"The Way is Made by Walking" by Arthur Paul Boers

Sometime about 2005, Arthur Paul Boers went on a hike. Not just any hike, but the 500-mile-long Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. Already an experienced hiker, he made the journey in 31 days. And he wrote about his experience. 

But he didn’t simply write a travel diary of what he saw and where he stayed. Instead, The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago is about the experience of pilgrimage itself, what it means and signifies, and what the idea of pilgrimage suggests for the Christian life. It isn’t a primer on pilgrimage, or even a step-by-step guide to the Camino de Santiago. This is the Christian life as a pilgrimage.

 

Boers explains why he was drawn to pilgrimage, its Christian roots, and its lessons for spirituality. Like the pack he carried on his back, a pilgrimage is always about the need to simplify, carrying with us only what’s vital and necessary. (He became such a stickler on this point that he tore out sections of the book he read along the way as soon as he finished reading them. The book was Don Quixote.) 

 

He goes on to consider the challenges of faithful pilgrimage, the opportunities for hospitality, what happens even to secular seekers along the way, and how to put pilgrimage into daily practice. And he sees walking as a spiritual practice.

 

Arthur Paul Boers

Just so you know, Boers also wrote about the blisters on his feet, the good and bad food, and some nice places to sleep along with those he’d rather forget about. And four appendices discuss recovering and reclaiming Christian pilgrimage, planning a pilgrimage, some well-known pilgrimage destinations, and resources specific to the Camino itself. 

 

The book, first published in 2007, so impressed the late Eugene Peterson that he wrote the foreword. 

 

Boers is an ordained minister and Benedictine oblate, and he served for many years as a pastor in rural, urban, and church-planting settings.  He served for six years he held the R.J. Bernardo Family Chair of Leadership at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, Canada, and taught pastoral theology at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. He’s also published Our Work, God’s World; Living into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distraction; and Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership.  He received his D. Min, degree with distinction from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he also holds degrees in pastoral counseling and peace studies.

 

You don’t have to travel to Spain and walk the Camino de Santiago to appreciate The Way is Made by Walking. You can practice the idea of pilgrimage in your own neighborhood or town. And while the 500-mile Camino might be too challenging, I’m thinking about the 120-mile path from Winchester to Canterbury. 

“What is Due the Other” by Kent Russell

Your mother has been the family breadwinner. Your father has been something of a non-starter. Your mother looks at your writing career, including the book you’ve published, and doesn’t think you have a real job. You and your two older sisters have been raised Catholic, but you’ve wandered. And you don’t feel especially close to your mother. 

Then she calls, and asks you to come with her and one of your sisters on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And you go, accepting the request almost without thinking.  

Writer Kent Russell describes what happened in What is Due the Other: The Diary of a Family Pilgrimage. Part memoir, part travel diary, and part prayer journal, the work describes an 18-day pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Galilee, with a group of generally older people led by a Catholic priest originally from India. Kent and his sister Karen are the youngest members of the tour. 

The trip, while it has its humorous moments, is not a comedy. This isn’t a satire. But it is also not a traditional account of a spiritual journey. Perhaps the best way to describe is a journalistic account of what happens on a trip to the Holy Land, one in which the journalist will find himself changed. And the change comes not only in spiritual renewal but also in his relationship with his mother. 

Kent Russell

Russell discovers the reality of the geography of Jesus and Christianity, and it is different from what he understood from the faith he was reared in. He rides in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. He visits Bethlehem, and understands that the manger of Jesus’s birth was more likely a cave. He walks with the group through the Via Dolorosa, Jesus’s last journey that ends in the cross. And the reality of the geography and faith brings Russell to a spiritual place he has not been before, and a place with his mother he has not been before. 

The author of I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (2015), Russell has written for Harper’s Magazine, GQ Magazine, The New Republic, and The Believer, among other publications.  

What is Due the Other is the story of a young man looking to understand his mother better and surprising himself by deepening his faith in the process.  

Photograph: Sunset on the Sea of Galilee by Fina Dittmer via Public Domain Photos. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Luci Shaw and “Scape”

As I get older, I’m noticing something about myself.

Things I didn’t have much time for when I was younger seem to be more important.

Things like art exhibitions. Poetry. Watching bees and hummingbirds in the garden (I spent several minutes sitting at our kitchen window on Saturday, watching a hummingbird flit from flower to flower in the garden).

Part of the reason may be I simply have more time. Children are grown and on their own. Work has become less about career and more about accomplishment. Retirement is looming.

I’m paying more attention. And I’m paying more attention to the creative acts, and acts of creation, around me.

I’m not alone in this. I hear friends saying similar things.

So I come to a volume of poetry like Scape: Poems by Luci Shaw, and what’s she talking about in every poem is familiar, recognizable, and somehow moving.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Rambles of a Wandering Priest

My online (and High Calling) friend Karen Eck at Karenee Art sent me an email some days ago, suggesting I might want to take a look at a recent book by a friend of hers, Allen Martin Bair, called The Rambles of a Wandering Priest. It is a collection of 69 “rambles,” or meditations, on a variety of subjects and themes.

The rambles are not what I expected them to be. They are more than meditations; they are honest, candid reflections by a man who is much like the rest of us – someone who struggles, doubts, wonders and wanders, and then is dumbfounded by God’s grace and faithfulness.

Bair, an ordained Old Order Catholic priest (they can marry), also offers something else: the perspective of someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism, which was diagnosed as a lot of other things until he was in his 30s. And from the beginning, he talks about it, and likens it to a kind of spiritual autism the human race has because of sin.

The 69 rambles are organized under seven themes: spiritual autism; faith, prosperity and possessions; practical discipleship (the theme with the most rambles); God; grace, salvation, and other theological subjects; the Church, and how we treat each other; and then a final reflections and observations. He calls upon a wide array of sources, familiar and non-familiar, including Stars Wars and Star Trek (I loved the ramble about “Yoda pancakes”), vegetable gardening, writings of the early church fathers, and computer desktop icons.

Bair rambles through the spiritual landscape, but it is a familiar everyday landscape. What he does, however, is to bring an original eye to what he finds in that landscape, and you begin to see, and find, God where you do not expect to find him. It’s an engaging, honest, thoughtful work, and I’m glad to have gone rambling with it.