Pilgrimage Sermon
Greyfriars, Tolbooth & Highland Kirk
Sermon – 6th November 2011
“You know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich”. 2 Corinthians 8:9.
I spent a good part of last week in the city of Assisi in Italy. I was there with representatives of many faiths from around the world. We were talking about pilgrimage and environmental responsibility. (About 100 million people go on pilgrimage each year around the world – from the Hajj about to begin in Mecca in the next few days, during which 3 million Moslems will gather, to the gentle journey that people like Jo Elliot and myself took earlier this year when we walked from Dunadd, the ancient capital of the Scots on the west coast, to St Andrews in the east, absorbing the beauty of our landscape and stories of our spiritual heritage in the places we passed and the people we encountered).
Pilgrimage means many different things to people of faith. For some it is the fulfilment of an obligation (something you do at least once in your life), to others it is a penitential journey during which one hopes to be healed or transformed in one’s thinking by the act of setting off from one’s comfort zone into the territory of the unknown. Pilgrimage is a metaphor for the journey of faith. As Christians, we say that the Kingdom of God is something to which we aspire and so we journey in hope and faith, trusting that as we set off (even if that does not mean actually physically moving anywhere) we will be blessed. Blessed, that is, by new insight and discovery, by the surprise of encountering Christ in the stranger’s guise and by the sheer exhilaration of the adventure of faith.
The challenge before us in Assisi, at the conference sponsored by the Alliance of Religion and Conservation, ARC, was how we might absorb more deeply into our spiritual traditions those habits of the heart that might enable us all to touch the earth more lightly and to appreciate and conserve the God given beauty of the earth. As the founder of ARC, Prince Philip has said, “If your religion tells you (as it does in Christianity anyway) that the Creation of the world was an act of God then it follows naturally that if you belong to the church of God then you ought to look after His Creation”.
At Assisi, we met Shinto priests from Japan talking about their sacred forests, where for thousands of years they have managed their woodlands sustainably. When a tree is planted they know it will be left for 350 years before it is cut down to build one of the sacred temples that are always made in wood.
Representatives of 1.5 billion Moslems were present in Assisi too, there to talk about their ambition to green the Hajj. The pilgrimage to Mecca is about to take place in the next few days. 3 million Moslems are likely to make the journey this year and will leave behind them many million discarded plastic bottles amongst other things. The Eco-Moslem movement is trying to “green” that pilgrimage and make it more environmentally responsible. We were all given a pilgrim flask to use instead of plastic bottles. And interestingly, the flasks have a little bit of copper in them which, after a few hours will purify the water in the flask. This is something that Sikhs have known about and incorporated into their drinking vessels for centuries and now they are sharing that ancient know how with the rest of the world.
Taoists from China were there, along with representatives of the Chinese government. They spoke of the beginning of an unprecedented dialogue between the Taoist movement and the government of China. The government is beginning to realise that the uncontrolled economic growth currently being experienced in China can be dangerous for society’s and nature’s well being if it is not moderated and balanced by some deep spirituality that leads sustainable development. It is recognition of that ancient idea of “Ying and Yang”, the need for balance in life. How extraordinary to think that the Communist government of China might be on the threshold of embracing some ancient spiritual wisdom to try to develop their culture and economy in responsible ways.
We heard from a group of Sikhs who offer a wholesome meal to 60 million pilgrims at the Golden Temple at Amritsar each year. Hospitality is their thing, but how do you do that in such a way that respects the earth and leaves a positive footprint?
There were Norwegians, promoting pilgrimage to Christianity’s most northerly shrine at the Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim (Nidaros is the traditional name for Trondheim). They have created a pilgrim route that takes pilgrims across the mountains on a journey of up to 500 kilometres over some of Norway’s most spectacular countryside.
The Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Naomi Tsur, was present. Jerusalem is, of course, such an important pilgrimage destination for Jews, Christians and Moslems welcoming 8 million visitors each year as spiritual pilgrims (and, of course many Scots go there and the Church of Scotland has recently refurbished the Scots Hotel at Tiberias as a rather smart hotel for 21st Century pilgrims). Naomi made a particular point of seeking me out. “You are from Edinburgh, aren’t you”, she asked, “We have a tram system too, you know! It was 10 years of misery whilst it was under construction, we know how you feel, but hold on! The new system is doing wonderful things to green our city and to bring our disparate communities together. It was terrible during the construction period but we love it now. And, if you think you have it bad to be doing this in the midst of a recession, just remember that we had 2 Intifadas (uprisings) to deal with during the construction period”.
It was an exhilarating week and the whole event took place in the astonishing and mystical setting of Assisi where we felt that we were being accompanied all week by St Francis, that saint of the church who came from Assisi and where the Basilica erected in his honour towers over this lovely hill town. The memory of the man and the movement he inspired was of such value that it encouraged even the Protestant Reformers here in Edinburgh to name the first church built here after the Reformation of 1560, the Kirk of the Greyfriars in honour of this man who devoted himself to the love of God and the service of humanity and all God’s creatures. His memory and his movement walked with us on our pilgrimage through the week.
St Francis renounced his own considerable wealth in order to live a more simple life, nearer to nature and nearer to the poor. He spoke to the animals and cherished God’s creation striving to live a life that mirrored that of Christ, filled with compassion and generosity of heart. As the head of the Franciscan Order said to us in a speech of welcome, “Francis did not create anything he just saw what was already here and cherished it all more deeply”. That is a thought that has stayed with me since I heard it and it seems a very profound idea. How many of us race through our lives never really noticing or appreciating the beauty and love that surrounds us? How many of us, me included, think that what justifies our existence is embarking on endless new initiatives and projects?
So, what does all this mean? Pilgrimage – Ecology – Creation – Living Sustainably- Being Transformed in our relationship to God’s creation.
In the midst of a hail storm of words, ideas, initiatives and perspectives that at times was almost more than one could cope with it was all summed up beautifully in a few words by a poet called Jay Ramsay who had been asked to walk with us through the conference. Reflecting on the idea of pilgrimage as a means of un-cluttering our lives and simplifying consciousness, he remarked, “When you really have something on the inside, you need less outside”. And, of course that is a profound truth. All our materialism and greed is to a degree borne of an anxiety that we do not have enough and the mistaken idea that more things will satisfy a deep vacuum in ourselves that is primarily spiritual and will not actually be filled with more stuff. All those destructive habits that have led to the degradation and plundering of the earth’s resources and the enslaving and impoverishment of people and their environments is a testimony to the fact that we have not always seen the earth for what it is, as the means by which we can know the creator and know the creator’s love for all things.
“When you really have something on the inside, you need less on the outside”, shouldn’t that be the church’s “mantra” or motto for the future? Isn’t that wisdom for our times? This is after all what the church at its best has tried to preach for 2000 years. This is what Paul is referring to when he talks of Christ’s poverty. This is what people like St Francis understood. And the message of inner riches to offset our destructive, unsustainable over –living is surely a vital theme for our times.
When Pope John Paul II visited Scotland in 1992, he invited the people of Scotland once more to become a pilgrim people, sharing the road together on a journey of rediscovery of our ancient spiritual roots that bind all people of faith in Scotland to a shared story. T S Elliot described a dissociation of sensitivity that set in the west in the 17th Century with the rise of rational scientific thought. It isn’t that science is a bad thing and goodness knows we will need the best of science if we are to find ways to live sustainably in the future and feed 7 billion people. But Elliot questioned whether the state of the human condition could ever be satisfactorily and comprehensively analysed on a laboratory bench. He lamented the “dazzling disregard of the soul” that he saw emerging in the world around him.
It seems to me that we are on the threshold of a rediscovery across the globe that the challenges we face which have to do with poverty and environmental sustainability can only be tackled by the rediscovery of the human soul. I do not mean that we need a revival of Christianity as a blunt ideological instrument, but we need to rediscover that spiritual dimension to life as a tool that will help us to balance our inevitable use of the earth and our treatment of fellow humanity that has got so out of balance during the Age of Plunder that we have been living through.
The challenge of environmental sustainability is a spiritual one not just a management task or a problem that will be resolved by scientists and experts working on initiatives or by politicians (as the complete failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference of 2009 demonstrated). As someone pointed out to us in Assisi, people of faith need to remind politicians that “they may be short term politicians but they are long term human beings” and the harmonising of spiritual values with rational scientific insight is one of the great works before us in the 21st Century. One of my favourite quotes comes from the American beat poet Gary Sneider who wrote, “We need a religious view that embraces nature and does not fear science; business leaders who know and accept ecological and spiritual limits; political leaders who have spent time working in schools, factories or farms and who still write poems. We need intellectual and academic leaders who have studied both history and ecology and like to dance and cook. We need poets and novelists who pay no attention to literary critics. But what we ultimately need most is human beings who love the world”.
Our Christian faith is a long term phenomenon. In 2000 years it has only just got going and in the years through which we are living we are witnessing fundamental shifts and changes that are not dissimilar to the travails and groans of childbirth that Paul referred to in his letter to the Romans. But as people of faith we deal in generations. A new age for the Christian faith is being born and, as Michael Ramsay an Archbishop of Canterbury was wont to say when people spoke to him about church decline, “don’t forget, we are the early Christians!”
And so, we are a pilgrim people, on a journey to newness. And I believe along with the great Scottish theologian Donald Mackinnon that “we are about to learn deeper lessons concerning the laws of Christian existence than have been possible for centuries”. What he is referring to is a way of living that does not depend on the support of the church as a structure of institutional and temporal power, as it has since the time of Constantine. Neither should the life of faith depend on the compensations of material wealth as both Jesus and Francis knew, but rather our existence should depend wholly on the faithful provision of the creator. And, as Mackinnon adds, “If the lessons therefore bite deep they will teach us not to seek in our future deliverance from the tragic, but the presence of the ground that alone makes possible the endurance of its burden”.
St Francis, as we were told at Assisi, did not create anything, he simply saw more deeply what was already there. What he saw was the glory of a beautiful creation, the wonder of the human frame filled as it is with the capacity for love and grace. And he saw too that the only true riches worth seeking are those that are on the inside that come from our faith in the one who made all things and holds us in being and who alone makes the facing of life’s pain as well as its true fulfilment possible.
Here at the Kirk of the Greyfriars, we are working to renew or buildings and our resources to become a bright mission place, a destination for weary and searching pilgrims, a place of true hospitality and alternative imagination. We have a story to tell and a message to convey of God’s love for all. Let’s get on with it! Amen.
