Thoughts for the Journey of Faith
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Do we have any idea what it means to travel the way of Jesus? ‘I’m not sure. But I will not stop trying to re-imagine what it means. Never. Something draws me to the path. Gently. Beautifully.’ Brian Draper sets off |
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Vertigo
35,000 feet above the patchwork iceblanket of Hudson Bay, the sun came flooding back from the frozen sea. I was embarking on a ‘journey of faith’, heading to Colorado for a spiritual retreat way up in the snow-blessed mountains.
I tried to imagine the voyagers who had gone before me, over land and sea, in the centuries previous. I thought of the snow and ice, rain and wind; of the lost lives of women and children; of the pioneers who ran out of food or luck, a long way from home. Of the gold-rush and the Wild West and the making of the New World.
My headphones buzzed and I felt cross. You can’t enjoy a film with this kind of sound quality. The stewardess brought a gin and tonic. I pulled the blind and settled into stupefied resignation. What do I know about journey?
Cowboys and Indians
Perhaps today we face different challenges. Like starting the day on
one continent, and ending it in another. Your humanity can sometimes be
mislaid somewhere in between, like baggage. Disorientation. Immediacy.
Cultural meltdown. The world’s a theme park, and we are
players.
Getting off the plane at Denver, you’re greeted by the
evocatively piped sounds of the Native Americans, who were shot like
buffalo and chased off the plains that shimmer into view through the
smoky glass panes. Huge pictures hang proud of tribal elders as you
bounce along the travelator towards Homeland Security. The jet lag,
like a drug, almost helps you miss the irony. But somewhere deep
inside, a compass twitches towards true north.
Uprooted
Last year, our family moved house. We’d lived in the
same place for a few years.It was a modest, ex-council place in
Suburbia, Herts. Didn’t look special, but despite my cultural
misgivings, it was special to me.
It was where my boy and girl were conceived and born. It was where we
partied hard the day they were christened. It was where we heard all
sorts of good news and bad. It was where we welcomed strangers and
slowly became their friends. I guess it was home.
A few months before we moved, we decided to plant a little privet hedge
between us and the neighbours (it’s what you do in Suburbia).
They politely objected (touché), suggesting that their son
was allergic to this particular species of privet. OK, we said, but as
these were just young shoots, could we leave them in the ground until
we moved, and then take them with us, rather than kill them? Fine, they
said.
As the day drew nearer to go, I found myself walking every inch of our
little town. I sat at the swings where I’d always played with
my kids; I walked the lakes around which I had ran relentlessly to lose
weight; I sidled past the barber’s, the travel agent, the
toyshop; up side alleys and through car parks. I shed tears in the
skate park among broken glass and empty coke cans, and in the coffee
shop where we had stolen romantic moments amid the pallid. Place
becomes sacred if you stop watching Location Location Location and
start living where you are.
But believe it or not, I had heard a divine call to a new work in a
lovely city, 60 miles down the road. Hardly an Old Testament
wilderness.
My God. What on
earth did Abraham feel like?
Come moving day, each privet plant offered little resistance, save one.
It doggedly refused to surrender its grasp on the soil. I pulled with
all my might on its stem, fighting back more tears.
B-l-o-o-d-y
t-h-i-n-g w-i-l-l n-o-t b-u-d-g-e.
Finally it relinquished and I stumbled back on the pebbledash and sat
down. ‘I will plant your roots in better soil’, I
heard a voice say.
Excess baggage
I remember one of the local Christians being surprised, when we arrived
at our destination, that we could fit all of our worldly goods into
just one removal lorry. It’s not always easy to declare the
Joneses the winners in the battle to keep up, but this time I
surrendered without a fight. How many removal lorries can fit through
the eye of a needle, anyway?
Faith in Transit
St Augustine once suggested that ‘faith is to
believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what
you believe.’ Several hundred years later, the rock star
Bono, of U2, put it another way, in the song ‘Walk
On’: ‘I’m packing a suitcase for a place
none of us has been – a place that has to be believed to be
seen.’
If you had to pack a suitcase for the journey of faith ahead, what
couldn’t you do without, for your new life on the road?
Start with the end in mind
And what about the destination? What must we believe, before
we get to see it? A promised land? Where is it that we are going?
I’ve always imagined that it’s a place. But if
it’s not, then where is the journey taking us? (And is the
journey taking us, or are we taking the journey?)
Faith is not a
journey into the past or future
We spend so much time indulging in the guilt or shame or sorrow of our
past, as well as living in the expectation of ‘making
it’ in the future (or receiving salvation or gaining
fulfilment), that we forget about living in the here and now. Perhaps
we need to reimagine the journey of faith as one that is outside of
time. It takes time, for sure. But that’s different from
waiting for life to kick in around the next corner, on the next
holiday, with the next job, when I meet someone special, and so on and
on and on and on. The kingdom of God is at hand, is it not? I love the
Christian Aid slogan, ‘We believe in life before
death’. I think Jesus did, as well. It’s life, Jim,
but not as we know it.
The only way is...
Most of us picture life as a ladder to be climbed. Imagine reaching the
top of the ladder, only to find it had been leaning against the wrong
wall all along.
Perhaps there are other ways of seeing the journey. I’m not
sure whether we should think about climbing or descending, though. Do
we wish to go higher or deeper? Jesus seemed to think that the riches
were to be found at the bottom of the pile. Among the poor, the
mourners, the outcasts, the meek. The first will be last and the last
will be first. Deep stuff.
Narrow path
So Jesus once said, the road to life is narrow, and few find
it. Weird. I used to think that was because only a few of us chosen
souls were walking it. It never occurred to me that I hadn’t
found the path myself yet.
But if the journey is along a narrow path, I guess sometimes
it’s a hard one to spot; I guess there will be low branches
and brambles encroaching; I guess it will sometimes, somehow, squeeze
us thin.
And I guess sometimes it will take us to places we don’t wish
to go. You can’t just tell the road to change direction,
after all. Are you prepared for where it might end up? In an untrendy
post-code? Or a warzone?
Wherever it takes us, we have to remember: it is the road to life. So
we must have eyes to see and ears to hear what real life looks and
sounds like – and tastes and feels and smells like. The aroma
of Christ is death to some, and life to others. This is no senseless
journey.
Go slow
Speed is of the essence in a culture stuck on fast-forward. Makes me
want to go slow. When did you last stop to savour the journey for its
own sake? It’s the journey that makes or breaks us, after
all; so could it be less about where we end up, and more about the Way
we get there? You can trample your way right up to the gates of heaven,
after all. But who have you become, in the process? Who have you pushed
past, clambered over?
Eckhart Tolle suggests that if you keep straining into the future
instead of ‘being’ in the Now, ‘your
life’s journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive
need to arrive, to attain, to “make it”.’
He continues, ‘You no longer see or smell the flowers by the
wayside, nor are you aware of the beauty and the miracle of life that
unfolds around you when you are present in the now’.
I resolve to savour the episodes I live through AS THEY HAPPEN, as well
as the people I meet and travel with, the moments of transition and
triumph, the thin places I pass through, the sorrowful times of
departure, the mouth-watering hints of arrival. I reject air travel for
the soul.
Information or
Transformation?
The older I get, the less I know, despite the wealth of information I
receive from the paperbacks and DVDs and teaching tapes and God
channels and festivals and … When will I learn?
Strange
I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day wondering what life was
all about, when a song gate-crashed my consciousness. It was Mike
Scott’s scarily beautiful ‘Strange Boat’
said it all.
We're sailing in a strange boat, heading for a
strange shore
We're sailing in a strange boat, heading for a strange shore
We're carrying the strangest cargo
that was ever hauled aboard.
We're sailing on a strange sea, blown by a strange wind
We're sailing on a strange sea, blown by a strange wind
We're carrying the strangest crew
that ever sinned.
We're riding in a strange car
We're following a strange star
We're climbing on the strangest ladder
that was ever there to climb.
We're living in a strange time, working for a strange goal
We're living in a strange time, working for a strange goal
We're turning flesh and body
into Soul.
Way to go
Jesus said that He was the Way. Look where it got Him, they cried, as
He hung there on the Cross. It got Him all the way to us.
That’s quite some journey of life and faith. Do we have any
idea what it means to travel His way? I’m not sure. But I
will not stop trying to re-imagine what it means. Never. Something
draws me to the path. Gently. Beautifully. As the hymn writer mused,
‘I trace the rainbow through the rain; the promise is not
vain…’
One step at a time. That’s enough to be going on with.
Wondering, increasingly, how – and decreasingly where
– I am headed. For there,but for the grace of God, go I.
