A Travelling People: Prayer Pilgrimage at Crook 2014

A reflection by Ray Anglesea given at Crook LEP for the 3^rd Annual Prayer Pilgrimage around the West Durham Methodist Circuit Chapels, Saturday 20^th September 2014.

During my summer sabbatical Ki and I have travelled over 20,000 miles; we have been “going away” and “heading off” somewhere by car, boat and plane. We have been fortunate over many years to have travelled around the world to see places, to see people and for work. Although the relatively new technologies of travel have revolutionized our ability to travel elsewhere and back again, we still hold to the romantic ideal of being away from daily routines and pressures, to see places we have wanted to visit, to come face to face with the exotic, to relax, to reflect, to learn, to broaden the mind, to literally “expand our horizons.”

Today’s travel, exciting and stimulating as it is, is indeed the flagship of modernity; it can be enchanting as well as illuminating. Modern travel is not just the consequence of a Thomas Cook or a Thomson marketing exercise. One of the spin offs of such marketing exercises is that it can allow plenty of choices to enhance our travel programmes to reflect our spirituality; for travel indeed can feed our souls and enlarge our vision. St. Augustine is said to have claimed, “The world is a great book of which they which never stir from home read only a page.” Through my summer blogs I have been able to write and share with the chapel and the wider synod some of my spiritual insights and experiences during this time “on the road;” the outward physical journey has frequently fed the inward spiritual one.

The Hebrew and Christian scriptures are full of people led by God to travel or those who meet God on the road. The gospels that tell of a prophet not honoured in their own land almost require a divine instruction to travel. God, it seems, has regularly told people where to go. Eve and Adam were the first biblical travellers, Cain was condemned to be a “wanderer on the earth,” then Noah and his family were taken across the flood waters in their Ark. Jacob was nomadic, Joseph was taken to Egypt and later Moses escaped from Egypt to go back and deliver God’s people to a “land flowing with milk and honey.” Joshua completed this mission. In the New Testament, Mary and Joseph needed to travel to Bethlehem for the census and then fled to Egypt with their new baby. Jesus travelled widely, finally to Jerusalem on a donkey. Paul met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. The apostles travelled extensively. Prophets have rarely sat still in one place and often part of their call has been to travel. Today pilgrimages have formalised holy travel and we find millions travelling each year to enhance their faith through visiting particular sites. Durham Cathedral, where I work, is a major tourist attraction in the region attracting some 600,000 visitors a year.

At the heart of the Christian tradition is the conviction that the children of God are a travelling people, who live in this world with one foot in the kingdom of God. In the birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, the kingdom of God has already been inaugurated. This kingdom is not something that lies entirely in some kind of heavenly future after death; nor is it an experience that can be fully understood and achieved in the here and now. The unfolding of the kingdom of God in our lives is, I understand, both a life long journey, a path we travel. Part of discovering this kingdom and our part in it may be realised on a pilgrimage, in conversation with fellow pilgrims, in prayer or perhaps at a sacred place or for many the sheer joy of being in the Dale and in the countryside.  Places where we have met God often become a place of memory to treasure, a place of resurrection perhaps in a contemporary context.

Generations of Christians have known that pilgrimage is not simply a vaguely religious holiday with a bit of worship thrown in. Rather it is the opportunity to reflect on what is really important in our lives and to examine our priorities, of what it means to be truly human and to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. For after all travelling and making connections is to live with the risks, uncertainties and the loose ends of life. There is always the search, the exploration, the movement, the questions, the challenges and the surprises. These examples are of course the very stuff of life as they are of resurrection. For on pilgrimage as in resurrection, we travel in the knowledge that the unlikely, the unlooked for and the extraordinary will happen.

I wish you a joyous pilgrimage; happy travelling.

Ray Anglesea