I confess that I am sitting under a pine tree doing absolutely nothing … I confess that I have been listening to a mockingbird … This kind of thing goes on all the time. Wherever I am, I find myself the center of reactionary plots like this one.

      – Thomas Merton, “Confession of Crimes Against The State”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The authors of The Westminster Confession of Faith, perhaps the greatest compendium of Reformed theology ever composed, tell us that “there is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions …” (Chapter II, Section 1).

In describing God as “without passions,” the Westminster Divines were harking back to the writings of the ancient Greek Fathers of the church. The word the Fathers used to denote this attribute of the Deity was apathes: “without pathos; free from suffering.”

What this means in layman’s terms is that God is not subject to “mood swings.” Circumstances don’t affect Him as they affect us. Things don’t rile Him up or get Him down. “Stuff” bounces or rolls off Him like water off a duck’s back. He is infinitely above anything that might threaten to poke holes in His unruffled serenity. This doctrine of God’s impassibility is closely related to, and indeed is inseparable from, the concept of His immutability or unchangeableness.

Apatheia – the nominal (noun) or substantive form of apathes – is an important aspect of the Pilgrim life. It is, in fact, the next of our fundamental Pilgrim values.   “Be imitators of me,” says Paul, “just as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). As flawed human beings living in a fallen world we will, of course, always be subject to passion and change. But this should not prevent us from emulating and striving after the unflappable calm that resides at the immovable center of the divine nature.

It goes without saying that apatheia is not the same thing as apathy. It doesn’t consist in dismissiveness of others, and it certainly doesn’t imply a deficiency of human compassion. Nevertheless, the two terms do have something in common. There is an important sense in which the Pilgrim, as an alien and stranger in the earth, simply doesn’t care about the things that get the natives all in a huff. The great concerns of this world – the structures and systems of the kosmos – mean little or nothing to him. As C. S. Lewis wrote in a 1940 letter to his brother Warnie:

     Lord! How I loathe great issues. How I wish they were all adjourned sine die. “Dynamic” I think is one of the words invented by this age which sums up what it likes and I abominate. Could one start a Stagnation Party – which at the General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?

This is part of what we mean by apatheia. But there’s more. For the allurements of wealth, power, and position, of prestige, financial security, social honor, and the esteem of others – all those things that were “vanity” to Ecclesiastes and “dung” to the apostle Paul – these too are neither here nor there as far as the Pilgrim is concerned. He pays little attention to wars and rumors of wars, nor is he in any sense terrified or dismayed at the empty posturing of his adversaries. His sense of well-being does not rise or fall with the stock market or the shifting tides of the political or cultural climate. He refuses to bow before the brazen altar of career and human accomplishment.

When it comes right down to it, the Pilgrim is not afraid of doing nothing and seeming to be nobody. That’s because he knows that the root and stem of his being lie elsewhere: namely, in the invisible reality of his eternal and unshakeable connection with the Infinite.

 He accepted Prime Ministers as he accepted railway trains – as part of a system which he, at least, was not the revolutionist sent on earth to destroy.

       – G. K. Chesterton, “The Fad of the Fisherman,” in The Man Who Knew Too Much 

* * * * * * * * * * * *

It’s been said that, for the Pilgrim, there can be no allegiance to anyone or anything but Christ; that when the state, or any other merely human entity, demands his loyalty or obedience, he can respond in only one way:  with gentle but firm resistance.  It remains to be clarified that this has nothing to do with political rebellion or revolution.

This is as good a place as any to pause and review definitions.  A Pilgrim, we’ve said, is a temporary resident.  A refugee.  A person living in a strange land among a people not his own.  The Pilgrim knows that “this world is not his home” – that he’s “just a-passin’ through.”  Being a stranger and an alien, he does not become entangled in things that are none of his business.  His outlook is founded upon a supernaturally inspired distance and detachment.  His vision and perspective shape his concept of authority and accountability.

It is one of the sublimest ironies of the Gospel story that Jesus was executed on a charge of political insurrection.  Of all the many and varied characters on the scene that day, He had the least interest in the political aspects of the situation.  When Pilate asked Him, “Are you a king?” His matter-of-fact response was, “My kingdom is not of this world.”  And when the Governor pressed Him with, “Don’t you know I have the authority to release you or to crucify you?” He said, in effect, “You have no authority at all.  Your ‘authority’ is an illusion.  Apart from God’s will, you could do nothing.”  He was not particularly impressed with the majesty of Rome.

Celsus, a philosopher of the second century, was just one of many respectable Romans who accused the early Christians of undermining society and behaving as “haters of the human race.”  The basis of their charge?  For the first three centuries of the Common Era, followers of Jesus, the King whose kingdom is “not of this world,” declined to become active participants in the “system.”  So firm were their convictions on this point that Julian the Apostate, Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 A.D, renounced Christianity altogether and championed a return to ancient polytheism on the grounds that it would improve the civic situation.  “We can ignore his argument,” writes Jacques Ellul, “but what historians of the later empire all agree on is that the Christians were not interested in political matters or military ventures.”[i]

Ellul, following Vernard Eller, refers to this lack of interest as anarchy.  It’s a word most of us associate with chaos, disorder, and Molotov cocktails, but its meaning in the present context is quite different.  Eller explains:

     ‘Arky’ (from Gr. arche) identifies any principle of governance claiming to be of primal value for society.  ‘Government’ (that which is determined to govern human action and events) is a good synonym – as long as we are clear that political arkys are far from being the only governments around.  Not at all; churches, schools, philosophies, ideologies, social standards, peer pressures, fads and fashions, advertising, planning techniques, psychological and sociological theories – all are arkys out to govern us.

      ‘Anarchy’ (‘Unarkyness’), it follows, is simply the state of being unimpressed with, disinterested in, skeptical of, nonchalant toward, and uninfluenced by the highfalutin claims of any and all arkys.  And ‘Christian Anarchy’ … is a Christianly motivated ‘unarkyness.’  Precisely because Jesus is THE ARKY, the Prime of Creation, the Principal of all Good, the Prince of Peace and Everything Else, Christians dare never grant a human arky the primacy it claims for itself.  Precisely because God is the Lord of History we dare never grant that it is in the outcome of the human arky contest that the determination of history lies.[ii]

Christian Anarchy, then – a Christ-centered disregard for the claims of “government” in all its forms – occupies the next spot on our list of distinctive Pilgrim values.  Because he owes allegiance to one Master, and one only, the Pilgrim’s attitude toward every other so-called authority is necessarily “disinterested, skeptical, and nonchalant” – in a word, “anarchical.”  For love’s sake, he is more than happy to tolerate, co-exist with, and, where possible, even submit to the powers that be, whether that means Washington, City Hall, or Denominational Headquarters.  But this does not mean that he takes their pretensions seriously.

On the contrary, he views most of their antics and shenanigans with a sort of benign and amused indifference.

 *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

[i] Jacues Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity, 92.

[ii] Vernard Eller, Christian Anarchy, 1-2.

       The kingdoms of this world are the national states.  “All this I will give you if you worship me” – meaning the dragon who gave the beast power.  “You shall serve God alone,” says Christ.  You shall serve him absolutely and not only relatively as in the state.  Jesus refused to become a Roman emperor like Nero.  He became Jesus Christ, and love was fulfilled in Him. 

— Eberhard Arnold, Christians and the State 

    All the nations are as nothing before Him, they are regarded by Him as less than nothing and meaningless.

— Isaiah 40:17

* * * * * * * * * * * *

“Christ is all, and in all,” wrote Paul, epitomizing in a single sentence the essence of Pilgrim perspective.

It was some four centuries later that St. Patrick gave a decidedly Celtic twist to the same idea.  His Lorica, though lyrical and loquacious in style, lacks none of the punch of the apostle’s terse six-word summary.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,

Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me.

Christ on my right, Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise.

Christ in the heart of every one who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of every one who speaks of me,

Christ in every eye that sees me,

Christ in every ear that hears me.

Patrick and Paul agree.  There is only one way to describe the Master’s claim upon His Pilgrim follower.  It is total.  It is absolute.  It brooks no rivals and admits of no qualifications.  It fills up the Pilgrim’s field of vision from horizon to horizon.  How could it be otherwise when the Lord Himself stated the case in such uncompromising terms?  “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

This is the meaning of the word allegiance.  In its Latin derivation the term suggests the bond between slave and master.  In its historical context it conjures up the image of a vassal knight, kneeling, palms together, swearing fealty to his liege lord.  It denotes complete submission and unwavering loyalty.  It is exclusive, all-consuming, and obligatory.

Allegiance is next on our list of distinctive Pilgrim values.  It is unique to the connection between Christ and His disciple.  For every other relationship there is just one standard of measurement:  “Owe no one anything except to love one another” (Romans 13:8).

Make no mistake about it.  There is a place for love of country, just as there is a place for love of one’s hometown, one’s alma mater, one’s neighborhood or clan; father and mother, wife and children, brothers, sisters, friends.  But these loves, as Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms, are only relative.  They have to be kept in perspective.  In no sense can they be compared with the all-inclusive thing we call allegiance.

It is difficult to imagine loving the state.  That would be like loving a machine.  But the state is not thereby prevented from demanding our allegiance.  This it does in varying degrees according to the particular form it takes; for totalitarianism is a graded continuum, and every state in every form falls into place somewhere along that sliding scale.  It is precisely to this extent that the state merits a response of gentle but firm resistance on the part of the Pilgrim.

Such is the presumption of the state that in its quest for absolute dominion it does not shrink from requiring those beneath its sway even to kill and die on its behalf.  Thus in one bold stroke it makes a total claim upon the life of the individual, neither knowing nor caring that in so doing it sets itself up as a rival to the One who is all in all.

For the Pilgrim, meanwhile, there can be no question of pledging allegiance to anyone or anything but Christ.  After all, no man can serve two masters.

Not God and Mammon or God and Country.

     Rome did not exist for those people, nor did the man Caesar; there were no temples of pagan gods; there was only Christ, who filled the land, the sea, the heavens, and the world.

                                Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis 

      * * * * * * * *

Distance, we have said, is one of the fundamental values of the Pilgrim life.  So is the perspective one gains when distance is successfully achieved.

To a certain extent, this is familiar ground.  It’s the old problem of the forest and the trees, the challenge of finding a place to stand.  It’s the question of vision – of acquiring and practicing a particular way of seeing.  But it’s something else as well.

We might elucidate by saying that perspective is vision turned inside out.  If vision is a supernatural gift, a bequest from beyond, then perspective is the inner landscape that takes shape behind the eye as the gift is integrated into the self and begins to weave its spell and work its peculiar magic.  It’s the full broad span of the soul’s measureless inward universe sharpened to a point and brought to bear upon the random swirl of disconnected objects that constitute the external world.  As it brings these objects into focus, perspective reflects the light of vision back into the outer darkness, gently coaxing meaning out of chaos.  The Germans call this phenomenon Weltanschauung, a word which has been rendered into English as worldview and understood as a kind of “philosophy of life.”

The Pilgrim, of course, has no “philosophy of life” in the usual sense of the term.  There is no “ism” or “ology” to which he subscribes or owes undying allegiance (“isms” and “ologies” being nothing but manifestations of the kosmos).  The Pilgrim has only a Road to travel and a Leader to take him over it.  His single task is to keep his eye fixed upon the Guide.  To the extent that he does this faithfully and consistently, the Image of his Master swells and grows until it occupies his entire field of vision.  And when in time – a year, perhaps, or an entire life-span – he is able to say in sincerity and truth that, for him, there is no other in the whole of earth and heaven, then, in that moment, he finds the Pilgrimage achieved.

In the meantime, what becomes of all those random objects on the outside?  What happens to them as Pilgrim Perspective grows and develops and unfolds?  What about nations and kingdoms, presidents and premiers, houses, lands, investments, elections, wars and rumors of wars?  What about people and possessions and the thousands of little things that make life in this world either a blessed comfort or an everlasting pain?  The simple answer is that they change in shape and significance in inverse proportion to the burgeoning of perspective’s spread and span.  As the Image of the Leader increases, they decrease and fade.  But that’s not the end of the story.

He who has ascended above the heavens must fill and, in filling, engulf and swallow up all things.  But in that process, something miraculous occurs.  Like the headlands of a strange new shoreline emerging from the mist – strange and new, yet somehow familiar, as if remembered from a dream – all those endlessly varied particulars rise up in perfect order, each one falling naturally into its pre-ordained place.  The eye refocuses and – behold! – there is a picture where before were only unconnected dots.

A “vast idea” rolling before the mind’s eye – or, rather, not an idea, but the Ideal of ideals, incarnate in a Person whose expansive presence dominates earth, sky, life, and breath – this, as Keats correctly discerned, is the one thing from which we may rightly expect to “glean our liberty.”  This is the world-altering perspective that grows out of Pilgrim vision.

     –Beauty—a living Presence of the earth,

            Surpassing the most ideal Forms

     Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed

            From earth’s minerals—waits upon my steps … 

                        (Wordsworth, “Prospectus to The Recluse”)

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“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Among other things, this well-worn proverb proves the point that truth does not necessarily reside in the popularity or frequency of a saying.  The old saw is only partially correct.

It’s most appropriate, perhaps – and most helpful – as applied to the shifting standards of personal beauty.  In that arena it would indeed be both fair and accurate to say that Fashion – elitist caprice turned cultural mandate – rules the day.  Case in point:  taken as a body (no pun intended), the work of the painter Renoir strongly suggests that he and his 19^th-century contemporaries had a marked penchant for rather large and fleshy women.  We, on the other hand, still haven’t quite got over Twiggy.

Simone Weil – no Cover Girl herself – was thinking of something altogether different when she wrote, “[Beauty is] the only finality here below … Only beauty is not the means to anything else.”[i]  This is a remarkable claim.  It assumes that Beauty is anything but capricious and subjective; that it is, on the contrary, a solid, self-validating, transcendent Reality – an end in itself.

Even the casual reader recognizes at once that Weil’s statement has nothing to do with the world of the runway or Vogue magazine.  Ultimately, it is an assertion of the Absolute.  There is such a thing as the Beautiful, Weil insists, just as there is such a thing as the Good, the True, and the Holy.  And the pursuit of the Beautiful – ars gratia artis – is one of those rarest of human activities, exceedingly few in number:  an experience that has real potential to raise us above ourselves.  Like the desire for Truth, the quest for the Good, and the selfless service of uncalculating Love, it has no place in and cannot be co-opted by the systems of the kosmos.  These are matters of supreme importance to the Pilgrim.

Edward John Carnell once observed that it is not a matter of mere personal taste to declare a winter sunset more beautiful than a crushed cigar box.  We all know that he was right.  In the sunset glows an unmistakable Something – ineffable, unnamable – that calls to us from beyond the walls of the world.  And in the heart of anyone fortunate – or unfortunate – enough to encounter it, that Something wakes an exquisite and painful longing.  A longing for the Infinite.

Precisely because the Infinite is in fact an Eternal Person, this Beauty finds its most compelling expression in living personalities.  It’s here that Beauty points most urgently beyond itself; for as Weil goes on to say, “The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation.”[ii]

The poet Dante knew all about this.  Seeing Beatrice, a vision in red, Dante caught his breath and said, “Here is a deity stronger than I; who, coming, shall rule over me.”[iii]  And so she did.

It would be nice if we could say that they lived happily ever after.  Unfortunately, from that point forward the poet found himself obliged to travel a long, tortuous, and consistently disappointing road.  As for Beatrice, she married another man and died young.

But that’s not the whole story.  For in the end, it was his unflagging devotion to the domineering deity of Beauty, incarnate in the Florentine girl, that led this Pilgrim’s footsteps to heaven.

* * * * * * * * * *

[i] “The Love of God and Affliction.”

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] La Vita Nuova, Chapter II.

               Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul,

                  Like a weaned child with his mother;

                  Like a weaned child is my soul within me.

                           (Psalm 131:2)

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“Man up!”

It’s a slogan for our time ­– a mantra for devotees of the New Machismo, followers of the cult of Navy Seals, Green Berets, and two-fisted, gun-toting TV cops.  And why not?  It’s a man’s world after all.  If you want to make your mark in it, you’d better “man up.”  Even if you’re a woman.

That’s how some of Jesus’ early followers felt about it, anyway.  At least in the beginning.  Guys like James and John, for instance – the so-called “Sons of Thunder.”  A couple of self-styled toughs who couldn’t wait to call down fire from heaven on their enemies.  Apparently they had the impression that following Christ was a matter of joining up with “the few, the proud, and the strong.”

Then there was Peter.  The “Big Fisherman.”  Don’t let him catch you whining like a little baby.  Humiliation?  Forget about it!  Rejection, defeat, and death?  No way!  A guy doesn’t get ahead like that!  When he heard that kind of talk, Peter knew exactly how to respond:  “Man up, Jesus!  When the going gets tough, the tough get going!”

Men love to get together and act like big men.  Feminism is largely about a woman’s prerogative to play the same game.  Pre-teens and adolescents, too, are dying to get a piece of the action.  But the littlest children know nothing of this.  Content, non-competitive, and unconcerned with “cool,” they are easily captivated by small wonders.  They react to life spontaneously and express their thoughts and feelings as the situation requires.  They are free to be themselves.

More to the point, children know what it means to trust.  They have to trust because they have no resources of their own to fall back on.  As a result, they are not above letting go and allowing Someone Else to carry them.  Like Michael Darling, the smallest and youngest of Peter Pan’s unassuming protégées, they understand intuitively and instinctively what it means to soar on wings of faith.  As J. M. Barrie describes Michael’s initial encounter with the Eternal Boy from Neverland:

        “They were all on their beds, and gallant Michael let go first.  He did not quite mean to let go, but he did it, and immediately he was borne across the room. 

        “‘I flewed!’ he screamed while still in mid-air.”

                                    (Peter Pan, Chapter 3, “Come Away, Come Away!”)  

“The symbolic association between childhood, innocence, and regeneration,” writes author Jackie Wullschlager, “is age-old, lying at the heart of the New Testament and of Christian thought; Christians worship their God as a new-born baby …”[1]  It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this observation.

When God chose to enter the world as a helpless infant, He was showing us something about the nature of His kingdom and the power by which it operates.  He was identifying Himself with weakness and incapacity.   He was embracing vulnerability and demonstrating the importance of becoming utterly dependent upon the Father.  In the process, He sacralized childhood and exalted little children to an unprecedented degree.  For as it turns out, little children have a great deal to teach us.  When it comes to the things that really count, they possess a distinct advantage over their grown-up counterparts.

That’s why Jesus never told anyone to “man up.”  On the contrary, He exhorted His followers to “child down.”  When, true to their manly inner impulses, the disciples were going at it tooth-and-nail in a dispute to determine who was “the greatest,” their Teacher threw them for a loop by pulling an unexpected stunt:

        “Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.  Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

This, too, is a crucial part of what it means to be a Pilgrim.

[1] Wullschlager, Jackie.  Inventing Wonderland.  New York:  The Free Press, 1995.

        Technique says:  “People must become machines in order to be treated technically by the hundreds of techniques which  converge on them …”       

                  Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word   

 ******************************

Technique, it might be argued, is author Jacques Ellul’s term for what we have called the kosmos.  It is true that he frequently gives the word a narrower, more specialized meaning:  “technology.”  But far more often he uses it to denote the entire sweep and scope of “the system:”  that artificial but all-inclusive complex of patterns, processes, ideas, and methodologies that has come to characterize the world in which we live and of which technology per se is but a particular material manifestation.[i]

Technique is not simply about the proliferation of machines.  It can be more accurately described as a mechanistic attitude or a mechanical way of doing things.  It’s the state of affairs that prevails when the machine becomes the model, the template, the paradigm for everything else.  It’s the religion of Number, the philosophy of the calculable and measurable, a mindset that leaves no room for the intangible or the poetic.  Its goal is absolute efficiency.  Being entirely human in origin and design, it is therefore inherently anti-human in tendency and purport.

In his quirky utopian/dystopian novel Erewhon (“Nowhere” spelled backwards), Samuel Butler imagines a society so keenly sensitive to the dangers of technique that its leaders decide to destroy all the machines and abolish technological advancement altogether.  The reason for this dramatic step is set forth in a statement found among the fictional nation’s historical annals:          

        I fear none of the existing machines:  what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.  No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward.  Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it?                 

(From Chapter XXIII, “The Book of Machines”)

More than a hundred years after the penning of Butler’s book these words have a more ominous ring about them than ever before.  They find a striking echo in Neil Postman’s relatively recent observation that            

        The uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity.  It creates a culture without a moral foundation.  It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.

(Technopoly, Introduction)

The irony is that in outlawing technology, the people of Erewhon do not succeed in escaping technique.  On the contrary, the novel’s protagonist – a visitor from the “real” world – finds the governing structures of that society so oppressively systematic and mechanistic that he is ultimately forced to flee the country in an attempt to preserve his life, his sanity, and his very humanity.  And therein lies the true moral of the tale.

That moral has to do with the broader implications of technique.  For as it turns out, systems can dominate people even without the aid of machines.  And when the point is reached where the requirements of efficiency trump the needs of the individual – when that which was once a useful tool becomes the undisputed master of its maker – then we may be sure that a perilous line has been crossed.

This is the dilemma we face today.  Postman and Ellul predicted it.  Nicholas Carr (The Shallows:  What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains) and Sherry Turkle (Alone Together:  Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other) have, among others, documented it.  We are all living with the fallout.

“The Sabbath was made for man,” said Jesus, addressing the technique-obsessed Pharisees, “and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).  His dictum demonstrates that the dehumanizing threat of technique is bigger and runs deeper than the question of digital devices and the rapid rate at which they are “becoming something very different to what they are at present.”  It reminds us that religion, too, can be a machine.  So can governments, nations, corporations, organizations, professions, media, entertainment, sports, politics, fashion, finance, investment, advertising, marketing, and the hundred other slick, sly, and seductively pragmatic schemes of so-called civilization that whisper to us from behind the curtain, promising not only power and prestige but even a richer and more satisfying experience of God Himself.

There’s a reason certain academic disciplines have been labeled “Humanities.”  When was the last time you heard a Presidential Commission or an Educational Task Force lamenting the fact that our kids are falling behind the rest of the world in their poetry, music, and painting scores?  It’s unlikely you ever will.  Not while technique rules the world.

But the Pilgrim diligently seeks another way.

************************************

[i] For more on this, see especially Ellul’s The Technological Society (French La Technique, 1954).

           The Christian life is a revolutionary life because the Christian assumes a critical distance from the world and in spite of all contradictions, keeps saying that a new humanity and a new peace are possible and they cannot come about without us …

                                Henri Nouwen, With Open Hands 

 ******************************************

“How do you get your news?  Paper?  TV?  Internet?”

Well-meaning interlocutors who go around with this question on their lips assume too much.  They assume, for instance, that the person they’re interrogating actually wants to “get the news.”  They also overlook a circumstance that even the most obtuse among us can hardly have failed to note:  namely, that, sooner or later, the news is going to “get” you whether you want it to or not.

“Getting” the news is not the problem.  The real challenge is finding some forgotten corner of the universe where it might be possible, even for a single blessed moment, to escape the news.

The news, in all of its diverse forms, has in our day become what Blaise Pascal called a diversion.  A diversion, said Pascal, is something we pursue because it prevents us from facing the truth about ourselves.  “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance,” he wrote in his Pensees, “men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.”  Provided it serves to block these unpleasant thoughts, a diversion can be as petty, as silly, or as random as you please:  “Men spend their time chasing a ball or a hare; it is the very sport of kings.”

Diversions such as the news keep us so busy that we never notice the vanity of the world, the vacuity of our daily existence, or the bankruptcy of our own moral and spiritual condition.  As long as our attention remains riveted on the results of the election, the score of the game, updates about the missing Malaysian airliner, or the latest exploits of Lindsay Lohan, we don’t have to remember that we have no idea who we are, why we’re here, or what we’re supposed to be doing.

Pascal saw all of this clearly.  What he may not have foreseen was the advent of a day when the tables would be turned and our diversions would start pursuing us.

Such is the current state of affairs.  In many of its details – particularly the frenetic pace of the chase – it is unprecedented.  But it’s not altogether new.  Far from it.  Even in the 1840s Thoreau had begun to feel the suffocating effects of its approach:

            Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?”…  After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.  “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe,” – and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark un-fathomed Mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

                                    Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“But the rudiment of an eye.”  One wonders about the appropriateness of Thoreau’s word-choice here.  A “rudiment” is an “elemental beginning;” whereas we, the victims of the modern media barrage, have only a “vestige”.  We can hardly see anything anymore – hardly anything, that is, except what they want us to see.

It was in an attempt to cultivate within himself something more than this mere “rudiment of an eye” – to develop a deeper and subtler inward sensitivity to real truth – that Thoreau withdrew to Walden Pond.  As he put it, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  In other words, he went to the woods to achieve that critical distance from distraction and diversion without which it is impossible to see what must otherwise remain unseen.  He went to the woods to escape the news in order that he might become new.

This kind of distance is of paramount importance to all who wish to follow the Pilgrim Path.  It is, in fact, the second of our distinctive Pilgrim values.  Jesus knew all about it.  That’s why “He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed” (Luke 5:16).  He forsook the world that He might see the world for what it really is.  He separated Himself from the world that He might love it with a pure and deathless love.

We can do the same if we care enough to put our minds to it.  If and when we do, we will make a surprising discovery:  it is only in turning off the “news” that we prepare ourselves to receive, reflect, and embody the very Best News of all.

                          O world invisible, we view thee,

                           O world intangible, we touch thee!

                                 (Francis Thompson, “In No Strange Land”)

Sadly, vision – the first of our Pilgrim Values – has been almost entirely co-opted and corrupted by salesmen, CEOs, motivational speakers, and corporate “leadership” gurus. In their hands this priceless treasure has been transmogrified into something closely resembling “visions (or delusions) of grandeur” – a glitzy but hollow shell of its former self, stuffed with such empty kosmic values as self-aggrandizement and lust for success. Suffice it to say that this kind of “vision” has no place in the Pilgrim life.

The vision we have in mind is a matter of seeing, pure and simple. To be more precise, it’s a way of seeing. Before you can be, you have to be able to see.

To a certain extent, this vision is the result of conscious choice and persistent practice. But at an even deeper level, it’s a gift:

“Blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear; for assuredly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Matthew 13:16, 17).

“Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17).    

Pilgrim vision is granted to those who are willing to stand in the place of the passive receiver.  The starry-eyed and the agenda-driven, blinded by plans and ambitions of their own, know nothing about it. Once appropriated, it can be cultivated and developed in a number of ways. But whatever shape it takes, it is always a thing of primary importance. For as goes the vision, so goes the rest. In a very real sense, it’s the tail that wags the dog. As Jesus put it, “The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness. Therefore take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness.” (Luke 11:34, 35)

   Scottish lore tells of a woman who was gifted with the fabled “second sight.” This rare and highly coveted ability was bestowed upon her in exchange for a favor she had done – not altogether of her own free choice – for the fairy-folk. It seems that on a certain evening a strange woman clad all in green appeared on her doorstep with a beautiful child in her arms.

   “Will you nurse my baby until I return?” asked the fairy (for such indeed she was).

   The woman stared for a moment, completely at a loss. Then she heard her own voice saying, “Yes. Certainly I’ll do that.”

   A year passed. During all that time, the woman never lacked for anything: all her physical and material needs were miraculously and abundantly supplied. At last the fairy returned.

   “You have been kind to my child,” said she. “Come with me now, and I shall show you my house.”

   The woman followed her through a shaded wood and up a sunny green hillside. Near the top of the hill the fairy lifted up a turf in the bank, revealing a wooden door. She opened the door and the two of them entered.

    “What do you see?” asked the lady in green.

   The woman squinted in the dim light. “Not much,” she said. “A bare chamber. A dirt floor.”

   From her belt the fairy drew forth a goblet containing a green liquid. She poured three drops into the woman’s left eye.

    “Look again!” she said.

    The woman did. Before her lay a spacious and beautiful country; away and away it stretched into the dim blue distance. There were green hills fringed by trees. Crystal streams flashed in the bright daylight. A broad lake shone like burnished silver.

   For many years afterward the woman retained this capacity to see what other mortals were entirely unable to discern. Only the fairies could have given her such a gift. Only they could take it away.        

Pilgrim vision is like that. It’s a kind of second sight. It is not about “chasing dreams,” hatching “visionary” plots, or cooking up grandiose schemes for self-advancement. It has nothing to do with aiming for ever greater heights of success, power, and wealth. On the contrary, vision is the rare ability to see the unseen; and having seen it, to order one’s steps according to the radically different pattern of reality revealed in the light of that bright but invisible world.

       I went up to my study. The familiar faces of my books welcomed me. I threw myself in my reading-chair, and gazed around me with pleasure. I felt it so homely here. All my old friends–whom somehow I hoped to see some day–present there in the spirit ready to talk with me any moment when I was in the mood …

( George MacDonald, The Seaboard Parish)

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Is there a way to get up out of the narrow canyon of our immediate historical situation and command a more sweeping view of the Pilgrim Path?  Has some genius been able to perfect a means of time-transport after all?

C. S. Lewis thought so.  But the contraption he had in mind didn’t consist of cranks, gears, tubes, diodes, or optical fibers, nor did it have anything to do with traversable wormholes.  It was a simple affair:  a thing made of ink and sheets of paper bound together between cloth-covered boards.  He was thinking of books – old books in particular.

“The only safety,” says Lewis in his essay On the Reading of Old Books, “is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity,’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.  Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books.  It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.  If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

Why tie ourselves down to such a troublesome and constrictive rule?  Simple:  it’s practically the only way to break free of a sweet, seductive, and subconscious slavery to the prejudices of the time in which we live.  As Lewis went on to say:

Every age has its own outlook.  It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.  We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period … None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.  Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already.  Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.  The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

To a significant degree, our investigation of the Pilgrim Path will be centered around things found in old books.  “Old” is, of course, a relative term.  If you use the phrase “back in the day” to refer to events five years past, you may think an “old” book is one published prior to 1990.  We will almost certainly be referring to some of these more recent examples of “ancient” literature in coming installments:  to Lewis, for example, and Ellul, and authors such as G. K. Chesterton, A. W. Tozer, Simone Weil, Malcolm Muggeridge, Brennan Manning, and Henri Nouwen.

On other occasions, however, we’ll reach much further back:  to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for instance, or to Pascal, George MacDonald, William Blake, Henry Vaughan, John Owen, the Venerable Bede, and old John Bunyan himself.  Sometimes we’ll appeal to writers even more antiquated than that, like the prophets and apostles and early church fathers.  There’s no telling how far we may go in our attempts to escape the numbing haze of contemporary thought.

Our goal in so doing will be to get at the heart of the most basic Christian values.  Some of these values will bear familiar names:  faith and love, hope and vision, meekness and beauty and perspective.  Others, like autarkeia and apatheia, have a more foreign ring about them.  Still others may shock and dismay – anarchy, for instance, and weakness, and death.  But they all have one thing in common:  when boiled down to essentials, they stand diametrically opposed to the assumptions and values of the kosmos.

Sound intriguing?  Then stay tuned …

Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land of Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali and the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the South, and the plain of the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, as far as Zoar.

                        (Deuteronomy 34:1, 2)

                    … Now look down

                      and see how far the heavens have revolved.

 (Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXVII, ll.77-78; tr.   John Ciardi)

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How do we get back on the Pilgrim Path? That’s the million dollar question. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of question that allows for simple, easy answers; and to complicate matters even further, it’s entirely possible that the solution may turn out to be one thing for you and something else entirely for me.

Let’s not become discouraged on that account. After all, “difficult” isn’t the same thing as “impossible.” A complex problem isn’t for that reason an insoluble problem. At the very least we can draw up a plan and give it an earnest try.

In the “Pilgrim Path” entries that follow we will attempt, through a series of reflections on the hidden values of a “peregrinatory” life, to re-capture that elusive Something that Jacques Ellul, out of sheer aversion to the word “Christianity,” preferred to designate as “X”. We will experiment with a method of sloughing off the accretions of culture and the troublesome baggage of the past. We will make it our aim to lay hold of the sweet kernel that lies sleeping within the time-hardened husk. By these means we will seek to uncover anew the essence of Christ-following in its original, unadulterated, unsubverted form.

Our task will be to explore what it means To Be A Pilgrim: to follow the Master faithfully and single-mindedly, to live and work and make a positive contribution not by grasping for power or asserting ownership and control, but by “passing through” the world as humble, unassuming, service-minded strangers and sojourners.

To do this we need perspective – a place to stand somewhere outside of and away from everything we normally take for granted. To see clearly, to attain a bird’s-eye view, to gaze abroad without restraint, we have to get out of the narrow ghetto of our own “contemporary” world. At least for the moment, we must attempt to forget “what’s happening now” and breathe a different atmosphere.

The goal is to see ourselves, the human community, the world, and God Himself through different eyes: the eyes of people whose assumptions, presumptions, and entire frame of reference are not only distinct from but even foreign to our own. This is the splash of cold water in the face that’s so desperately required today. After all, if you can’t see the forest for the trees, there’s only one thing to do: get out of the forest.

But how? That’s the practical problem.

Some manage to get the job done by traveling widely, living abroad, and developing a truly “multicultural” outlook. They deserve our admiration and respect. The difficulty, of course, is that this option isn’t open to everybody. It may be attainable only by a favored few.

The other alternative is to take a trip of a different kind and spend some time rubbing elbows with the denizens of the past. But here we come up against an even more formidable obstacle. Mr. H. G. Wells to the contrary, nobody has yet found a way to build a working Time Machine.

Or have they?

         I am well aware that the Church must inevitably be a social structure, otherwise it would not exist.  But in so far as it is a social structure, it belongs to the Prince of this world …

Simone Weil, Waiting For God, Letter II

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In the western world, it has become all too easy to profess loyalty to an organization called the Church and subscribe to a doctrinal system labeled Christianity while simultaneously living by a set of assumptions directly opposed to the values of the Pilgrim life.  Not only is this possible:  on the whole, it has been the story of the Church as an institution for the past twenty centuries.  And the Church has followed this course most readily whenever Christians have found themselves in a position of prosperity, ease, alliance, and comfortable affiliation with the surrounding culture and the powers that be.

Puritan preacher John Owen saw it happen in 17^th century England.  Prior to the English Civil War, the Puritans had been an ostracized and persecuted minority.  Following that conflict, they experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune.  With the overthrow of Charles I, they became the Ruling Party.  They dominated Parliament and controlled the British government under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell.  Naturally, this was a good thing for their pocketbooks, their public policy agenda, and their temporal securities.  Economically, materially, and politically they were sitting on top of the world.  But Owen understood all too well what they had lost:

“He that should see the prevailing party of these nations, many of those in rule, power, favour, with all their adherents, and remember that they were a colony of Puritans,—whose habitation was “in a low place,” as the prophet speaks of the city of God,—translated by a high hand to the mountains they now possess, cannot but wonder how soon they have forgot the customs, manners, ways, of their own old people, and are cast into the mould of them that went before them in the places whereunto they are translated.” 

(Of Temptation, Chapter III)

“Prosperity,” concluded Owen, “hath slain the foolish and wounded the wise.”  The Church of his day had taken the bait.  It had exchanged the values of the Pilgrim Path for the glitter of dominion and success.

We are now grappling with a similar temptation.  For hundreds of years the Christian community in the west – a community that began two millennia ago as a band of unpropertied sojourners and transients – has maintained strong vested interests in the structures of the kosmos.  Today those interests appear to be slipping from our grasp.  With each successive court battle, with each new piece of legislation, our hold upon the centers of influence seems to be waning.  And as our mastery over the system declines and a sense of panic sets in, the impulse to seize the reins – to “reclaim our rights” and “take back the culture” – becomes increasingly urgent.  In many instances it eclipses every other concern.  We have forgotten what it means to live in the world as a colony of disinterested Pilgrims.

Somehow or other, we’ve got to get back on the right road.

               Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you are like                 graves which are not seen, and the men who walk over them are not            aware of them.

                                                                                (Luke 11:44)

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Values are of primary importance to anyone who wants to walk the Pilgrim Path.  The entire business of going on pilgrimage can be boiled down to a simple question of eschewing one set of values and embracing another.  It’s not complicated.  There are really only two choices.

On the one hand there are the values of the kosmos:  that closely ordered, tightly structured, time-honored complex of principles and techniques that constitute the working basis of the world-system.  On the other hand there are the values of the Spirit:  the living, breathing, fermenting stuff of God’s dynamic, invasive, in-breaking kingdom.

These two sets of values are like mirror images.  On almost every level, the one is the inverse of the other.  They don’t cooperate.  They can’t blend or mix.  Like the darks and lights in a photographic impression, where the one is, the other is not.  They are in fact at enmity:  for it is the very nature and purpose of the kingdom to subvert and explode the kosmos, just as the stone cut from the mountain crushed the iron, the clay, the bronze, and the gold of Nebuchadnezzar’s idol.

To be a pilgrim is to forsake the one and follow the other.

What makes this tricky is the often deceptive relationship between external and internal.  As we’ve already established, it’s what’s inside that counts.  Because a genuine estimate of worth can be such a subtle, elusive, invisible, non-cognitive thing, it’s not unusual for one set of values to be “carried by” or concealed within the outward forms of the other.  When this happens, the same individual’s honest gut reflexes and conscious intellectual commitments can end up at odds with each other.  Awkward, to be sure, but not necessarily uncomfortable.  Quite the contrary in most cases.

That’s because the person in question generally has no conception of what is going on inside him.  As a result, he finds it easy to affirm one proposition while leaning with all his weight upon its contrary.  He may, for example, withdraw from society and adopt the trappings and lifestyle of a humble ascetic because, in his heart of hearts, he wants to make a name for himself.  Or he may sacrifice his life in service to the poorest of the poor precisely as a means of seeking power, position, and influence.

When this is done intentionally, we call it hypocrisy.

Far more frequently, it’s the outworking of a deep, unseen, and sub-conscious choice.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;–

Little we see in nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

(Wordsworth, Sonnet)

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Values.  You’ve heard the word before.  We all have — so often that nearly every trace of meaningful content has been sucked clean out of it.  There’s been endless talk about family values and American values, religious values and humanitarian values, conservative values and liberal values.  Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.

Values-conflicts are reputed to be at the core of the so-called “culture war.”  Assuming there is a culture war, this shouldn’t be surprising.  After all, people feel strongly about their values.  Never mind that very few can tell you what a “value” is.

Contrary to popular opinion, values are not beliefs, religious doctrines, philosophical tenets, or political positions.  A “value” is exactly what its name implies:  an estimation of worth.  It’s an assumption – usually an unexamined assumption – about reality.  It frequently has very little to do with careful analysis or conscious thought processes.  Quite often it’s absorbed by osmosis from the surrounding culture.  Think and believe what you will; your values are another question altogether.  They’re subconscious and reflexive.  They’re the “solid” stuff you grab for when the rug gets pulled out from under you.  They’re the refuge you seek when the house catches fire or the sky begins to fall.  They’re the ground floor, the bottom line.

In the 1870s the United States government did not hesitate to lie, cheat, steal, kill, break promises, disregard treaties, and destroy an entire culture simply in order to accommodate the overpowering lust of white Americans for Black Hills gold.  At the beginning of the trouble the Lakota, to whom the Black Hills had been sacred from time immemorial, found the whole thing amusing.  They couldn’t understand the European obsession with the “yellow metal.”  Sure, it was pretty.  But valuable?  They didn’t see how — the stuff was neither edible nor useful.  So they laughed at the white man’s folly.  But the joke fell flat when they found themselves forcibly driven from their ancestral lands by wave after wave of prospectors, settlers, and bluecoats.  The Sioux leaders hadn’t realized that something else lay hidden behind the glitter:  the promise of power and wealth.

That’s the way it works with values.  The metal, the coin, the currency is nothing in itself.  It can assume a wide variety of forms and be called by any number of names:  gold, silver, or brass; houses, cars, or lands; liberty, equality, fraternity; patriotism, democracy, team-spirit; Islam, Buddhism, or Christianity.  From a certain point of view, these words and the concepts they represent are mere arbitrary labels.  They’re neither here nor there.  In the final analysis, it’s what’s inside that counts – the elusive intangibles that lurk behind and beneath the “yellow metal.”

And that’s not always easy to discern.  For a value is usually something so elemental, so primeval, so visceral that you can hardly put a name on it.  It escapes your notice because it lies concealed within the thing you think you really want and cherish.  It’s like water to a fish.  It’s like the air in which we live and move and have our being.  It’s like the trees that can’t be seen for the forest.

Here, with this very basic realization, is where our pilgrim journey has to begin.