1. Pastor’s Ponderings
by Pastor Kimberly Chastain
Dear Ones,
As I write this, I am preparing to take a long trip to the United Kingdom. I will fly to London and spend a few days with my sister, then we will travel north to Scotland and spend a week traveling ever farther north and west until at last I arrive on the Hebridean isle of Iona, for a retreat and pilgrimage at one of the holiest places in Celtic Christianity.
In a way, the whole trip is a pilgrimage for me, structured around the holy places of the history of Christianity in Britain and around the holy places in my family lore. A friend of mine is leaving on the same day to walk the last 100 miles of a more traditional route, the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about pilgrimage and what it means: the idea that some places are imbued with special holiness, are “thin places” for the grace of God, and to visit them or walk among them will open the pilgrim to the grace of God in new ways. It’s kind of a strange concept for Presbyterians, who believe that “earth’s cramm’d with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only those who see take off their shoes”(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh).
And yet, we all have those places, where the heart opens up and the mind is set free and the glory of God is both closer at hand and infinitely grander than we could have imagined. And in both the Camino, and on the holy isle of Iona, people have been finding that their lives are transformed because they are placing themselves where the saints of God have walked for more than a thousand years.
The holiness is found not only in the devotion of the individual who visits, not only in the rocks and trees and water of the place, but in the community that shares the journey, in the inhabitants of the land that offer hospitality and friendship to those who come, and in the stories that are shared and treasured across time and space. In a world where we talk of spirituality as a private thing, or a chance to be alone with God, pilgrimage is a community event, whether you undertake it for private reasons, or simply to bear witness with others.
I hope that I will return renewed and refreshed in faith, with stories to share and with a storehouse of encounters with the divine to nourish me on the next phase of our journey. And in the meantime, I want to invite all of you to reflect on the journey that we walk together—the holy spaces we encounter, the times that we find ourselves open in new ways to the grace of God, and the stories that we can share to bear witness to our common pilgrimage. Perhaps even to imagine that you could show off the places you travel, so our common witness can grow stronger through shared stories.
And may God bless each step of the journey.
Grace and peace,
Pastor Kimberly