Comparative Pilgrimage

You shall make this response before the LORD your God: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…”
Deut. 26:5

Your statutes have been like songs to me wherever I have lived as a stranger
Ps. 119:54

Throughout Scripture, travel is a key to following God. God’s first word to Abram is a command to “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:2). God calls Abram to travel, with no clear destination, depending on God to reveal it after he leaves kindred and homeland behind. Israel’s 40-year sojourn in the wilderness, and the wanderings of David, Elijah, and others, underscore sojourning as a feature of a life lived with the God who commanded Moses to build a moveable tabernacle for God’s glory to abide.

Jesus calls his disciples first to “Follow me” (Mark 1:17). Jesus himself is a sojourner: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have their nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matt 8:20). His high-priestly prayer to the Father puts it plainly: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Paul’s ministry, as we think of it, begins with a word of the Holy Spirit: “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” The result: The disciples “sent them off” to Cyprus and Antioch (Acts 13:2–3). Paul’s vocation — the work to which the Spirit called him — was itinerant: to sojourn where God would send him.

In late May and early June of this year, I helped lead pilgrims in the footsteps of St. Paul through Greece and Turkey with fellow Covenant contributor Fr. Clint Wilson and a group from his Louisville, Kentucky, parish St. Francis in the Fields, organized by Concierge Travel. Immediately after this, my wife, her parents, and our two elementary-age daughters met me in Greece to retrace this path, with extra stops for gelatos, Kinder Joys, and swims in the sea. These consecutive journeys provided a vantage point for examining what pilgrimage is, how it differs from tourism, and the enrichment it offers to the sojourn of life in Christ.

Our pilgrim way followed Paul’s second missionary journey, from Philippi in northeastern Greece, to ancient Thessalonica (modern Thessaloniki), and Berea (modern Veria) in the northern Greek area of Macedonia, then to Athens and Corinth in southern Greece, recounted in Acts 16–19. From there we boarded a boat bound for Ephesus (near modern-day Kušadasi, Turkey), and we continued to the island of Patmos, where an exiled John wrote Revelation. Along the way we added stops at the beautiful mountaintop monasteries of Meteora, along with stops at the Greek islands like Rhodes as we made our way across the Aegean.

I had taken students and friends to most of these sites during two years of living and serving with a ministry in Athens and in subsequent research trips back to Greece. I had also traveled with family to Rome right before I started my Ph.D. dissertation, and we went to the Holy Land after I finished. But to travel as a pilgrim was different in ways that I have struggled to articulate.

Greece feels very different from the Holy Land. Sites in the Holy Land are often covered over through layers of destruction and rebuilding, marked by the ecclesial and political divisions that continue in our day. These are readily apparent on the circuitous journey through the checkpoints and walls between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, in the seven different Christian groups laying claim to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, or the Dome of the Rock above the Western Wall on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Millennia of Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant pilgrims have left their varied marks throughout the Holy City.

Greece, on the other hand, feels simpler. With the exception of the Areopagus in Athens, most of the sites are tucked away outside of the bustle of cities. Many of them were left to disrepair in Byzantine and Ottoman times, to be uncovered, rediscovered, and marked anew in the modern era. In each of these places, Paul preached, and the church has remained for 2,000 years since. The impression is of quiet continuity. Like small towns secretly harboring pride for their renowned scions while carrying out their everyday business without reference to their fame, the knob of the Areopagus, the site of Lydia’s baptism in ancient Philippi, or the location of Paul’s acquittal by Gallio in Corinth lie sparsely marked amid a host of ruins around which Greeks conduct their everyday lives. Our pilgrims who had been to the Holy Land noted a deep awareness of the tradition to which their Greek destinations attest. The Church remains and continues to tell these stories in these places.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and other pilgrim stories center on the varied personalities one can meet on pilgrimage, and the world of interesting stories they carry with them. Our group, with members of St. Francis in Louisville, as well as Episcopalians, Anglicans, and Methodists from Florida, Virginia, and Wisconsin, became acquainted as we traveled. Our Greek tour guide, Rose, handled much of the archaeological and cultural information. Fr. Clint gave pastoral leadership, and as traveling scholar I connected the places we visited to Paul’s story in the Acts and autobiographical and pastoral insights from his epistles.

Together we traveled, read Scripture, mentally reconstructed from ancient ruins the streets Paul walked, the synagogues and marketplaces where he preached. We imagined riverside baptisms and imprisonments in Philippi, speeches before councils in Athens (Acts 17:22) and Corinth (18:12), and an angry mob in Ephesus (Acts 19:23–41). Equally important were times breaking bread together in liturgies held in Philippi, Berea, Corinth, and on a ship mid-sea (cf. Acts 27:35), and in our many meals shared together.

A pilgrimage presumes a trajectory different from the usual goals of travel. Some travel to experience new sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, to get outside themselves and into a new culture. Others travel to escape and relax in a peaceful place. Pilgrims journey in the hope that God will meet them on the way. The tours, the photos, the ruins, and the churches commemorating what can no longer be seen point pilgrims to the God whose messengers spoke in these places and the word they preached. In the plane, bus, and boat rides between sites, this living Word continues to speak, calling pilgrims to be caught up in God’s story of redeeming a world whose cities, temples, and rulers fall before the God who endures forever:

Lord, you have been our refuge
from one generation to another.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
Or the land and the earth were born,
from age to age you are God.
You turn us back to the dust and say,
“Go back, O child of the earth.”
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past
and like a watch in the night. (Ps 90:1–4)

To do this requires mutual surrender to each other and to the pilgrimage. We come together to grow closer to God through this journey. The delights of food, drink, and souvenirs give way to lingering in silence and contemplation or savoring the experience of communion with God and each other. Shepherds guide this flock through pastures of prayer, fellowship, and contemplation.

I sensed this most acutely when revisiting these sites with my family. Like the pilgrims, we came together to experience places where Paul walked, to furnish our imaginations with contours of his world. Yet family dynamics, the band with whom we sojourn through all of life, differ from groups who gather solely for pilgrimage. My wife and I shepherded in another way, guiding her parents and our children through different needs and concerns than Clint and I found with our pilgrims. Encounter with God was never far away, but it came coupled with other intimate encounters with family members and their bodily and emotional needs. Our mutual surrender followed a different grain than pilgrim with pastor or scholar, moving on lines more closely negotiated.

Highlights with the pilgrim group came from people sensing a living connection with the message Paul preached and the people to whom he preached. Many women identified deeply with Lydia, Paul’s first convert in Philippi, a female seller of purple goods who provided for Paul’s ministry in the town. Clint and I marveled at the quiet beauty and ecumenical hope of the chapel at the Philerimos monastery in Rhodes, where Orthodox and Catholic liturgies take place weekly, sometimes together.

My family highlights were of a different sort: Hearing my younger daughter’s questions about Jesus in comparison with the Hellenic pantheon, seeing my mother-in-law’s watercolors from a day she stayed back to nurse an injury, observing my older daughter’s wonder at wildlife in the sea. Pilgrims I had known for only a few days were quick with stories of epiphanies, whereas with my family I was the one experiencing revelations: discovering new wells of grace or wisdom in people I’ve known for most of my adult life.

A family trip is not a pilgrimage unless you make it one. We prayed, we read, we broke bread, but our sojourn together is longer. Our time traveling in Paul’s footsteps is just a segment of the road that stretches between the horizons of our entire earthly journey. These pilgrims, the wife with whom I share my greatest hopes, joys, and sorrows, and her parents who have shepherded us in so many ways, whom we may someday bury — I hope many years from now — the daughters I baptized and raise, whom I hope may someday bury us, these pilgrims are the ones through whom the living Word continues to form my soul throughout my mortal sojourn toward eternity.