Pilgrimage, Place and Hospitality
William TempleLecture, Blackburn Cathedral, September 9 2104
In his book Pilgrimage: a spiritual and cultural journey (LionHudson) Ian Bradley reveals that while church-going in Europe has sharply declined, the number who go on pilgrimage has hugely increased. This confronts us with issues we need to address. On the one hand, the resurgence of tourist and nature walking routes can overshadow the purity of true pilgrimage, as did the commercialization of medieval pilgrimage. On the other hand, if the church can re-connect the vast modern travel patterns to practices that help people journey and grow with God, by rediscovering the origins and purposes of pilgrimage, we touch something deep in every human being, and we put ourselves on the map, a large new map. The huge success of the film on the Camino to Santiago, The Way, is one among many signs of this.
The Christian church was birthed in a pilgrimage. Pilgrims from many races flocked to Jerusalem for the Pentecost festival (Acts 2). They had an unforgettable experience, received the Gospel, and were baptised, thus ensuring that from its start Christianity was an international movement of people who travel with God.
Pilgrimage is at the centre of the Old Testament. Its main focus is the Journey of Moses’ people for forty years through desert towards a land promised by God (Exodus). The three great Jewish Festivals of Passover, Pentecost and Harvest remember and learn from this pilgrim experience. In the Old Testament thousands would travel great distances to be at one of these festivals, Jesus among them. They also spent a week each year living outside their houses in a hut made of branches from trees. This was so that they would continue to travel with God in their hearts. Songs for pilgrims are in our memory. Psalms 120-134 are known as the Songs of Ascent, because pilgrims who had walked many miles through the valleys sang these songs as they climbed the final steps up to theJerusalem temple.
Martin Luther condemned the abuses of medieval pilgrimage and pointed out that Jesus (unlike the Prophet Mohammed) never commanded people to make pilgrimage. Yet an evangelical pastor in southern England, upon reading in psalm 84 verse 5 ‘Blest are those who go on pilgrimage’, left his home and walked to Lindisfarne, asking for overnight hospitality at vicarage doors en route!
After the Roman Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena claimed to have found fragments of Jesus’ Cross, and built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site, pilgrims began to flock there. From 381- 384 Egeria, a noble woman from Galicia, made a pilgrimage to the biblical Holy Places and circulated an account of it. In 420 Jerome said that Jerusalem overflowed with pilgrims and, presumably encouraging those far away to make pilgrimages nearer home, added that ‘the courts of heaven are as open in Britain as in Jerusalem’. In 602 Aedh, son of the Irish King of Oriel, was killed while on a pilgrimage to Clonmacnoise, and a sculpture of him now adorns the entrance to the Clonmacnoise centre. In 680 Bishop Arculf of Gaul was blown off course on his return from pilgrimage, and spent time at Iona, where Abbot Adomnan wrote copious notes from his reports. Adomnan clearly had other sources also that went into his book about pilgrimage, De Locis Sancti.
To travel is a primeval urge. Pagans went on pilgrimage, in some sense at least, when they journeyed to places such as New Grange, in Ireland. Were they following energy lines? Were they seeking focal places that connected their humdrum lives with the patterns of constellations or the gathering place of ancestors? Pagans still mark significant experiences, seasons and places with rituals that use earth, water, sounds and physical movement.
What is the purpose of pilgrimage?
Our Community of Aidan and Hilda Way of Life states: The purpose of pilgrimage is to tread in the shoes of Christ or his saints in order to make contact with the many rich experiences which are to do with being a pilgrim. Such pilgrimages draw us into deeper devotion to our Lord Jesus and will inspire us to mission…
There is a life changing element in pilgrimage, for it challenges the desire to control which has dominated humans since the ill attempt to build a tower that reached to heaven, the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). This desire to control is deep in all of us. In true pilgrimage we stop trying to control everyone.
What are the benefits of pilgrimage?
We move away from our familiar world on to that of others, where our language and customs may no longer be dominant. We discover that ours are not the only ways. We get in touch with our vulnerability and our need of others’ help. Instead of fitting the world and our religion into our little world and our mind-set, we have a chance to fit ourselves into a larger world, where the earth is our home, people are our friends, and God is our inner compass. We discover fresh horizons and sources of security which are deeper than those we have left behind.
What do you do on a pilgrimage?
You walk. You pray in the rhythm of the sun rising and setting. You share. You reflect. You attune yourself to God speaking through creation. Some people add a stone to a cairn or throw stones to symbolize they are off-loading something, or attacking the devil. Others bathe themselves in water from a stream or sea, inwardly immersing themselves in God. You kneel at a holy place and you remember the cloud of witnesses in that place. As you walk, you might create an Alphabet of Devotion (A is for Adoration, B is for Baptism etc) and you think about what these mean. You can learn Scriptures, unpack the Lord’s Prayer, sing songs,offer praise at a waymark or gate. When they arrive at a pilgrimage place Muslims pray:
Here am I at your service, O Lord
to you belong the empires of the world.
It is good to make an act of dedication to God when you arrive.
Good and bad pilgrimages
Unfortunately, both in mediaeval times and in today’s tourist industry, people have prostituted pilgrimage for gain. A package tour to a pilgrim centre can sometimes be right, but beware that it does not kill the spirit of true pilgrimage.
In order to illustrate the difference between following the ‘pilgrim package’ and ‘the pilgrimage of the heart’ I share a personal experience in Jerusalem. The official tours tend to maximise trade for the rich and powerful, and marginalise the poor and oppressed, often disguised in pious language. So I asked myself ‘Where would Jesus go?’ I felt God say that Jesus would be among the poor, seekers, or friends. So I took a Palestinian bus to Bethany, and meditated at the site of Mary and Martha’s house on how we may nurture Jesus today. I prayed in Lazarus’ tomb and prayed for resurrection in tomb-like places in the world. Then I walked the hot and dusty road through Bethpage up to the Mount of Olives, to meet a Palestinian Christian and to discuss how we can support our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Columbanus, the Irish monk who re-evangelised parts of Europe in the 6th century, advised Christians to think of themselves as guests of the earth, and as perpetual pilgrims from their birth to their death. Jesus taught ‘I am the Way’. Irish Christians say ‘Let your feet follow your heart until you find your place of resurrection.’
Scholars claim that Europe was converted more by the Irish pilgrims for the love of God than by all the official church missions. These Irish pilgrims did not go to a famous place and return to their familiar home. Sometimes they set out without knowing where God would lead them, and they lived like this for the rest of their lives. In this sense, pilgrimage is a metaphor, a picture, of how we live our entire lives.
Some of them got into boats and allowed the wind to blow them where itwished. They made no separation between God’s wind, the Holy Spirit, and God’s wind in nature. We use this picture of setting sail in the ocean of God’s love, and of abandoning ourselves to God in the waves of life, when we take commitments, or vows, as some of you have done or will do. A leader of the Community says to the person who has made these commitments: ‘God is calling you to leave behind everything that stops you setting sail in the ocean of God's love. You have heard the call of the Wild Goose, the untamable Spirit of God: be ready for the Spirit to lead you into wild, windy or well-worn places in the knowledge that God will make them places of wonder and welcome.’
St. Cuthbert’s Way, the sixty three miles route from Melrose to Lindisfarne draws ever more pilgrim. One church welcomes pilgrims in and invites them to give the sermon! St. Oswald’s Way has now been opened. In Lichfield Diocese St.Chad’s Way is taking off. Some Dioceses, such as Stavanger, in Norway, and Oxford have created pilgrim trails starting at their cathedral, and passing through a list of churches that are open for prayer and perhaps in some cases for refreshment.
Place
‘To exist is to have a place, a space that is recognised by others’, said Paul Tournier. God is everywhere but this does not mean that there are no special places, for clearly there is great variety in God’s creation. We commonly talk about the spirit of a place: a pleasure park here, a ghost town there.
The Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemmann writes extensively of the importance of land in the life of Moses’ people once they settled in one region. In The Land - Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith he suggests that land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith. ³Biblical faith is a pursuit of historical belonging that includes a sense of destiny derived from such belonging." He suggests that the urban promise of freedom and self-actualisation has failed, that it has not fed the human hunger for a sense of place, which is a primary category of faith.
The Church of England is thought to be based upon the parish system. The population, however, no longer gets its defining inputs from such a limited structure. That is why people talk of the global village and of the liquid church. In fact for hundreds of years pastoral care was overseen from monastic centres, and it may be that model is emerging again. Yet within the hugely increased variety of resources available to modern people, sacred space remains a significant item.
I was commissioned by six branches of the church in Norfolk to establish ‘one family of Christians in one neighbourhood’. The new neighbourhood was Bowthorpe, on the outskirts of Norwich, which planners described as three linked urban villages which blended private, council and housing association homes, including homes for families, students, the disabled, the elderly each village revolving around a village hall and green, a shop and a school and even a work unit. There was at first only one road entrance for cars and at its heart are the large shops, health centre, police station and church.A visiting Swiss community health architect felt Bowthorpe was pre-packaged. Europe, he said, had been evangelized by missionaries who found the psychic space at the heart of a community and planted Christ’s presence there. He thought the Bowthorpe project would fail unless it created a space where people could get in touch with their roots, their inner selves and their creativity, where they could experience spontaneity and even wildness. In short, it needed a spiritual home that connected the people with God’s natural rhythms. That led us to create such a sacred space.
We also did a community audit.The Fresh Expressions of Church web site gives details of community profiling including one from Derby Diocese. These might measure population, housing categories, crime, diseases, jobs, cars, births, deaths, facilities, but an audit of the spiritual state of the neighbourhood, though it must inevitably be more intuitive, nevertheless is important. We tried to gage something of the spiritual awareness, collective unconscious, values and relationship, historical identity and institutions. An area which has only certain factors may be a mere collection of people with a consumer mentality. If it has institutions ("the lengthened shadow of one man", Emerson) it has the beginning of a true community. Historical identity , that is awareness of its story, is necessary to neighbourhood. Roots matter. The soul of a neighbourhood may depend on even one person carrying its story and its meaning inside him or herself so it can be fully expressed when the right time comes. My friend Scott Brennan in the Lothians recently did a survey of Newton Grange. He discovered that most people had no connection with a church, but the majority revealed they were spiritual, or superstitious and matriarchal. He asked himself what would the Kingdom of God look like in such a milieu. He organised some Mind, Body Spirit fairs and people queued to have interviews in a café run by church people.
The spirit of a place is a constantly evolving cluster of qualities. Taken as a whole the dominant spirit may be that of pleasure, apathy, fear, friendship, greed or love of God.
Place is space that has historical meanings, where some things have happened that are now remembered and that provide continuity and across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken that have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny. Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued. So biblical faith is not to do with a history of a people in random space; it is to do with a particular history of a particular people in a particular place.
As far as I know the first person to use the term ‘thin place’ was Dr George MacLeod, who founded the Iona Community in 1938, and described the island of Iona as “a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual".
What the Genesis story depicts as ‘the fall’ of humans from continual, close communion with God meant that barriers went up – they had to cover themselves: the gap between God and humans was no longer thin. The Old Testament charts special moments of grace in God’s plan to redeem the world. Sometimes these occur in particular places. For example, Jacob meets God and sees a ladder of angels bridge the gap between heaven and earth. He names that place Bethel, meaning house, or dwelling place of God, and leaves behind a stone memorial of the spot where the gap between heaven and earth became thin (Genesis 28:10-22).
Where vast numbers of unpurified egos live and work, and the place is crammed with vacuous sounds and much ado about nothing, the thin experience is torpedoed. So, if we who seek to evangelise such a place are to retain Jesus’ qualities and rhythms and closeness to the Father, we cannot do less than to imitate Jesus. Jesus, as a habit, went into the garden when he was in Jerusalem. The Garden of Olives was surely a thin place for him. He habitually repaired to a mountain when he was in Galilee. He told the seventy volunteers who were sent out on a mission to stay in a welcoming space, a home where they were welcomed. So we who labour in the heat and burden of the metropolis need to find sacred spaces within it, welcoming homes, gardens, sheds, prayer places. But we also need to heal the land. This is something our community is committed to. Prayer for healing follows a careful process of identifying the wounds that have been inflicted upon a place, representative confession of the sins that have caused these wounds, ensuing in transformation and blessing.
Hospitality
Hospitality is not only championed in Scripture as a custom in a home but as a key to the kingdom of God. We see this in Abraham welcoming the three visitors, which Rublev’s ikon has portrayed as a theophany of the Trinity (Genesis 19); in the prostitute Rahab sheltering Moses’ intelligence team (Hebrews 11:31) and in the statement in Hebrews 13: 2 ‘Remember to welcome strangers for in doing so many have welcomed angels without realizing it’.
Lack of hospitality has been the constant charge of God against humans. The Son of Humanity had nowhere to lay his head: Wisdom has not been welcomed in at the gates.
St. Brigid was famed for her hospitality. She sang and prayed in the kitchen as she made the butter and the bread which she always had in liberal supply for guests. This prayer has been attributed to her:
"I would prepare a feast and be host to the great High King, with all the company of heaven. The sustenance of pure love be in my house, the roots of repentance in my house. Baskets of love be mine to give, with cups of mercy for all the company. Sweet Jesus, be there with us, with all the company of heaven. May cheerfulness abound in the feast, the feast of the great High King, my host for all eternity."It was said that Brigid divided her dairy churning into twelve in honour of the apostles, and the thirteenth in honour of Christ; this was reserved for the poor and for guests.