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They say that a pilgrimage is all about the journey - 'the way' - rather than the destination. Following the cancelation of our flight home from Croatia last Sunday morning and at about 90 minutes into a three-way call with United Airlines and the '24 hour help desk' of our travel agent, that sentiment was ringing in my ears. It's the journey that counts. Although we got home two days later than planned, had that journey home not encountered that bump on the road, we would never have had the opportunity to spend an evening as a pilgrim band in Bavaria, Germany. I wouldn't have met the man who introduced me to the lady who runs the bakery in Erding outside Munich, who asked her colleague to call a taxi to get the remainder of our group to the airport, whom Uber had left behind. Yes, it takes a lot of human endeavor to get All Saints’ moving, wherever we may be! None of those chance encounters would have taken place. Neither would our group have had the memory of running in the rain to get back to our place there, or hustling through Newark airport to the gate before it closed for our final flight home.
Take a left instead of a right on the journey, and you can end up meeting your future spouse, or the person who a few weeks from now will offer you a job. Life really can feel that random. If I had not decided to apply for a scholarship for a year of graduate studies at Harvard, my entire life from my late 20's onward would have been different. Where might you be right now if you had chosen the other path?
I have never been a big believer in the idea that God has a plan for our lives. Neither have I tended to be someone who thinks that God is a cosmic puppet master, somehow pulling the strings of reality so what is meant to be is indeed what happens. I have never believed that everything happens for a reason, instead I believe things just happen. Good things and bad things: things we welcome as pleasant surprises and fulfilled hopes, things that fill our hearts with fear and dread, and a whole host of other things in between.
The journey is not about getting where God wants us to go, but about being who God wants us to be while we travel. The Christian life may look like it amounts to a series of rules for the road - 'love your neighbor', 'forgive your enemies', 'tend to the sick and the weary' - but it is actually the discovery of what First Timothy calls 'the life that really is life'. It is the becoming of who God already knows us to be. We just need the journey - whatever it is like and wherever it takes us - to make that discovery for ourselves.
Our digitally inclined 21st century version of hubris presents the mistaken notion that we are meant to make that journey by our own steam. The life we are invited to live in so many and varied ways in our contemporary world is the self-authored life. Be the author of your own destiny. It's a mirage, of course, tied to social and economic status more than any capacity we may or may not have for self-actualization. It is also a fraudulent claim. We cannot write our own script any more than we can for the world we live in. We can, however, learn how to speak of ourselves and of others through the language of the God of love. We can learn to see the world - with all of its chances and changes - through the lenses of mercy and grace. And we can start to see in our own reflection something of the image of God, the resemblance of a life God already loves and welcomes in from the moment our life begins.
So, yes, it is the getting there that counts. I pray that you will know the Holy One as your faithful companion and shining light along the way your life will lead you. May the road rise to meet you, and may you arise to meet the road.
Peace,
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