PILGRIM WAYS
Theological Reflections By Henry Ralph Carse, Ph.D.
Part Seven - The Pilgrim Sacrament
Christian pilgrimage is clearly a theological practice far deeper than simple religious tourism. But, what sort of theology is it? We can see elements of pastoral theology, of course, in the care of souls that pilgrim spiritual directors exercise, and of liturgical theology in the profoundly prayerful aspects of the experience. However, it is, I believe, the relatively recent insights into narrative theology that give us the closest model for understanding pilgrimage.
“If there is anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories, listening to them and cherishing them.” Mary Pellauer thus sums up the narrative core of Christian experience. It is through story that we encounter the Gospel most intimately, through story that the life of Jesus unfolds, and through story that faithful disciples re-form their own lives to echo Christ’s. Pilgrims in the postmodern context enact a narrative theology that embraces both text and context, fidelity and ambiguity, tradition and change. They stay close to the Bible, but often venture far from traditional understandings; they are faithful, but do not insist on conformity; they are not enamored of creeds or cults. Pilgrims affirm the essentially narrative character of religion, for, as Gerard Loughlin writes – in Telling God’s Story - “religious stories provide our lives with significance.” And pilgrims go beyond: they are not content with the stories they started with. They become both storytellers and characters in the plot, tracing a sacred path through the shifting terrain between “center out there” and “boundaries in here.”
The classic definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an interior and spiritual grace.” Every pilgrim story is such an outward sign; the mystery of sacramental life lies in understanding the inner grace that an outward story can point us toward. Because Christian pilgrimage is so deeply rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus, it is the Jesus narrative that offers the most compelling “inner grace” of the pilgrim sacrament.
The meaning of Scripture and the meaning of Jesus are linked powerfully in the experience of pilgrimage, where Christians situate their own lives within the story of Jesus, “making themselves over” in his life, in order to be made anew in their own lives. The liminal nature of pilgrimage, at the edge of the pious orthodoxy of “church,” offers pilgrims a new horizon where Jesus may be encountered beyond creeds. Two radical ideas (both cited by Gerard Loughlin in his work on narrative theology) converge here in the sacramentality of pilgrimage: “the impiety of Jesus,” and “faithful fiction.” The first of these evokes the way in which Jesus breaks the “one-way mold of revelation:” he becomes simultaneously the one who speaks, and the message spoken, and the one spoken to, as well as the meaning of what is spoken. Pilgrims who follow Jesus out of the “one-way piety” of dogma will share the theological mobility of Jesus – an “impious mobility” when compared with creed, but a deeply faithful form of discipleship.
“Faithful fiction” refers to the way in which pilgrimage challenges the fundamentalistic tendencies of Christian doctrine to become (as Donald Cupitt writes in What is a Story?) - enslaved by “religious truth… objective, revealed, unchangeable, eternal and divine.” Through my interviews with pilgrims over time, I caught glimpses of how the ambiguity of the pilgrim experience, balanced between doubt and belief, tempers fundamentalism. Pilgrimage is a story, a moral fable, a legend, a meditation, a questioning and a poem – always with spiritual meaning. It is a “faithful fiction.”
Pilgrims en route are not systematic theologians, nor are they conceptual rebels. They speak close to orthodoxy, even when they walk close to heresy. Somehow, they practice fidelity in the midst of ambiguity. Although the God of the theologians can be conspicuously absent in modern Palestine and Israel, the pilgrims I interviewed never abandoned their witness to the vision of a divine companion at the edge of their pilgrim gaze. Jesus becomes most present in his perceived absence. A pilgrim to the Holy Land may have to jettison her image of a blond and radiant Savior, to discover Christ in the earthly faces of refugee camp children or the flickering candles of a Holocaust memorial.
The homecoming of a pilgrim is the narrative hinge upon which the sacramental arc turns. The realization of a pilgrim’s theological awakening in terms of a life well lived in an imperfect world, stands in contrast to traditional views of pilgrimage as culminating at a shrine, or wending homeward in reverential reverie. The pilgrim vocation is fulfilled in redemptive action, not comforting piety.
Wittgenstein called philosophy a “cure for itself.” Perhaps the same might be said for the theology of pilgrimage. A sacred journey may well be a sacramental practice, precisely because – as Cupitt puts it bluntly - it “cures you of religion by returning you to the human world.” It is not, for example, Jerusalem’s perceived presentation of itself as “The Holy City” that determines the pilgrim’s encounter with the sacred there. Rather, it is the ambiguous context, the unscheduled meeting, the alternative shrine, and the competing discourses of many faiths, politics and pilgrim legends, that awaken the pilgrim conscience. Pilgrims who brave this kind of journey, and who have the courage to act on the insights of this kind of conscience, may bear the vital symbols of an inclusive, compassionate and fully humane faith, a faith that we can hope will someday be more broadly embraced and practiced.