Lent began four days ago on Ash Wednesday. We gathered together to remember our sin and our mortality and received ashes. I said the words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. And people thanked me for saying so, which always feels a little funny to me.
But I do the same. When I receive the ashes smeared on my forehead in the shape of a cross, and hear these words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” I say, “thank you.” Maybe it’s because we already know it deep within us, and it feels right to hear the truth spoken out loud every once in a while. We are small in the large scheme of things. A small speck of dust in a vast wilderness. We need to find a power greater than our own to navigate this journey.
The Israelites had such a power. As they journeyed out of the land of their enslavement toward the land of promise, they followed the pillar of cloud and fire into the wilderness. They didn’t know where on earth they were headed. Moses was their courage, and so they followed him – but Moses was relying on a greater strength than what he had in himself. All of them together walked in the direction God led them. They spent the next forty years in the wilderness, because that is how long it took to get them ready to take the next step. To be transformed – from slaves to God’s chosen ones, in possession of a promised land. It was forty years of training and reshaping.
Wilderness is good for that sort of thing. I have seen pictures of the wilderness where Israel abided, and it looks very intimidating, fierce. But a wilderness doesn’t even have to be external; it can be something that happens inside of us. Wilderness can happen without even going anywhere.
On Ash Wednesday, I shared a word I just learned – peregrinatio. I think of it as a holy wandering. We do not set the itinerary, we do not know the destination of a peregrinatio; it is a holy wander undertaken for the love of God.
It’s particularly challenging for people like us, because we prefer to have a plan. We go to the supermarket with a grocery list, we come to church every Sunday with an order of worship, we run our committee meetings with an agenda – we like to have a plan. And goals.
But a peregrinatio doesn’t go according to a plan; you don’t set the goals. On Wednesday I shared a story about three 9th century Irishmen who one day got into some small boats called coracles – they were actually round wicker baskets – and without any oars they drifted across the sea. After seven days, they came ashore in Cornwall, the southernmost tip of England. They were taken to King Alfred, who had some questions for these men. He wanted to know where they were from and where they were going. They answered, “We stole away because we wanted, for the love of God, to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where!’
A peregrinatio is undertaken for the love of God. The destination is unimportant. The journey is all.
And while it may very well be a real outward journey, across the sea in a wicker basket or a trek across a desert land, it does not need to be so because the peregrinatio is an inward journey. Our Lenten journeys are often of this sort.
One of my companions on my Lenten journey this year is Esther de Waal, a writer, a scholar of Celtic Christianity. She introduced me to the idea of the peregrinatio. She would say that it is not a type of pilgrimage that is undertaken because someone tells you to do it. Or because all your friends are doing it. The peregrinatio comes from an inner prompting, a passionate conviction that you simply must follow.
There is an unease with how things are that must be accommodated. There is a hunger that must be fed. There is a desire that the heart must follow.
And this unease within is stirred by the brokenness we see all around us and know in ourselves. This hunger within is suffered when we recognize the injustices that are committed even in our own community. The desire that swells in our hearts is for the crooked paths to be made straight, the brokenness to be healed, the hate to be overcome by love.
We may know what we want, what we need; but we don’t really know how to get there. Because we are so small. We are dust.
And there is no map for the peregrinatio. There’s not a tour bus we can hop on for the ride. So we begin our inward journey to somewhere…our holy wander. It’s sort of a trust walk.
And you might say that doesn’t sound too hard, since you don’t need to have a plan, you can just wing it. But it is hard, for you don’t just wing it – attentiveness to the movement of the Spirit is required. You might say it sounds safe, because you don’t have to travel to another land, an unknown, unfamiliar, uncomfortable place. But it is not safe, because the inward journey may take you to places you have never dared to look at before. It is a journey that can make you estranged from your normal, familiar, ordinary life – even while you are still in it.
Still, it is not an aimless amble of the spirit. Nor is it anything like running away from something. The peregrinatio is grounded in the reality of being at home in one’s own true self.
And we really need that grounding, because when you allow your spirit to wander for the love of God, as the Irishmen put it, there are dangers, for sure.
A few centuries before those three men set off in their coracles, Saint Patrick wandered through Ireland for the love of God, and he is well remembered for his journeys and the extraordinary impact of them. As beloved as he is now, Patrick was seen as a serious threat by much of Ireland during his life – a threat to kings and religious authorities. He is called the Apostle to Ireland, and the stories about his life remind me of the stories about the Apostle Paul in the book of Acts. Both tell of harrowing escapes and near misses and the unending courage of these men to go on.
Patrick composed a prayer that became known as the breastplate of Saint Patrick. If you are like me, you might have thought it was a literal breastplate – a piece of armor he wore on his travels. It wasn’t. It was a metaphorical shield; a prayer for protection. Saint Patrick “wore” this shield wherever he went. This beautiful prayer proclaimed God’s strength and power, enough to protect him from all the evil forces in the world. There was then, and is now, a fair quantity of evil force in the world. And Patrick was, like us, only a speck of dust in a vast wilderness.
The journey of faith, the holy wander, cannot be undertaken alone, without help. We are not enough, in ourselves, to do this. The peregrinatio is not untethered, for as Patrick’s breastplate testifies, wherever we go we may have Christ and all the power of heaven with us.
We know that Jesus had this power with him on his wilderness journey – this is the power that enabled him to defy the devil and all his temptations to place his trust in something other than the powerful love of God.
The journey we are on in this season is an inward journey. We don’t follow a road map, we don’t navigate. But we allow ourselves to drift as those faithful Irishmen did in their coracles – through the perils of the sea. We go on this holy wander tethered to the holy Word, tethered to Christ, remembering these words from Saint Patrick’s breastplate:
Christ beside me, Christ before me;Christ behind me, Christ within me;Christ beneath me, Christ above me:Christ to the right of me, Christ to the left of me;Christ in my lying, my sitting, my rising;Christ in heart of all who know me,Christ on tongue of all who meet me,Christ in eye of all who see me,Christ in ear of all who hear me.For my shield this day I call:A mighty power –the Holy Trinity!Affirming threeness,Confessing onenessIn the making of all – through love.
On we wander, for the love of God, in the power of the Spirit, to the heart of Christ.
No comments:
Post a Comment