Good morning. You do not know me, but this is not my first time here. The first time I saw Paris should have been 1971. I was supposed to come here as part of my French learning in high school. But it did not happen. My teacher was arrested for marijuana possession and the trip was canceled. The second time was 27 years later when I spoke here. I was finally making my first trip to Paris and offered to speak then; you said yes.
Now it is 26 years after that and I wonder, why am I here today? For the same reason I was here before: I was coming anyway and offered to speak. But also because all journeys are circles, in spirit if not in fact. And this is a place of the spirit.
It is said that the end of all our wanderings is to return where we started and know it for the first time. Could there be a better description of why all of us are here – to come a little closer to knowing where and who we are?
Therein lies my message for you this morning. All our journeys are circles, be it around the block, around the clock, or around the world. And the destination is understanding. Since we shall never understand it all, being small and imperfect, we must take many such journeys.
For those of this religious community, one that has embraced the journey as meaningful itself, that makes us a pilgrim faith. For what is the pilgrim but someone who travels to the edges of the world in search of the center of the soul?
That is why am I dressed like this. About a dozen years ago I became an actual pilgrim. I was reading about Hadrian’s Wall and that it is possible to walk from end to end, and knew instantly that I had to do that.
Ever had such a moment when without thinking you knew you had to do something? The liberal religious scholar James Luther Adams talks about the ‘temperature test of faith,’ by which he means that when you find yourself rising at once without hesitation to defend something, you know that something is sacred for you. That was me, only it was not to defend but to claim.
A few months later I stood at Walls End near the mouth of the River Tyne and began six days of walking – across pastures and over hills, through cow manure and in rain – until I arrived, soaked and shivering, filthy and exhausted, at the Irish Sea. And knowing I would do it again.
So, I went on to Santiago along the Camino Ingles, to Japan along the Kumano Kodo, to Peru along the Inka Trail, and self-made pilgrimages to India and China, South Africa and Israel. With each one I learned something about the world and myself, the most important of which was realizing that this was my spiritual practice.
It is also, I would argue, the essential spiritual practice of our liberal faith. Adams calls ours a ‘pilgrim church, on an adventure of the spirit.’ What better describes our devotion to truth, wherever it beckons; to justice, however denied and delayed; to love, no matter how difficult? Is that not a journey toward a sacred destination?
Yet “To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon,” says poet Mark Nepo. “To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.” And the only way to learn it is to do it.
It is May of 2017. I am in The George, a coaching inn that sits atop the site of the Tabard Inn where Chaucer’s fictional pilgrims left for Canterbury. I am nursing a pint with my very British supper as I anticipate setting out to retrace their steps, a route taken by actual pilgrims centuries ago. I will walk 15 miles tomorrow, so I have a second pint.
Almost seven years ago that was, and yet I remember that meal better than last week’s. Pilgrimage makes you pay attention to the world.
How much of what we do and see is automatic? And good thing. We cannot afford to ponder every moment deeply. Food must be prepared, laundry done, bills paid, and so on. But at some point, we all ponder whether any of it matters. We get outside ourselves, in a sense.
Pilgrimage is getting outside. That need not be along a road. A poster in a Quaker meetinghouse I visited said, “Don’t just do something; sit there.” For me, though, it means going somewhere in person. There are many ways to step outside. Worship is a time that is outside the ordinary. Art does that – theater, paintings, music. We seek them because they take us outside ourselves. Here’s a funny note, though. To stand outside yourself is the literal meaning of the word ecstasy.
We need ecstasy because it takes us outside ourselves. But if Mark Nepo is right, ecstasy is not enough. There is a real risk of becoming ecstasy junkies, spiritual nomads prowling for the next glorious moment. Pilgrimage is more than ecstasy.
I am in Israel on my 70th birthday, February 2023, in the Nahal Dolev Nature Reserve. It is raining, and so there is mud. Down in a narrow ravine with no cell coverage I must cross a small wadi and climb up the other side, which is entirely mud. There is a stout tree branch. If I can grasp that I might be able to save myself from sliding down. I grab the branch. My feet slip and slip. Hanging on to the branch I think, “Well, it will make an interesting obituary.” With mighty effort I get beyond the mud. My shoes and pants are caked. Pilgrimage means getting dirty.
Every pilgrimage has hardships. Exactly what they will be is unknown no matter how much you plan. There is no risk of bandits now, as there was centuries ago, but there was a day when I was visiting Paris for the first time, back in 1998, in Pere LaChaise cemetery on a winter afternoon when an announcement in French over the Public Address. It turned out to be a closing notice. The gate through which I entered was locked. So was the next one. What would I do if unable to leave? The grave of Collete is a marble bed. I could honestly claim to have slept with her that night.
Pilgrimage reduces you to a body. Your feet hurt. Your back hurts. You get wet and dirty. You walk through brambles and get stuck by thorns, through pastures fertilized with manure, climb rocks with no apparent hand holds, and arrive at your auberge or gite de chambres looking like a vagabond.
When you get outside, literally or figuratively, you will stumble. A book from a friend, given during a rough time in my professional life, was titled ‘Failing Forward.’ A pilgrim falls down often. Finding a way to keep going is what you do. Dealing with setbacks is what you do. No one told me that in rural France towns close down from noon to 2 pm. I went without dejeuner more than once, looking longingly into locked Boulangeries.
Mark Nepo says that to change without journeying is to be a chameleon. What I take him to mean is that a change we choose is a change of clothes, of appearance not of self. It is when we face things that require us to change – death, illness, poverty – or in my case thorns and mud, graves and closed bakeries, you adapt.
“To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim,” and for that to happen you must do two more things.
Get lost. On that first walk, along Hadrian’s Wall, before we all had GPS in our hands, it was near evening and rain was picking up. My map, in a soggy book in my soggy raincoat, was of no use. None of the landmarks looked right. But like I said, it was raining. And it was close to dark. Which way to turn? I couldn’t tell. Panic was not far away,
Being alongside a road I decided to try and flag someone down. Luckily, it was not long before a Land Rover pulled over and offered me a lift. “Where you are going,” he said cheerily. I said, “Some farm that’s a B&B. Not sure if I am on the right road.” “Name?” “Fred.” “No, the farm.” I read it from my itinerary. “Just down the road,” he said. And sure enough, less than a kilometer there it was. Could I have found it myself? Yes, but had I turned the wrong way, no.
The experience of being lost is spiritually powerful. Not for nothing does the old hymn say, “I once was lost but now am found.” It was moments like those along many a path that revealed something unexpected – a gift if you will – that would not have been found. To lose yourself is to find the world. And that points to the last thing pilgrimage demands.
Get Small. Back in 2016, breathing heavily, I made it to the top of Warmiwanusca pass in the Andes, 4200 meters up, and still well below the towering peaks around us. Machu Picchu was an anticlimax after that. The broad fields of the Pas de Calais last autumn were arced with a rainbow as I made my way and no one else to see it.
We have all had that experience. We go in search of them in nature especially. The pilgrim, though, does not take a look and a picture and get back in the car. The pilgrim lives there as much as possible, feeling in that smallness an intimacy with that which is larger. Is this what the ancients felt?
Long ago, driving home at night in rural Texas, the moon was full and bright. I turned off the headlights to see if I could drive by the moonlight. I could. But I wanted more, and so stopped by the side of the road and climbed onto the roof and looked up at the Milky Way, which was not some faint veil but a river of stars, so many that the usual constellations were hard to find. I felt dizzy there on the roof of the car, and yet a part of it.
What has this to do with you and this little band of spiritual eccentrics? I have thought about it over and over and I am not sure. But I am sure that we need to be pilgrims to be whole. We need to get outside ourselves, to have ecstasy. We also need the agony which is to get dirty. We need to get lost from time to time, to realize our precarious place in the world, and we need to feel small far more often. If ours is a pilgrim faith, these are the reasons. For as we all know the end is the beginning, and the journey is the destination.
To tell you how, would be wrong of me. Your path is not mine. But they do cross from time to time, and perhaps we can travel together for a while; llike Chaucer’s pilgrims, telling tales as we go, and resting under a sky that is a river of stars.