one another, Paul said, of the body of Christ.

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Here's where I am so thankful for my friend Carol Gilligan, who in her theory of development described at least that human growth is within a web of relationships. But webs, while holding very many points, is usually flat in one dimension. The kind of membership that we celebrate, that we are baptized into as Christians, is both the body of Christ in the here and now and the communion of saints in the past and the future members who are to come. How do you address all of this presence of people within a theory of change, of growth, of life?

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We are members of the church. We are members of God. God owns us. We are God's possession, both the church visible and invisible.

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Second, the connection with other members of a larger body than us, as a member of the Christian faith community, nurtures and sustains not only my mind. On that part, I am true with Calvin. The mind is a very important thing, but also spirit and body in toto. In other words, we are, even as Presbyterians, more than minds or floating or talking heads.

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Third, while all the theorists want the individual to define the stage and not succumb to being pigeonholed in a stage, which was never possible for any of us, given the power of these theories to tell us exactly where we are on the stage of life, I was looking for a way of perceiving growth and change in a manner in which the person's place within the body of Christ and the gifts and the talents, the person's abilities and capacities are honored and nurtured rather than focusing on the deficit, what you can't do and need to do in order to get to the next stage in growth. Let us let God in Christ narrate or describe us, highlighting who and whose we are. Tell us of sin,

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And where sin falls into this, by the way, Jim Fowler still hasn't figured out a way to weave sin into his theory of human development. The mystery for us is to figure out what and where God intended for us to serve the Almighty within the body. And as we say in the Westminster Catechism, to enjoy and worship God with such a deep knowledge, but not knowledge of the mind only, but also of the body and spirit. We are all more than our predetermined, predestined stage, level, area, period in someone else's human-constructed developmental flowchart.

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Our lives, you see, are too complicated, too thick, too full of paradox, of meanings, too humorous, too disjointed, rattled by sin daily, if not hourly and by the minute, and ever on the edge of the precipice of chaos. as we also must acknowledge as Presbyterians that we are saved by God's grace. And thus our lives are not able to be reduced, to be simplified to a mere stage, I am a stage one, I am a stage two, you're stage six, you must be better than I am. We're not able to live that life successfully because it will drive us crazy and then we're way off the chart.

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We know that life in God is not boring. The kind of predictability and thus control and power over us that these theories offer us is truly a weird kind of distortion of who and whose we are. It is only one dimension that they keep on pulling out of a three-dimensional or four-dimensional life. The idea of Christian pilgrimage as a way of not only understanding or perceiving growth and change

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as an analogy or metaphor, but as a way of growing and changing, came initially through studying these theories of human development who continue to use this very language. They would use the language of passageways or paths or steps to the next stage or the roadway of life. Yet I was told by these theorists of human development that what had to be holding true for them was that I had to make the move somewhere along the way. Well, sometimes God has to help me make that move, but these theorists never made room for God in any of these theories.

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So I started to look at pilgrimage as a way of understanding growth, a process defined by the beginning or the genesis and by the end point, the destination, the finale, the reason, the end for all of these things that I am going through in life. For example, many of the developmental theories conclude with a universalizing self, the more mature self, the most moral self that you can possibly be, the most universal self you want to be. Yet none of these theories ever included God in terms of the kingdom, the realm, the dominion of God. And not the kingdom or realm as a place per se, but as an experience, as in the fruits of the spirit.

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in which we experience the power of God, the power of God's love. To quote again the Apostle Paul to the Romans, The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking, Mark Twain would add, of harp playing and no sex, but a place of justice, a place of peace, a place of joy that is given to us by the Holy Spirit. Paul writes, Whoever serves Christ in this way pleases God and wins the esteem of women and men. Let us then, he writes, make it our aim to work for peace and to strengthen one another.

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Yet Martin Robinson, also a scholar on pilgrimage, reminds us that while pilgrims travel in search of God and God's realm, in the process, pilgrims also help and hope to find themselves. Who am I in God? What I am proposing is Christian pilgrimage towards the kingdom, towards the realm, towards the dominion of God, in which we also find ourselves in Christ as an alternative approach or pathway of understanding growth as Christians. For it is in Christ who knew and knows us first and still loves us, and is ever so faithful even in the midst of our

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unfaithfulness, that we discover who and whose we are. What do I mean by growth as Christians? Well, as we move towards God's realm, our body, our mind, and spirit grow as Christians on this pilgrimage as we strive, by God's grace, to be and to become more like Christ. And as we become more like Christ, we expand, we grow, we grow into our flesh, we grow into our woundedness, we embrace the hurt in our lives, our heart, our sense of powerlessness, our place, our lives, our gifts, our talents, our services are received into the body of Christ.

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But it doesn't stop there, and it doesn't stop with us. Our growth in being more like Christ is to continue to go beyond our lives as we begin to understand and appreciate the way that we are so connected with one another in this life. Both in the context of the real and the immediate, yet also the transcendent and the holy, the visible and invisible church, the body of Christ, through the one who journeys with us, Jesus Christ.

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It's all part of pilgrimage of life in Jesus Christ. And this way of understanding growth is inclusive of all Christians. People when they are old and young, both women and men, rich and poor, gay and straight, of all ethnic heritages, denominations, churches, among the world of nations, and those who are abled or considered non-disabled. This idea of expanding as growing is drawn, borrowed, and paraphrased by the work of the Benedictine abbot John Main.

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John Maine writes this, the growth is an expansion of one's being, being pushed beyond the frontiers of one's seeming limitations, of which we have, all of us, been more than willing to confess, and growing into the Godhead. It is a dynamic motion beyond ourselves in which we leave limitations behind and enter into a creative development of our entire being, body, mind, and spirit in the body of Christ, in union with God. Maine writes that we no longer understand our lives or ourselves in terms of our limitations, but rather in terms of our capacity to expand. It's because of the invitation that God in Christ has made to us to leave self behind, to follow the one with the cross, to pick up our cross, to enter into the expansion of the fullness of self found only in the one who knows us best and knows us first, Jesus Christ.

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Such a discovery and nurture of this journey is found within the dynamic, fluid, malleable body of Christ spurred on by the love of God's Spirit. As the Apostle Paul expresses it, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. In the life I now live, in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. It is in this topsy-turvy, paradox-driven world of Christ in which the last are first and the first last, in which one finds oneself by losing oneself in Christ, that we grow in Christ, thus growing in our understanding of ourselves through the one who knows us best and first.

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Before we know ourselves, God in Christ knows us. A few weeks ago, the lectionary reading was what? Psalm 139. I call it God the Great Knitter.

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kind of psalm. I was there knitting you in your mother's womb. I know you. I know you right well.

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I swear it was a southerner who wrote that psalm. As Christians, such insight is a result of grace through faith, and not by my human cogitation or works alone, as we are given the gift of insight, of knowing deeply that this sense of expansion and growing experience of fullness results from God in Christ within, among, behind, beside, and before us, language of pilgrimage. This means that our human consciousness, our mindfulness, is always opening, always expanding.

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When closing in times in doubt of despair, God in Christ reopens us, brings us into a place and dwells deeply in our hearts. I was told by Michael Warren that I am creative, so here's the creative spark. One way to understand this growth is by comparing it to, watch, a Hobberman's fear. The Hoberman sphere is an incredible thing.

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My kids, we all love to play with this. My students love to play with this as well. The sphere, you see, is a system of many links. It looks like a porcupine, a hedgehog, that transforms a small sphere.

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There's a very small sphere right in the middle that is able to expand to 10 times larger based upon the mathematical principle that allows a structure to mechanically expand while keeping its shape. Behold the sphere. What once was this small like this, like us, is able to expand and to grow. No longer do I want to play with these one-dimensional steps and stages that all the stage theorists love to play with.

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What I want to look at is life as being this expansion, this growing into. But I want something that doesn't even look like this. I want something that's more malleable, fluid. I want something with even more linkages with other people within the context of the body of Christ.

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When contracted, it is. sphere of spines. It almost looks, you know, brittle to the touch. The volume inside the sphere is small, but when it expands, all the spines bend outwardly backwards so as to make a larger sphere with the inside of the sphere greatly expanded.

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Likewise, though we are awash in grace, faith, and hope and love of God, our mindfulness, our knowledge, our awareness of this gift is limited at best. We often know or apprehend the gestures of grace, faith, hope, and joy, and we know those things retrospectively after they've happened to us or with us. We are born and baptized into the body of Christ. From that moment onward, our growth in the body resembles the sphere in its contracted state of being.

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Baptized in the body of Christ over time with experiences along the way, the pilgrim road of life, learning, relearning the stories of Christian community, our place in that community, and others. We grow with others into Christ, who is the head of the church. We are to be like the Benedictine monk who, writes John Maine, carries the past with us, collecting it along our pilgrimage, transforming it, and being transformed by those stories, by the radiant presence of a new creation. Our entire sense of self and awareness of our connections with others and ourselves in the body of Christ, with our connection to earth around us, expands, pushing past our limitations, pushing past the world as we know it, as we grow into a dependent relationship into God and Christ.

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As members of the Christ body, we are part of something far larger than ourselves. far more magnificent than our lonely, individuated selves, for we are in Christ, in the body of Christ, as Christ dwells within us. For these three lectures, I will propose some of the characteristics of the variables or experiences that are, or at least seem critical and essential in understanding growth as pilgrimage. These variables or experiences seem to accompany each other,

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And they've come largely through not only my reading, but actually having to go on pilgrimage. The list that I will present is not presented in any systematic order. There is no beginning, middle, or end in terms of being on pilgrimage itself. Besides, to put them in any kind of systematic order runs the fate of making pilgrimage a science, something predictable, a kind of fit with human conformity, robbing the sense of the spontaneous, the serendipitous, the unpredictable, which is at the very heart of all Christian pilgrimage, thanks to the Holy Spirit, who keeps on breaking into our lives in the unexpected, unplanned moments, rattling us in ways that produces, that evokes, that makes growth possible.

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It is the unforeseen that is the greatest gift of pilgrimage. We may be prepared for the act of pilgrimage, but we should not be overly prepared. Pilgrimage defies, you see, easy formulas, or becoming formulaic. Pilgrimage is not a science.

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Can you hear it now? If we made it a science, people would say, well, I'm at this part of the pathway. Where are you? And you're further on along the way.

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That's not the way it's supposed to go. Remember, the trust, the hope of pilgrimage is, am I facing the right direction? And asking the community if I'm not, oh, please just turn me around. I am so lost into the way that I should be going.

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Therefore, consider this pilgrimage as art. The list that I will present today in these three lectures is not exhaustive. Far more can be added in this list of characteristics. But what this list will hopefully do best is give us a starting point for further discussions, reflections, and hopefully growth in the body of Christ.

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The characteristics or the variables are taken from actual pilgrimages. Both pilgrimages I've taken as well as pilgrimage narratives of others. I will include stories from my personal pilgrimages to El Santuario de Chimayo in Chimayo, Northern New Mexico, to the Abbey of Jesus Christ Crucified and the Basilica of the Black Christ, El Cristo Negro in Escapulas, Guatemala, the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne in Northern England, and the Celtic pilgrimage site, St. Patrick's Purgatory, located in Northern Ireland.

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I've actually been to Purgatory, it's not bad, but... I didn't go to Rome, Jerusalem, or Santiago de Compostela, fearing that such popular sites in which millions go and travel would be too much for me to handle, and I would be swept away or turned off by the commercialism of these joints. I went to the small, out-of-the-way, off-the-highway places. Consider this presentation these three days.

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Cloister walks goes on blue highways. I'm using these personal stories because, well, that's really the only thing I have to point to, to talk about, to grow out of. Friends of mine, Catholic, all, looked at me and they said, Well, you've read enough books on pilgrimage. Put them down.

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Now go. Be off. Go on pilgrimage. I had to learn myself the power

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of the stories of change and growth in life, as did Egeria, a woman who traversed to pilgrimage sites earlier in the life of the church. I must, like St. Aidan and Cuthbert, who were pilgrim monks in the fifth century of what is now called England, travel back, forwards, to and fro without any sense or order. I reread and lived Chaucer's tales with many people as we told our tales of bumbling stories of pilgrimage as his group did to Canterbury.

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with this counterpoint partner, John Bunyan, who took, if you will, the Lone Ranger approach to Christian pilgrimage. In the modern day, pilgrims like Belden Lane, Dorothy Day, Patricia Hampel, Paulo Coelho, and even Annie Dillard on her trek to the deeper world of Tinker Creek in her own backyard in Virginia. None of these people, you see, were the same after they went on their journeys, to places, to people, to a space where the holy and the mundane intersect in daily life. In a bit of cartography, mapping out the terrain of variables, growth as pilgrimage, I begin therefore with a focus on the gestures that we perform as followers of Christ.

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For it is in the gestures that we practice and perform daily, that which is revealed in our own flesh among us, in the muscle and sinews, the ways that we actually live, what the Benedictine sister Joan Chittester calls the Jesus life. First, the gestures of Christian pilgrimage. I learned early on in my walk from Costilla, northern New Mexico to Chimayo, over 125 miles.

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I mean, we walk the whole thing, 20, 25 miles a day. The gestures of pilgrimage begins with this. It is the simplest movement, simplest gesture of the foot as it goes forward. Once the tender soul strikes the dusty ground, heel rolling to toe, then off the earth, it leaves an imprint upon the brown soil.

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The education of this novice pilgrim ascends, excites the web of nerves that stimulates the muscles of the calves, causing knees to bend and thighs to march, energy shooting up my torso into my always stubborn Scottish backbone. Pilgrimage soon encircles and consumes my every thought until it inscribes itself deeply into the marrow of my being, expanding my heart as I search for and desire the love of God and finding out, oh God, for what reason did you bring me here? It was 3 o'clock in the morning when we took that first walk, especially in the moments of anxiety and feelings of loneliness. My eyes are drawn upwards to the cloudless heavens.

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The almost teal blue, or as they love to say in Carolina, the Carolina blue of the sky.