Practicing Pilgrimage

On Being and Becoming God's Pilgrim People

Webb-Mitchell

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781532614040
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Practicing Pilgrimage: On Being and Becoming God's Pilgrim People explores both the theological, cultural, and spiritual roots of Christian pilgrimage, and is a "how-to" book on doing pilgrimage in our suburban backyards, city streets, rural roads, churches, retreat centers, and our everyday life. Brett Webb-Mitchell takes the ancient practice of Christian pilgrimage and applies it to our contemporary lives.

Part I

Framing Pilgrimage

1

A “Pilgrimage” and the “Pilgrimage of Life”

O teach your wandering pilgrims

by this their path to trace,

Till, doubt and striving ended,

they meet you face to face. —William Walsham How1

I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. —Wendell Berry2

Three Stories of Pilgrimage

There was a chill in the morning air as my partner and I parked my car close to the starting line of a march that was to take place in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina. We walked to the actual starting line of the 2014 Historic Thousands on Jones St. (“HKonJ”) march, which, at the end of the day, would involve anywhere from two thousand (the police estimate) to eight thousand (the march organizers’ estimate) people. We were surrounded by people with placards, buttons, T-shirts, clergy stoles and collars, banners, and handheld bumper stickers raising issue with the budget cuts in the recent state legislative sessions, which would have a big impact on the long-term unemployed, on women’s health, on public school and university education, and on those receiving Medicaid. There was an African American gentleman dressed as Uncle Sam, American flags pinned here and there to his costume, standing on a large city-owned electric box and lecturing us on the problems with North Carolina’s government; from time to time he broke out into patriotic songs, with the crowd cheering him on. Various people handed out bottles of water in case anyone got dehydrated after the one-and-a-half-mile walk downtown. Our destination was a raised platform in front of North Carolina’s early nineteenth-century capitol building, where speaker after speaker named the injustices being brought upon the citizens of North Carolina by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and musician after musician sang with Gospel swagger, reminding us that God’s justice will prevail in the end. Even though it was a cold day, the rain that was predicted did not come. Instead, later in the morning, the sun actually shone as if to bless the crowd of walkers, rewarding us for our small yet noble efforts.

This march in Raleigh was a kind of pilgrimage.

•

The small group gathered together in the large fellowship hall of University United Methodist Church. Composed primarily of officers of the church, the group was to take a walk of reflection on the past and discernment for the future. The church had recently received a generous gift of a large parcel of land in a yet-to-be-developed part of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the church’s leaders were struggling with what they could or should do with this gift. So we took a pilgrimage from the church to the new plot of land, which (thankfully) was within easy walking distance. We kept our ideas for the purpose of the property and God’s will for the property front and center as we walked. Walking behind a cross used in the church’s worship, we followed the cross and cross-bearer to the land, walking either single file or two by two as we prayed, discussed, laughed, and talked openly about visions of what could be done with the land. Along the route, I would stop the group occasionally and ask the pilgrims to think out loud about their ideas, or to pray quietly about the use of this land. On the land itself we saw a little white tent set up in the middle of the lot. Under the white tent was the original Lord’s Supper table used by the church when it was founded in the early 1800s. They were looking into the possibility of opening a satellite campus, and this seemed a good opportunity to use the table again as the church considered a new venture. What might rise here? A house for youth ministry, or a retreat center of sorts within the Chapel Hill area, or perhaps a house for people living with intellectual challenges? We closed with a chance to break bread and share from a common cup in remembrance of Jesus, ending with a singing of the Doxology, all the while contemplating what vision God would have for the land.

This was a pilgrimage too.

•

At the beginning of the semester, I would take the general ethics class I teach at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a historically black college/university, on a pilgrimage. We began the pilgrimage in the large lecture classroom, where I usually set the stage for a pilgrimage with a discussion about what happened in the modern civil rights movement for the African American community in the American South prior to February 8, 1960. We talked about the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, handed down in 1954; Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955; and the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, in which nine students were given the task of being the first black students in an all-white school. The last example I gave the students from the civil rights movement was the sit-in at the F. W. Woolworth diner in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. As a national policy, Woolworth neither sanctioned nor condoned separate eating sections in their diner. Each store in every region of the country could make that decision. The managers of the Woolworth stores in Greensboro and Durham chose to segregate. With that background, I asked the students to close their books and follow me. We made our way to the James E. Shepard Memorial Library, the main library on campus. Once there, we walked under the main stairwell in the building, in which there is a portion of the Woolworth diner that students from then-North Carolina College (NCC, now NCCU) and some students from Duke and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) occupied on February 8, 1960. Like the students at North Carolina A&T, the students from NCC also walked and sat on similar plastic seats with aluminum backs and were jeered at, spat upon, and worse—they had hot coffee thrown in their faces, ketchup or milkshakes poured over their heads, all because they sat in the “whites only” section of Durham’s Woolworth diner. Even though current students often passed by this exhibit throughout their days at NCCU, none of them ever took the time to read the plaques and realize the significance of the historic items. “This is not your history or my history, but our history,” I told the students. Most important was this: we were honoring those who went on a pilgrimage of justice in 1960, marching from NCCU’s campus to the downtown Woolworth’s. Those students walked to the Woolworth diner every day for more than six months. Martin Luther King Jr. heard of their sit-in and gave a historic talk at the old White Rock Baptist Church in downtown Durham a week after the sit-in began. He told the students not to fear jail or arrest for doing what was right. The students were emboldened by Dr. King’s presence and admonition, and continued until the Woolworth management at each store in the South agreed to let people sit where they wanted to sit, thus ending segregation at the Woolworth diner counter. The faded plastic seats in orange and teal blue shades with their aluminum backs, and the countertop with a menu from the Woolworth diner of the 1960s, have become historic not because they are replicas or made to be historic. They are historically significant—indeed a kind of relic—because of the civil and holy action that took place as people resisted injustice and worked to overturn a bad law. Thankfully, justice prevailed.

This class expedition was also a pilgrimage.

Scholar Larry Russell writes that pilgrimages involve simple, repetitive acts with deep consequences.3 According to this description, each of the examples given above was a pilgrimage. And each one of these pilgrimages embodied consequences that went beyond the personal to the communal, from being a mundane act to becoming sacred ritual.

The Pilgrimage Begins Right Where You Are

Participating in a march to North Carolina’s capitol building in Raleigh with other marchers and pilgrims, walking in prayer with a church group to a new piece of land, and going to see the historic relics of pioneers of justice are all pilgrimages. For some, pilgrimage is going annually to Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, visiting the musical relics of none other than the late 1950s icon Elvis Presley. For others, taking a ride in a vintage convertible—preferably a ’63 Chevy Impala—along Route 66 may be a religious pilgrimage of sorts, with nostalgia ushering memories of the past to the present. Visiting or walking to the church that holds the iconic painting of the Black Madonna in Częstochowa, Poland, lighting votive candles and praying intercessory prayers in the presence of the icon is a pilgrimage. In the American South, returning to the church of your childhood for an annual homecoming celebration, after being away from that church (or any church) for years, is a kind of pilgrimage too. Going to a high school class reunion may be considered by some a pilgrimage. People stream year round to a place like El Santuario de Chimayo in New Mexico, or crawl on bended knees for over a mile to venerate the statue of El Cristo Negro in Esquipulas, Guatemala, or go to great lengths to celebrate Mass at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, Canada, seeking healing of mind, body, and spirit. Perhaps, dear reader, you’ve already been on a pilgrimage, but you just didn’t realize it.

What makes each one of these people “a pilgrim”? Or the route one is on an example of a “pilgrimage”? One of the best responses I have received after leading a workshop on pilgrimage was given to me by a young middle school student who said that a pilgrim is someone who is seeking or looking for something important, while a pilgrimage is a “holy hike . . . just like the people in The Lord of the Rings!” While I laughed at his response at first, the more I thought about it, the more I came to agree: the Hobbits were pilgrims, returning the ring to the place of its origin, and a pilgrimage is a holy hike, a sacred walk, or a spiritual journey. After all, a pilgrimage involves a movement of body, mind, and spirit from one’s current location (point A) to one’s destination (point Z). As one person in essayist Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s book on his pilgrimages around the world says, “[Pilgrimage is] a vacation. Okay, well, not exactly a vacation, but it’s ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Framing Pilgrimage
• Part Two: Practicing Pilgrimage
• Epilogue: The Church as Resident Pilgrims
• Bibliography