Pilgrimage: The Journey Home

The following is a presentation of Artisan Church in Rochester, New York.

I was going to have you start out today, and I guess I still am going to have you start

out today, by dreaming a little bit.

I want you to take a moment and think about the things in your life that feel unfinished,

unfulfilled, maybe unfulfilling.

We all have some of these things, right?

I felt this way all through my grad program.

I just kept saying, like, okay, I have three more semesters to go, I have two more semesters

to go, you know, whatever it is in your life that you're kind of waiting to be through.

I want you to think about what your life will be like after all those problems have gone

away, and yours might be quite a lot more severe than just, you know, waiting to get

through school, but can you imagine and sort of make a little dream?

Start, maybe dwell on that dream for a minute about what your life will be like after all

of those needs have been met, or the sickness is over, or you're through the divorce, or

you finally graduate.

Do you feel the sense of longing that comes with something like that?

With wanting to get to a certain place in life, but not being able to speed through it.

Do you feel that?

Some of you might be going, well, wait a second, my dreaming kind of took me back into my past a little bit.

Maybe you're dreaming about how things were.

You kind of wish you could go back to that.

So if you try to inhabit that dreaming for yourself, I'm guessing that most of us probably

have a little bit of a push and a little bit of a pull toward what is coming, we hope,

toward what used to be.

And it pulls you in both directions.

And this is something that I think was really powerful in the memoir that Saru Brierly wrote,

Long Way Home, which is what we're doing this, as we end summer here, we're doing the artist's

summer read for A Long Way Home.

A lot of you have already read all of this book.

Many of you stayed and watched the film a couple weeks ago.

Even if this is your first time with us, you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't

worry, it's not going to be a sermon about this moment.

It's a memoir per se, but for those of you who've read the story, you might recognize

that in that pushing and pulling.

For Saru, whose story I'll just, let me briefly recap for those of you who haven't read it

or who are new to this, but he was, he got lost as a young boy in India.

He ended up on the wrong train and fell asleep and then woke up hundreds of miles from his

home with no idea how to get back.

All he knew was a little bit of a dream.

A little bit of what his town train station looked like in his hometown and that he'd

been on the train for a long time.

And so he tries to get home, he goes in many different directions out of this main station

that he's wound up in in Kolkata.

He goes this way and then it's not the right one, so he comes back.

And the next day he goes that way and it's not the right one, so he comes back.

And he does this many, many times and he can never find the train station that looks familiar,

he can never find his hometown.

It's not a safe place for him to be, this busy train station, as a young boy.

And eventually the police scoop him up and take him to an orphanage and the orphanage

cares for him and looks for his family and they can't find his family.

And so they place him in adoption with an Australian couple who raise him in Tasmania,

raise him all the way to adulthood and in adulthood he begins to search again for his

home and for his family.

By then the magical technology of Google Earth has descended upon humankind and he begins

to use this mapping software to kind of trace his way out from Kolkata in hopes that he'll

find the place that looks familiar to him on the map.

And what happens is that he begins to have these deep questions about who he is, where

he is, and where home is.

And one of the most poignant things he says.

Is this home?

Was that where I was now or was it where I'd come from?

And if your own dreaming a moment ago pulled you in those two directions, got you started

thinking about what things will be like in the future but maybe also thinking about what

things used to be like in the past, maybe you can relate your state right now to Saru's

state as he was thinking about whether home was Tasmanian.

Or whether home was this town that he could not even pronounce correctly and that's part

of why he couldn't find it on a map.

And so we've been using this story of Saru and sort of weaving in biblical themes to

try to explore something that might be poignant for all of us in this time in our life.

And as we were sitting down to develop the themes for each week of this series based

on this memoir, I knew immediately that one of the weeks that I wanted to take would be

about pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage is a spiritual journey.

It's a journey that's undertaken for spiritual reasons, maybe religious reasons.

It's found actually in all kinds of cultural, in nearly every world religion and there are

many people who are not religious at all who undertake pilgrimages as well.

In Christianity, pilgrim sites such as Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago de Compostela.

Hold significant historical and religious importance.

In Islam, one of the five pillars is pilgrimage, Hajj, this pilgrimage to Mecca that every

Muslim must undertake once during their life.

There's pilgrimages in Hinduism, journeys to sacred rivers like the Ganges.

Buddhists visit places that are significant in the life of the Buddha.

In Judaism, the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

It is a pilgrimage site for many.

So all of these different religious worldviews have this thing in common, which is that we

seem to need to get up and go, to uproot ourselves from where we are and to go to some place

that's different and special and maybe holy.

So why pilgrimage?

Why did I think, in fact, why did I know that pilgrimage was going to be one of the topics

that I wanted to talk about?

Well, it's right there on Sarusa.

It is a love story.

I don't think that he probably would describe his experiences as a pilgrimage, but they

look very much like pilgrimage to me.

That train route that he took that night when he was a little boy unintentionally was a

pilgrimage that took him from his home out to some other place.

Then he kind of tried to take many little pilgrimages home and never really got to the

destination he was seeking.

me, feels like a virtual pilgrimage.

So Saru's story, of course, is one of the things that made me want to talk about this,

but you know already, I think many of you, that pilgrimage is something that's very important

to me.

I was able to go on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in May of this year.

It was one of the most poignant experiences of my life.

And I am going to take a minute to tell you about it, but before that, I want to show

you a picture that I took in 2019.

This was when I was on my big sabbatical that I was very fortunate to receive a grant from

the Lillie Endowment to do in 2019.

It feels like a billion years ago now, even though it was not that many years ago.

But let me show you this picture.

This is a photo I took in Achill Island in the west of Ireland, one of the most beautiful

places I've ever been.

This is a classic case of photos do not do it justice.

You cannot capture the green.

You cannot capture the green of Ireland with an iPhone, and probably not very well even

with a very expensive camera.

This was this amazing place that was, you can see the sheep there, you can see the waterfall

coming down out of this craggy kind of hillside, mountainside thing, and then all of these

stones on the grass in front of it.

Do you know what that is?

That's a labyrinth.

Many people think labyrinth and they think maze.

It's not a maze.

A labyrinth is not a maze.

A labyrinth.

A labyrinth, when it's properly laid out, has only one way into the center from the

edge, and then one way back out from the center to the edge.

Did I say that right?

You get my point, right?

From the edge to the center, then from the center to the edge.

And you weave your way all around it and it feels like you're going nowhere, but you're

only going to one place and you're only coming back from that place to your starting point.

And labyrinths were created for people who wanted to take pilgrimages but could not actually

give up the time and income or in whatever economy they were in, farming, to go on an

actual pilgrimage.

And so a labyrinth, sometimes we've actually had like vinyl mat labyrinths that we've laid

out here or we'll put tape on the floor or something.

We might do that again this fall sometime.

Stay tuned.

But a labyrinth is a pilgrimage that you can take in one place, and it's not quite the

same, but it gives you some of the same feelings.

And so I had that experience.

I actually did see part of the Camino on that trip as well, but I did not get to the holy

site at the end.

I did not get to the Cathedral of Santiago, the Cathedral of St. James, until May of this

year when I went on a pilgrimage with a group of other men through an organization called

Journey Home.

And you can see this next photo that I'll show you is me when I finally made it into

Santiago, and I'd seen like a hundred different cathedrals and chapels along the way, and

they were all the same.

And I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to die.

And they're all minuscule compared to this one, and you walk into this square, and it

opens up, and it was just breathtaking, and I was tears in my eyes, and I put my sunglasses

on to look tougher and took a selfie, black and white, properly moody.

You can see the gorgeous cathedral behind me.

One of the leaders on that trip said that a pilgrimage is voluntary displacement.

Yeah.

And that's exactly what I experienced.

I was asking some of, we have this WhatsApp chat group that we still maintain with the

other guys who I was with, and I said, hey, guys, I have to talk about pilgrimage this

week.

What should I say to everybody?

And one of them reminded me of something that I said at the beginning when we were all expressing

our fears about this experience.

My fear was, what if nothing happens?

Something happened.

It wasn't what I thought.

Anyway, when people ask me about that, I say, do you have the, do you have five seconds

or do you have five seconds?

Or do you have five hours?

Because there's really nothing in between.

What I've just tried to do is something in between, and now I just have to stop talking

about it at an awkward spot in the story.

The connections to pilgrimage in the biblical story are almost endless.

I mean, the hard work for a person giving a sermon about pilgrimage using the scriptures

is like, how do you narrow it down?

So for me, the first thing that comes to mind is the story of the Exodus, the Israelites

who wandered, as you heard from the book of Deuteronomy earlier, wandering out of the

house of Exodus.

And God led you through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous

snakes and scorpions.

And then, like the editor said, actually, it's venomous because poisonous is something

you eat.

That's if, like, Reddit was in the Bible.

The point is, it was a bad journey.

Nobody had any fun.

You know?

We're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're,

we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're.

Our gospel reading for today, which has that John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness,

prepare the way for the Lord.

This is a classic Advent text.

We are almost certainly going to revisit it in December when Advent comes around again.

He's crying out in the wilderness, prepare a way for the Lord.

And then Jesus comes and is baptized by John.

And he has this amazing kind of spiritual mountaintop experience.

And then immediately, right after that, it says,

the spirit led him out into the wilderness

to be tempted

he had a

40 day trial

these stories

and many others in scripture

make me think about the fact that so often

our trips out

into an unknown wilderness

are kind of like

involuntary pilgrimages

right

my mentor

Bart Tarman from this group says that

pilgrimage is a voluntary displacement

but so often the displacement is actually

involuntary

and the people of Israel

surely did not want

they wanted to escape Egypt but surely they did not want to

wander in the wilderness for four decades

Jesus was

obedient to the call of the spirit

to go out into the wilderness

but it was not a pleasant experience

or one that he would have chosen for himself

I'm sure

Saru Briarley

surely would not have chosen

if he had control over it

to get lost and take that long

pilgrimage train ride to Kolkata

he would not have chosen to have days

or weeks of fear filled

attempts to find his way

back home taking train rides in every

direction only to return

back to the central station in this

worst labyrinth ever

Saru would not have chosen the events

in his life that

led him to a place where he felt

he needed to make another pilgrimage

this time an intentional one

back to the country where he was born

from Tasmania

to Ganash Talai

he wouldn't have chosen any of that

and yet all of those events

in his story shaped him into the incredible

person that he became

the wilderness for him

was sometimes literal but more often

was probably figurative

the wilderness shapes our story

here's the thing

good little Christians

like we all are

believe that God is everywhere

I do believe that

but here's something else that I know

God is more easily found in the wilderness

yes God is everywhere

but we are more likely to notice

God's presence

in the wilderness

and it's almost like

when we undertake pilgrimage

and move out into a wilderness

or maybe get moved out

by circumstances into a wilderness

we sort of allow God

to find us

it goes all the way back

to that story in the Garden of Eden

where they're trying to hide from God

a pilgrimage

a wilderness exposes us

to God

in preparation for my Camino trip

I read

I theoretically read

I skimmed parts of a book

by Parker Palmer

called Let Your Life Speak

I will read this book

in its entirety

someday

off in the future

when all my problems have been solved

here's what Parker Palmer says about pilgrimage

disabused of our illusions

by much travel and travail

we awaken one day

to find that the sacred center

is here and now

in every moment of the journey

everywhere in the world around us

and deep within our own hearts

see the thing that pilgrimage taught me

is that it's not actually

the going somewhere else

it's the putting yourself

in the position

through going somewhere else

to realize that you were already there

the journey home mantra

that I read to you

when I first came back

talks about

returning to the heart's true home

my friend John

who's the director of Journey Home

says that pilgrimage is about getting lost

so that we can discover

that we need to be

found

it requires a level of intentionality

but the destination is unknown

and it often finds us

that famous verse

from the gospel reading today

where it's John the Baptist

crying out in the wilderness

prepare ye the way of the Lord

I default to King James on some texts

this is one of them

the really interesting thing is that

he's quoting the prophet Isaiah

that he's quoting the prophet Isaiah

there

and so I don't actually think

it's John the Baptist

out in the wilderness

proclaiming

prepare ye the way

it's not John the Baptist

the voice of one who is in the wilderness

saying prepare ye the way of the Lord

it's John the Baptist

saying

in the wilderness

prepare ye the way of the Lord

do you see the difference there?

this is what happens when we use ancient texts

we just get these chunks of manuscripts

and things and there's no punctuation

and stuff like that

especially when it's an ancient text

quoting an even more ancient text

it's kind of impossible to know exactly

what the syntax and structure is trying to do

I like to believe that this text is saying

in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord

and John the Baptist was just by the riverside

when he said it

although he was a wilderness type

so maybe it's some of both

so I want to ask you

where does the way of the Lord come from?

where does the way of the Lord start for you?

does it start tomorrow?

does it start in a month or a year

when you finally have got all your stuff figured out?

does the way of the Lord start for you

only when you can get back to your hometown

literally or figuratively?

I would argue that the way of the Lord for each one of us

is right here and right now

the temptation is always

to try to get out of this moment

to try to go back

to try to get ahead

and every time we do that

we are distracting ourselves

from the fact that this is the actual

actually the only moment where we exist

and the way of the Lord begins now

wherever you are

are you open to

finding out

what's happening to you?

what's happening between you and God

right now?

rather than

waiting to start

until you have

some quote unquote readiness

at an

undetermined date in the future

you know

we're not an altar call type of church

it's not just really

it's not how we roll

but this would be one of those altar call moments

if we were

I'm not going to ask you to come forward

and

all of that stuff

I'm going to ask you to be pretty honest with yourself

and brave though

this might be a moment for you

this might be a big moment for you

where you let go

of that forward, back, forward, back, forward, back

and simply exist in this place

and in this time

and respond to God's presence with you right now

and the problem with that

is that

you have no idea what comes next

when you do something like that

I'll leave you with the words

of the Reverend Dr. Leroy Barber

who was one of our other guides on this trip

the unexpected results

in pilgrimage

are the magic of the experience

and this is him charging us

and us

and me charging you

be open to whatever creator wants to do

and you won't be disappointed

for more information

visit us at artisanchurch.com