Our daily pilgrimage

January 12, 2014

Epiphany (Year A)

Matthew 2:1-12

            Because of the way Epiphany fell, this week I had a choice between the usual readings for this Sunday and the readings for Epiphany.  For me, there was no question.  First of all, I want to continue the Christmas story a little longer.  But also I love the story of the magi.

            I’m fascinated by the magi’s journey.  They probably traveled for months or years to become part of the story.  Since they were following a star, they must have traveled largely by night.  And who follows a star for hundreds and hundreds of miles anyway?  People must have thought they were crazy, leaving everything they had with no real certainty of finding anything at all at the end of their journey.  Having no idea what they were headed toward.  What was it that kept them going all that time?

            This wasn’t just a journey they made.  This was a pilgrimage.

            The magi might have offered the Holy Family gifts when they arrived, but what they were really offering was themselves.  Months and months of putting one foot in front of the other through exhaustion and danger and uncertainty was what they set before Jesus when they knelt down and paid him homage.

            The magi are generally recognized as showing the scope of God’s gift in the incarnation.  This baby wasn’t just for the people that God had been in relationship with from the beginning.  Jesus came for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, but that was just the start.  The magi make clear that this gift was intended to reach out to the ends of the world, to include not just Jews but Gentiles of every stripe in God’s plan.  These magi are standing in for each one of us.  But it’s not only who they are that invites us into the story.  We are also invited into their journey, their pilgrimage.  

Now, let me say that I love the idea of pilgrimage.  I had a few friends who after seminary walked el Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James, in Spain, and it sounded like a great adventure.  But I’m not sure I’d ever do that kind of pilgrimage.  For one thing, it’s not very realistic for me to leave my family behind and take off for weeks of tramping around, and I’m not sure I’d really want to carry a heavy load on my back for that long.  But I’m also not really all that into the destinations of religious pilgrimages.  I’m not super big into saints and their relics and don’t really buy into historical places being any more holy than anywhere else. 

But then last week I discovered a completely different understanding of pilgrimage through the journey of another wise man in a great novel called The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.  A pilgrimage that has very little to do with its destination and is all about the journey itself.

Harold Fry is a retired man living a blah existence in a broken marriage when he gets a letter from a friend he hasn’t seen in twenty years.  This friend, who comforted him in a time of great suffering and took the blame for something in his past, is now dying of cancer.  Harold finds that he doesn’t have the words to write back and so he starts walking towards his old friend.  He doesn’t get ready for the journey or find the best route, he just begins putting one foot in front of the other.  And he ends up completely transformed.

Now Harold did move from Point A to Point B; he did take a physical journey.  But I kept finding myself realizing as I read the book that the discovery and transformation Harold experienced is out there for all of us in the midst of our daily lives, if we can only begin to see our lives as pilgrimages.  Each day as one foot stepping out, each new person as a part of the landscape, each choice we encounter as part of our determining the route.

And so I invite you to think about your own life’s pilgrimage as you hear a few pieces of Harold’s story.

*          Harold “met a tax inspector who … had not worn a pair of shoes for ten years.  He talked with a young woman on the trail of her real father… and an Italian man with a singing parrot.  He spent an afternoon with … a homeless man who had drunk away his house, as well as …  a mother of six who confided she had no idea life could be so solitary.  Harold walked with these strangers and listened.  He judged no one, although as the days wore on, and time and places began to melt, he couldn’t remember if the tax inspector wore no shoes or had a parrot on his shoulder.  It no longer mattered.  He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too.  The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time.  Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.” (158)

How can we look at the people who cross our life paths differently and listen to them more attentively?  How might our lives change if we acknowledge at each moment both every person’s sameness and their uniqueness?  If we keep our heart open to their loneliness and smallness?  If we knew each person on earth to be a fellow pilgrim?

*          Harold “could make out the … tiny shapes that must be people’s houses and cars.  There was so much out there, so much life, going about its daily business of getting by, of suffering and fighting, and not knowing he was sitting up there, watching.  Again he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was both connected, and passing through.  Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk.  He was both a part of things, and not.  In order to succeed he must remain true to the feeling that had inspired him in the first place.  It didn’t matter that other people would do it in a different way; if fact this was inevitable.… It didn’t matter that he had not planned his route, or brought a road map.  He had a different map, and that was the one in his mind, made up of all the people and places he had passed.  He would also stick to his yachting shoes because, despite the wear and tear, they were his….  [I]t seemed important to allow himself to be true to the instincts that made him Harold, as opposed to anyone else.” (200-01)

            What makes you you, as opposed to anyone else?  How can you be more true to those parts of yourself?

*          Along the way, people acting on some longing in their own lives try to join Harold’s walk.  He isn’t sure whether he should let them join or continue on his own.  Then Harold “reminded himself there were no rules to his walk.  He had been guilty once or twice of believing he understood, only to discover he did not.  Maybe it was the same with the [other] pilgrims?  Maybe they were the next part of the journey?  There were times, he saw, when not knowing was the biggest truth, and you had to stay with that.” (233-34)

            Are there parts of your life that are so unknown they loom over you?  Is there a way for you to make peace with that unknowing being a part of your journey?

*          When Harold comes face-to-face with his own despair over suffering that cannot be undone, his wife reassures him: “You got up, and you did something.  And if trying to find a way when you don’t even know you can get there isn’t a small miracle; then I don’t know what is.” (310-11)

            What if our pilgrimage is less about the destination than the journey?  What might we find if we get up and do something?  If we try to find a way even when we have no idea what lies ahead?

Every day is a chance to take a cue from the magi and offer ourselves to God.  Not just ourselves as we wish we were or as we hope to someday become, but each step we take, each person we meet, each decision we make.  Every piece of our lives is part of our earthly pilgrimage with our God who walks among us.  Amen.