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)

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

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)

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

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.

But as a Pilgrim resolute, I took

Even with the chance equipment of that hour,

The road that pointed toward the chosen Vale.

            (William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book First)

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

What does it mean to be a Pilgrim?

John Bunyan knew.

In 1677, Bunyan, a tinker, author, and preacher affiliated with one of the many “Non-Conformist” Christian groups then on the wrong side of the English law, was thrown into prison for a second time.  His first sojourn behind bars had dragged on for twelve years (1660–1672).  This subsequent incarceration was to last a mere six months – brief by comparison, but long enough for the prisoner to put the final touches on a bit of writing he’d begun while out on parole.

It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who said, “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”  John Bunyan could have seconded the motion.  Outside the prison walls, he may never have found time to complete his little book.  Apart from the gross injustices that landed him in jail in the first place, he may never have stumbled upon the Pilgrim Path at all.  Indeed, had Bunyan been spared persecution at the hands of the governing authorities and the religious establishment of his day, the rest of us might easily have been deprived of one of the greatest spiritual classics of all time:  The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The Pilgrim’s Progress begins with a dramatic scene:  Christian, a burden on his back, his nose in a book, his eye on the Wicket Gate, fleeing from the City of Destruction.  “Life!  Life!” he cries as family, friends, and neighbors hurl abuses after him:  “Brain-sick fool!  Fantastical fellow!  Crazy-headed coxcomb!”  But Christian presses on – across the plain, through the Slough of Despond, and straight on to the entrance of the Narrow Way.

No reader can easily forget the picture Bunyan paints in this scene.  It’s a picture of a desperate man on a desperate journey:  a man with his face set like flint towards one thing and his back turned resolutely to another; a man caught between two poles, two opposites, two alternatives; two choices, two visions, two roads.

Our English word pilgrim is derived from the Latin peregrinus:  “stranger, wanderer, sojourner.”  A pilgrim in this sense is not a person with a big white collar, a floppy, broad-brimmed hat, or a pair of gold-buckled shoes.  Nor is he a patriotic mascot or a nationalistic symbol.  This pilgrim is an alien.  He’s a foreigner, a migrant, a transient.  He possesses neither an earthly country nor any of the rights, privileges, protections, and perquisites appertaining thereto.  Like the peregrine falcon, he ranges far and wide over the face of creation with no place to lay his head.  He has no home in this world, because this world is not his home.  He doesn’t fit because he doesn’t belong.

The early Irish saints – Fursey, for instance, apostle to East Anglia, or Aidan, abbot of Lindisfarne, or Columba, the one-time aristocrat who left his home in Donegal to found the monastery of Iona – used a Latin phrase to describe this way of life:  peregrinare pro Christo.  They saw themselves as men on a “journey” or a “peregrination” through this world.  They acted out of a deep conviction:  “No man can serve two masters.”  They understood that this type of pilgrimage is like a marriage:  it always involves leaving and cleaving.  It’s about shaking off one thing in order to lay hold of another.

That’s what it means to be a Pilgrim.

pil-grim (pil’grim), n. [ME.pelegrim; OFr. *pelegrin (later pelerin, Pr. pelegrin); L. peregrinus, foreigner < pereger, one on a journey < per, through + ager, country; cf. PEREGRINE], 1. a wanderer; sojourner. 2. A person who travels to a shrine or holy place. 3. [P-], a member of the band of English Puritans who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620.

(Webster’s)

“’And I shal apparaille me,’ quod Perkyn, ‘in pilgrims wise,

And wende with yow I wil til we fynde Treuthe.’“

“’Then I will dress as a pilgrim,’ said Piers, ‘and go with you till we find Truth.’”

(William Langland, Piers Plowman, Book VI; 1377)

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote …

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages …”

“When April with his sweet showers has

Pierced the drought of March to the root …

Then people long to go on pilgrimages …”

(Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue; 1386)

“Fulness to such a burden is

That go on pilgrimage;

Here little, and hereafter bliss,

Is best from age to age.”

(John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II; 1684)

“But where content dwells, even a poor cottage is a kingly palace; and this happiness he had all his life long, not so much minding this world, as knowing he was here as a pilgrim and stranger, and had no tarrying city, but looking for one not made with hands, eternal in the highest heavens …”

(The Continuation of Mr. Bunyan’s Life, anonymous; 1692)

“By the grace of God I am a Christian, by my deeds a great sinner, and by calling a homeless rover of the lowest status in life. My possessions comprise but some rusk in a knapsack on my back, and the Holy Bible on my bosom. That is all.”

(The Way of a Pilgrim, anonymous 19^th century Russian)

“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims* on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland.”

(Hebrews 11:13, 14)

“Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the pilgrims* of the Dispersion …”

(1 Peter 1:1)

* Greek parepidemos, temporary resident; refugee; one who lives among a people not his own.