Pilgrim?

The provided text is a blog post expressing reservations about the Lenten theme of “pilgrimage” in devotionals from Loyola Press. The author finds the concept of life as a pilgrimage to be inconsistent with Jesus’ teachings, arguing that Christ’s focus was on living fully in the present and addressing earthly realities. The blogger suggests that this pilgrimage idea feels self-absorbed and disconnected from the immediate needs of others, contrasting it with the Christian call to engage with and redeem the current world. Ultimately, the author sees true spirituality in everyday life and action, not in a metaphorical journey toward a distant heaven.

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voice dictation.  

I have been getting a series of Lenten daily devotionals from Loyola Press this year, as I do every Lent since I signed up for the emails and although I appreciate Loyola Press’s devotionals, even if they are excerpts from their books that they sell, I have some reservations about the theme of this Lent’s reflections and that theme is the idea of ‘pilgrimage’ and I was not able to find anyone who agreed with my view that the idea of ‘pilgrimage’ is alien to Jesus’ teaching.

There was a lot of talk about physical pilgrimages that emerged over the centuries and some church fathers and other figures in Christian history criticizing the idea of physical pilgrimages as—to dumb it down to a summary—essentially tourism rather than anything spiritually significant.

But I am going to the idea of ‘pilgrimage’ as a concept.  Nothing in my understanding of Christianity from my experience in teaching and writing, not my experience teaching, but I don’t consider myself a teacher, I am a blogger at best, but in my grapplings with theology and scripture and trying to just make my way in the world, I don’t see ‘pilgrimage’ as the right metaphor.

Some—according to an online tool—said that Jesus made his pilgrimage to Jerusalem where he was crucified and he taught significant things along that pilgrimage and that he said that he was the Way.  

But I think that Jesus’ teaching is much more concerned with how to live this life, how to face the tyrant, how to face our anxiety, how to cope with being human, how to cope with the absurdity of existence, the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, which the sources say that the Lord’s Prayer was revealed on Christ’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but to me the Lord’s Prayer is about Christ revealing God as our Father.

God as a Father to us exemplified in the parable of the prodigal son, a Father who runs to meet his son totally dispensing with any decorum and putting a ring on his finger and a robe around him and killing the fatted calf.

The exuberance of the Father for his lost son coming home has become an idiom.

The idea of killing the fatted calf is an idiom because of the over-the-top display that the Father rolled out for his wayward son.

As I’ve said before, I don’t want to say quoting, but I don’t want to misquote him, but Herb McCabe wrote that there’s something on the lines of forgiveness is not about God changing his mind about us.

It’s about us realizing that we are already forgiven.

He put it much more eloquently than I did, but the point to me is yes, we grow spiritually, yes, we mature, yes, we’re born as infants and we hopefully make it to old age before we die, but I think this idea of a pilgrimage is a cop-out.

I think that it’s this idea that we’re going to journey through this life and join Christ in heaven, but I think that heaven is among us.

I think that heaven is part of our current reality that we’re in.

I don’t think that heaven is a separate place.

I’m reminded of Timothy Ware, Archbishop Kallistos Ware of the Orthodox tradition, talked about going into a church somewhere in London, I think it was, and just feeling the sense of this presence of the cloud of witnesses.

It’s been a long time since I read that, so I’m probably not getting exactly right, but I think that we are surrounded by the saints in heaven and we just can’t see them all the time.

I picked up some idea somewhere that maybe that the saints are more real than we are.

That somehow the heavenly world that’s among us that’s in a different dimension is actually more real than the world we inhabit.

For example, the way that Christ was able to go through locked doors, it was not a metaphor, but it was an expression or an example of Christ’s resurrected body being more material that it could pass through what we think of as material.

I’m getting sidetracked.

The bottom line is I think that Christ’s teachings are about how to live here and now in this world.  That is what Christ means when He says that he is the Way.  He is the Way to His father.  The Way to live in this world.  

(And I’m not arguing for any kind of reduction or demythologization here.  I believe that this idea of Christianity as a pilgrimage is foreign to a Christianity that fully embraces the supernatural, miracles etc.—maybe even more so.)

I do think that there is more to life than this  world, but even if there’s not, if we set that aside, as I’ve said before, and just focus on the here and now, I think this idea of life as a pilgrimage is a distraction.

Yes, we mature and we go through stages, but it’s all right here and now.

As I said recently online, I believe that looking for my daughter’s school bus on the app and making sure that it’s going to be on time is just as spiritual as going to retreat and absorbing myself in the present moment.

I don’t think there’s a hard distinction between sacred and secular, holy and impure, or whatever the word is.

I think it’s all about the here and now and our life and the new heaven and the new earth.

However you have you interpreted that metaphor, whether you think it’s literal or whether you think it’s a metaphor or something other—

Who knows?

I think it’s all about redeeming life, redeeming our life and knowing how to stand our ground among evil forces and knowing that Christ has conquered already and that we can appropriate Christ’s victory in dealing with the slings and arrows that we deal with in this world and not think of it as a passing through, not thinking of it as something we’re just passing through.

I mean, look at the parable, the Good Samaritan.

The Good Samaritan was passing through as well, but he stopped when he saw the victim of the robbers.

A pilgrim wouldn’t do that, or at least a metaphorical pilgrim wouldn’t do that.

The idea of a pilgrim is all self-absorbed.

It’s all about me, me, me journeying through to get to some destination versus trying to live in this world that we find ourselves in and standing our ground and helping our neighbor and ultimately helping to redeem this world.

So I don’t see where this pilgrim idea, when I study the New Testament, when I study Jesus’ life, when I contemplate Christ in prayer, the idea of pilgrimage is foreign to that.

And that’s been driven home to me over this Lent as I’ve gotten these daily reflections from Loyola Press.

And I love Loyola Press, by the way.

But this pilgrimage thing, it just sounds like tourism.

It sounds like a hobby that people who have too much time on their hands engage in when they ought to be dealing with the practical problems of their neighbor versus some kind of pilgrimage.

I’m not trying to judge.

I just happen to feel like I don’t have the time to go on some pilgrimage.

I got my hands full, taking up my crosses every day, thank you very much.

And it’s a little bit off-putting to get spiritual reflections from people who seem to have extra time and money on their hands that I don’t have and that the poor don’t have.

So I’ll put this out there for anybody that wants to comment.

Maybe I’m just a lone outsider here, but this pilgrimage concept seems foreign to Jesus’ teachings.