To be a pilgrim

I wrote this yesterday but had no time to load it up.......
When I was an academic I spent a bit of time helping to set up a couple of new universities in Eastern Europe during the “Velvet Revolution”. One of the people I encountered in the University based in Bratislava wrote an essay that started with this little story.…

I was walking by the riverside yesterday evening when I met my old friend Jan. I asked him what he was doing there and he looked at me, then with some confusion in his voice he said, “Can’t you see?” as he waved the fishing rod he was holding out over the water.

I asked again, “But, what are you doing?”

“I’m fishing, of course!” He answered in frustration.

“But have you caught any fish?”

“No..” he replied.

“Well then, how do you know you are fishing?”

The person who wrote this story was planning to be a publisher of Catholic materials – he is probably a publishing magnate by now – but he had lived under a hostile regime that would have arrested and imprisoned him if he had published Catholic books and pamphlets. Indeed, he had spent years secretly smuggling in materials from the Vatican and distributing them throughout Czechoslovakia.

The story was expressing his frustration and confusion as he tried to start up his new business. Nothing had happened yet and, despite all of his planning, he didn’t know whether he would ever publish a single thing. He was calling himself a Catholic publisher but….

The reason why I am writing about this now is that I was privileged to be allowed to give a sermon in a church on Sunday and one of the things I said was that Alison and I are pilgrims. I stood there at the pulpit, looking out over the congregation and used the fact that we were pilgrims to explain both why I am involved in homelessness charities and where some of my empathy with homeless and badly housed people lies.

It was not until later, when I was talking to some of the parishioners over coffee, that I began to wonder at the validity of my claim. After all, we regularly take part in pilgrimages and we are planning to go on a pilgrimage which will last longer than most, but we are not on pilgrimage as I write this, are we? I mean, I am either dashing around helping my son settle into his new flat (Hurray! Wonderful news – my son has a place of his own to live in – he deserves a place so much!!) or helping my other daughters/grand children/etc or (whenever at all possible) sitting here writing. Alison is at a board meeting today and is working ‘till close to 9pm tonight. Neither of us has had the chance to even check out last minute details of the route yet, never mind physically take part in a pilgrimage.

So, how come I can say I am a pilgrim?

Is it because I’m scruffy and carry my belongings around in a back-pack? Is it because I can bore the grin of the most tolerant of people while talking about the walk? Perhaps it is because Alison and I spend so much time thinking and working on it – even if we feel it is not nearly enough time?

The simple fact is that I think we did start our journey some time before now and we have been gradually attuning ourselves to being what can be called “pilgrims”.

On Student Cross you can turn up the night before the start of the pilgrimage to join the group, or Leg and, after a short time you become part of a group, then you walk together and become one of a group of pilgrims. Certain people (leaders/secretaries) do the organising and make sure that the pilgrimage works during the week. Having been in such roles myself, I can affirm that you start your own pilgrimage a long time before the rest of the Leg on such occasions.

Gradually, as we draw closer to the actual walk, it will become harder to distinguish between the pilgrimage and other things. Or, rather, the context will shift from one of looking from where we are to the pilgrimage to one of looking from the pilgrimage to other things! That time draws closer each day.

The story at the beginning asks how Jan knows he is fishing if he has not caught a fish. It is a very particular way of asking a question and it reveals that human beings do not need to have concrete evidence to validate many different types of truth. We know we are standing up or sitting down even when our eyes are closed. We know that the food we smell exists and whether it is likely to taste good or not even if we have not seen or tasted it. We know that friends/family are alive and well even when we cannot see them, etc.

So I know that we are pilgrims, even if we are not currently on pilgrimage. It is, amongst so many things, a state of mind, a process, an experience and a journey – and our journey is about to physically start very soon!