By Martin L. Smith
I’ve just recycled my Christmas cards and a last glance brought smiles of gratitude for old friendships. One card always makes me laugh, even though it’s not intentionally humorous. It’s just that a card from the rector whose curate I was almost 40 years ago reminds me of the pleasure we had working together, how hardly a day went by without laughter. Tension is often the order of the day between rectors and young assistants, but we enjoyed our friendship, respected each other’s gifts, teased each other about our shortcomings and found endless merriment in our parish life. Humor was such a bond we even liked to preach together sometimes; I at the lectern and Robin in the pulpit, presenting the sermon as a dialogue. Occasionally we would improvise two-man plays which we would present in place of a sermon.
One thing that deepened our pleasure in preaching arose from a distinctive feature of the parish tradition. For a generation the parish had organized a pilgrimage to the Holy Land every three years. No one had much money, but the pilgrimage was cherished as a once-in-a-lifetime experience worth saving for. These pilgrimages had woven an extraordinary degree of intimacy with the stories of scripture in the congregation. At any service, more than half the worshippers had personal memories of the places mentioned and every reading triggered a ripple of response. All sorts of expressions would play across their faces, elbows would nudge to signal unspoken reminiscence, little sighs or murmurs could be heard.
“There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee…”; Even before we started our sermon, you could tell people were there, remembering how really nasty the local wine is, since we had tasted it (think rusty nails!) Or, typically English, we couldn’t help looking down and noticing that the Orthodox priest showing us what purported to be one of the actual jars was wearing pajamas under his cassock. Mention the Sea of Galilee, and people were back on a beach there on the northern shore, or on a little hill watching the stars fade and the sun rise as the fishing boats set out from Capernaum. Memories wove a shared language: “Do you remember when we went to pray in the chapel on the site of Calvary, and the lady came in with her shopping basket full of cabbages and set it down by the altar so she could crawl on her hands and knees to the place where you could put your hand down a hole in the marble and touch the rock? How we gave that look to each other that said without words, “Well, if she can do it, so can we!” So that when we preached on Good Friday we knew that eyes were shining in the congregation from the felt memory of touching that bedrock of this strange faith of ours.
I’ve never been convinced by people who claim to be indifferent about visiting the places of where Jesus lived and walked. Surely, even if it were to mean scrimping and saving for a few years—or am I being hopelessly old-fashioned?—this is an experience worth having once in a lifetime, something that will change the way we experience the scriptures and worship and prayer. But of course fear – of what that vivid personal contact might entail – might be the real reason concealed behind the arguments used in dismissing the idea as ‘not for me.’
In a diocese like ours where we are aware of the struggles of the Palestinian people and we know what terrible contradictions roil under the old pious title ‘the Holy Land,’ there are extra motives for making the pilgrimage, with opportunities for expressing solidarity with the wronged and for gaining first hand knowledge as a basis for political action and witness. But the core reason that has always moved people of faith to go on pilgrimage remains the same as it has been for millennia. The Word was made flesh, and the life of faith is an embodied experience. The spiritual journey is one we sometimes make with actual footsteps, the climbing that makes us out of breath, the immersion that gets us soaking wet.
I have a hunch that as more people restrict themselves to virtual experiences online, regaling themselves with the infinite array of images a key-stroke can summon to their screens, a counter-cultural revolt will not be long in coming. Communal flesh and blood encounters, incarnational practices, all that is face to face and physical and tangible will begin to be revalued. The Word was made flesh, and Christianity won’t stand for that sacred flesh being volatilized into the virtual and evanescent. Real pilgrimages will be a part of that counter-cultural reclaiming of the embodied, sacramental flesh and blood experience in real time.
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C.