By Martin L. Smith
One of the most popular expressions of outreach in Episcopal parishes takes the form of group travel to offer practical service to distant communities. The needs of communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina have called forth hundreds of such expeditions, and groups from our diocese alone are traveling all over the world.
Many of these expeditions link Christian communities, but the phenomenon is far wider than the churches. Thousands of people take part in projects such as those organized by Habitat for Humanity without any explicitly religious motivation. Nevertheless, this burgeoning of altruistic travel seems like a mutation of the ancient phenomenon of pilgrimage. Human beings from time immemorial have gone to great lengths to reach remote destinations in the quest of meaning. Our groups that set out to work for struggling communities, usually of the poor, are finding more meaning in their expeditions than merely the satisfaction that comes with being helpful.
Some of this surplus of meaning lies in the fact that in our socially stratified society middle class folk may never get the opportunity to make contact with the poor except through a mission trip. Maybe participants are being spurred not only by generosity but also a quest to find out what meaning people enjoy while living with a range of physical hardships and discomforts that our North American society is obsessed with eliminating. Many people return from their pilgrimages to Central American villages with compelling questions such as: How come that people who live with such physical discomforts seem far happier and contented, more trusting and hospitable than we are, who are so cocooned and protected?
The question calls to mind Henry Miller’s book about American culture, The Air Conditioned Nightmare. The title refers to our passion for controlling the environment through technology in order to insulate us from direct experience of the world around us. We have come to demand the right to determine the exact temperature of our homes and offices year round by the flick of a switch. Sixty years after Miller’s diatribe, our cult of technology and our worship of physical comfort is steadily intensifying as computers enable us to weave electronically controlled cocoons around us that we can fine-tune with the touch of a remote.
The nightmare consists in the disappointment that dogs so much apparent ‘progress.’ Does this ever increasing physical comfort generate any more joy or even alleviate anxiety? Does this compulsive concern with comfort and control achieve result in any healing or enhancing of our inner worlds? Our hearts remain recalcitrantly unstable and turbulent. Doesn’t all this self-coddling that almost abolishes physical exertion and muffles the impact of the natural seasons actually exaggerate our personal unease, making it seem gratuitous and intolerable? No one can invent a remote to enable us to bring our feelings into comfortable equilibrium. What we can control seems to throw into relief what stays beyond our control, the pervasive stress and anxiety that drugs can only medicate and hectically stimulating electronic entertainments merely repress.
Our people often come back from enjoying the simple hospitality of poor communities feeling that they gained more from their pilgrimage than they gave. The poor have something we are losing or have lost and their mission to us may be more important in the long run than the help we can give them. Where lies the secret of the hospitable and joyful life? What forms of simplicity, vulnerability and direct exposure to the natural world belong to our very humanity, that we lose at our peril?
We can’t answer these questions in a fog of romanticism. There is nothing blessed about dysentery, foul water, bad roofs, lack of schooling. There are fundamental human needs we must struggle to make sure are met everywhere. But there is nothing blessed either about our hyper-consumerist world that has enthroned comfort as its highest value and is obsessed with our technological ability to neutralize the reality of the natural world to which in reality we belong as creatures.
I wonder whether our local churches are up to the task of exploring these questions in depth. In the beatitudes, In the Beatitudes, Jesus prophetically congratulated the poor who keep faith with God, proclaiming that God intends the meek to inherit the earth. What they have and who they are is what God desires to establish across the globe. It is interesting that so many liberal Christians who pin their faith on Jesus’ teaching rather than classic Christian doctrine baulk when asked, “Do you long for the day when the meek inherit the earth?” (Congratulations to the honest Episcopalian whom I heard replying, “No, they wouldn’t know what to do with it!”) What have the poor got that we are losing, and that God our Creator supremely values and wants to have permanently established worldwide?
Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You and in numerous workshops, lectures and retreats, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.