Tourist or Pilgrim?

Rev. Peter Friedrichs

February 24, 2008

Several years ago our family made a pilgrimage to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Irene and the girls wanted to visit the grave site of one of their favorite authors, Louisa May Alcott, and I went in search of one of my heroes, Henry David Thoreau. Sleepy Hollow is an old New England cemetery, complete with trails that wind over rolling hills and through the woods. Despite the luminaries who are buried there, including many of the Alcott family, Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, there's no guide book or map that shows you where you might find their final resting places. The four of us walked for nearly an hour in search of the gravesites we wanted to visit, and the kids were, frankly, getting a little cranky. At some point, Irene and I decided to "divide and conquer," so the girls and I went our separate ways in hopes of doubling our chances of finding our goals.

As I crested a hill, I spotted a group of people in the distance who seemed to be tightly knit around a particular spot, and I thought to myself that this must be Thoreau's final resting place. It made sense to me that we should have looked for the crowds, since most people visiting the cemetery would be there to spend time with their literary heroes. I quickened my pace as I trekked down one hill and up the next, and I was a bit out of breath from the exertion and from excitement as I approached the gathered crowd. Being a little anxious and I suppose a bit pushy, I nudged my way toward the front to get a better look. Before I knew it, I was standing beside a priest who stood before an open grave into which a casket had just been lowered! In my haste, I had stumbled not into Thoreau's grave, but into a throng of mourners who were saying their final good-byes to a loved one!

I never did find Henry's final resting place that day, but I'm glad to say that Irene and the girls had better luck with Louisa. Her simple gravestone was poignantly surrounded by several small markers denoting her infants and children who had predeceased her. Such was my first pilgrimage experience.

It's safe to say that, at one time or another, all of us have traveled to some place that is unfamiliar to us. It might have been a trip across the state, across the country, or around the world. These trips beyond the boundaries of our own communities and our provincial experiences help to broaden our horizons. We witness the grand spectacle of the Rocky Mountains and it forever changes the way we look at the Poconos. We eat a burrito in Mexico and wonder how we ever enjoyed the food at Taco Bell. We walk the streets of Athens and realize how very young our own country is. It's both fun and enlightening to travel to other worlds, to see how other people live in cultures different from our own.

When we travel, we usually do so as tourists. We visit a place as an observer, an outsider. While we may bring an intense curiosity to the place that we visit, rarely do we invest much of our selves in it. As visitors, the reality we view is usually a superficial one, and we're led by an agenda of accumulating experiences and seeing sites. For tourists, it's all about the destination. We want to capture that perfect picture of the Taj Mahal at sunset or pet a cute little koala in Australia. Tourists disdain the time spent getting to where they are going. It's an inconvenience and wasted time. That's what makes Epcot Center at Disney World the ultimate tourist experience. There, within the space of a day, you can "visit" eleven countries from Canada to China. You can sample French pastry for breakfast, view Moroccan mosaics at midday, and watch a Chinese acrobatic troupe that night, all without leaving American soil. Even when we travel overseas, we are "Americans abroad," bringing our values and perspectives (and often our judgments) to bear upon those we encounter who are different from us. Arthur Erickson has written that "the tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before." We've all heard of, and many of us have observed the "Ugly American" syndrome abroad (although, like bad drivers, none of us admits to being one). The eating habits of children often makes us more tourist-y than we might want to be, and I remember that when we took our children to France, we ended up in many more pizza parlors and McDonald's than I care to admit.

There are, of course, other ways to travel. We can be less than a tourist, and here I'm thinking of the business traveler who jets to some foreign city, is picked up by a car service at the airport and delivered to a hotel, where she spends a few days in meetings or conferences, and then returns home in the same way, never having set foot, literally or figuratively, on foreign soil. If we have the time and resources we can be more than a tourist, too. We can study a country and its culture and language for months or even years before we visit it. And when we finally do travel, we can spend more than just a few days at any one destination. We can find a home-stay rather than a hotel, making friends and building relationships that bridge our cultures. We can dig deep into a place, learning its history and getting to know the contours of both its landscapes and its people.

Yet another way to travel is as a pilgrim. To journey as a pilgrim is to take an entirely different approach to travel. The pilgrim embarks on her journey with the deliberate intention of seeking transformation. He doesn't plan to return home as the same person she was when he left. And while most pilgrims leave home with a specific destination in mind, they are open to the transformational nature of the passage itself. Achieving the destination is often secondary to the experience of the journey. Pilgrimage is sometimes described as "outer action with inner meaning."^[1] In their book The Archetype of Pilgrimage, Jean and Wallace Clift describe pilgrimage as "a journey, a ritual, a commemoration, a search for something, perhaps something the pilgrim cannot express in words, perhaps even something the pilgrim does not fully perceive. Pilgrimages are connected with the spirit, but it is difficult to say precisely how."^[2]

A pilgrimage often follows a three-stage process similar to many rites of passage. The first stage is one of preparation and separation. The person who undertakes a pilgrimage senses a calling, perhaps from outside himself but often originating within, and decides to act upon it, even though it may be nothing more than a vague and undefined feeling. In this stage, the pilgrim listens intently to the interior or exterior messages she is receiving, and prepares herself to leave what is known and comfortable, the place she calls home. Once ready, she embarks on the journey. The second stage of the pilgrimage is the journey itself, the in-between time. It is the time of traveling to, of being with, and of traveling back from, the object of the pilgrimage. In ritual terms, this is referred to as a "liminal" time, a time in between, a time away from the familiar things we know. Our reading today described one pilgrim's liminal time. As Clift and Clift describe, "this middle stage of a pilgrimage is marked by an awareness of a temporary release from social ties which in itself can contribute to a sense of renewal and refreshment. We tend to feel 'freer' when we are away from home."^[3] During this liminal stage the pilgrim often encounters danger and risk, where she is forced to confront the unknown and perhaps the unconquerable. Sometimes the destination of the pilgrimage becomes secondary to the experiences the pilgrim encounters along the way.

The final stage of pilgrimage is the return home. It is at this stage that the pilgrim often gains an appreciation of the transformative power of the journey. The pilgrim sees old things in new ways. She may feel a stronger sense of connection or belonging to the world or to the divine, or she may feel acutely empowered and energized. Those around the returning pilgrim will often notice the change, remarking that something unidentifiable is different about them, or that there's a brightness or lightness about them that wasn't there before. Although the pilgrim returns to the place his journey began, he brings a new identity to that place and those who inhabit it. In contrast to tourism, where exposure and education are the paramount goals, a pilgrimage is more about internal growth or, as the Clifts write, pilgrimage "aims toward an enlargement of personality or worldview, toward the transformation of the person by their connection with some important reality or value beyond themselves."^[4]

While pilgrimages have been traced back to the times of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, we generally associate the practice with Christianity, both early and modern. In the centuries following the death of Jesus, early Christians sought out the tombs of saints and martyrs, believing that these men and women, even in death, held healing powers. It wasn't long before churches discovered the profitability in pilgrimages. Believers, both able-bodied and disabled, would trek thousands of miles to touch the tomb of a venerated martyr for the faith, leaving behind not just crutches and bandages, but coffers full of coins and jewelry. This sparked a vigorous trade in religious relics, and churches sometimes found themselves in hotly-contested bidding wars over the purchase of an alleged piece of Christ's cross, or a drop of his blood, or even over a single bone from the finger of a saint. Needless to say, theft, treachery and counterfeiting abounded. Eventually, the Catholic church established the "stations of the cross," artistic depictions of the passion of Jesus that were installed in churches throughout Christendom to serve as a substitute for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land for those who were unable to make the actual trek. Sites of religious pilgrimage persist today, where faithful Christians travel to drink the healing waters of Lourdes or to a grotto in California to gaze upon the weeping Madonna. The largest annual pilgrimage, one that has continued for millennia and which nearly two million people make annually, is the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that every able-bodied Muslim is required to make at least once in his lifetime.

At first blush you might think that Unitarian Universalists don't undertake pilgrimages, and that we don't have sites or shrines that are worthy of such journeys. But I'd like to dispel you of that myth because we do and there are. For example, you can make a pilgrimage to Kolozsvar, Romania to the very spot where, 500 years ago, Frances David preached in the public square in support of the Biblical basis of Unitarianism, a sermon which was instrumental in convincing King John Sigismund to adopt the Edict of Torda, the first proclamation of religious freedom in Europe. Or you could visit the site of a utopian community dating back to the 17th century in Rakow, Poland where our forbears followed the anti-trinitarian teachings of Faustus Socinus.

Closer to home, we've got several pilgrimage sites within a short driving distance from this very spot. Consider Murray Grove, the birthplace of American Universalism. The current retreat and conference center is situated on the site where Thomas Potter, praying for a miracle, built a small chapel where he hoped one day this radical doctrine of universalism that he'd heard about would be preached. And it was on this site where a stranded John Murray, widowed and demoralized preacher from England, who was coming to America in search of anonymity, became the answer to Potter's prayers. It was on that site, less than two hours from here, where the doctrine of universal salvation was first preached on American soil. And just up the road in Philadelphia, you can visit First Unitarian Church, where Joseph Priestly preached an early form of Unitarianism.

A couple months ago I told you the story of William Ellery Channing and the sermon he preached on the occasion of the ordination of Jared Sparks, the so-called "Baltimore Sermon." It was in this address that Channing claimed and explained the doctrine of Unitarianism, clearly differentiating our faith from that of its Calvinist forbears. To this day you can travel to what is now the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, where Channing preached that sermon, and even stand in that same pulpit.

Next month you have the opportunity to join other members of this church on a Unitarian Universalist "Heritage Trip" to Boston, where you can visit an abundance of UU pilgrimage sites, including the churches in Boston that both Channing and Theodore Parker called home, as well as the historic headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association and the chapel at Harvard where Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous "Divinity School Address." In nearby Hingham, there's "Old Ship," the first Universalist church in America. And in Concord you can visit Walden Pond, the site of Thoreau's retreat to the simple life. And of course there's the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery nearby, the final resting place of Saint Ralph and Saint Henry, whose gravesites I'm sure you can find with a minimum of fuss! Although Baltimore and Boston don't offer the healing waters of Lourdes or the ancient cache of the catacombs of Rome, these and other sites around the country and the world are the places of our past, the sites where our religious forebears fought and died for our religious freedom. Where our ancestors proclaimed the heresy of a God who is one and not three, a God whose overarching love for us guarantees us all a place in the kingdom..

Regardless of whether we ever visit these or any of the other sites of our heritage, by the nature of our faith each of us is called to make a progressive pilgrimage of our lives. Unitarian Universalism is not a religion for tourists. It does not permit us to be outside observers in our own faith development, or that of our fellow seekers. When we walk through these doors we are not handed a guide book that says "here you will find salvation" and "there you will find God." We do not pre-plan your trip for you, guaranteeing you beautiful vistas or scenic snapshots that fit neatly into a photo album that you can keep on a bookshelf at home. Unitarian Universalism does not allow you to sit quietly and comfortably on the bus, watching the contours of your faith roll by as your tour guide tells you what it is that you are supposed to see. You won't find here any pre-packaged, 7-day, six-night, meals-and-drinks-included cruise to the islands of truth and meaning.

If anything, we are the anti-Epcot of the world's religions. Our faith requires us to embark on a lifelong pilgrimage of the spirit, a never-ending quest for our own sustaining reality, our own life-affirming convictions. By our Unitarian Universalist principles we affirm and promote "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning" and mutual encouragement to spiritual growth. Like the pilgrims of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, we come together from all walks of life to share a common quest, and we venture forth boldly, enriching each other's journey with lively tales of our exploits and experiences.

Whether we ever leave the comforts of our homes to travel to distant lands, all who claim this faith as their own must be pilgrims of the spirit. We must be willing to undertake an inner journey that is no less arduous and no less daunting than any hajj. But it is a joyful journey, because we share the path with others. We are not sent out into the void without map, compass or companionship. This is no solo voyage, and there are others who have trod this trail before us, leaving markers along the way.

This spiritual quest that we share has no certain destination, and it has but one certain outcome: that we will return to the place where we started transformed, larger in heart and fuller in spirit than the day we left.

I, for one, am glad we're on this journey together.

Blessed Be.

^[1] Clift and Clift, The Archetype of Pilgrimage (Paulist Press 1996)
^[2] Clift and Clift, 9
^[3] Clift and Clift, 12-13
^[4] Clift and Clift, 20

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