Hindu pilgrims, India
My
third-grade teacher at my Christian school, Mrs. Olive Sandvig, was innovative,
teaching us things like how to churn cream into butter, and inviting us to
listen occasionally to stories on the radio, helping us, the first television
generation, learn the power of words without pictures.
For
a while, during quiet time, she read to us from Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s metaphorical tale of Christian’s
pilgrimage to the Celestial City. Though Christian met with dangers and
challenges and temptations, the spoken words had a calming influence on me, and
to this day, I can place myself at my classroom desk with my head laid down,
eyes closed, imagining the trip.
When
I was spiritual leader of Atlanta’s Midtown Spiritual Community, a congregation
that had left the Unity denomination because it was “too Christian,” I
appreciated the challenge of talking about spirituality in a more generic way.
I still had much to learn. Once I spoke of the need to move and to travel in
order to grow spiritually—in essence, the need for pilgrimage, and I was taken
to task by my dear friend Linda Pogue, who explained that a neighbor in her
English village had never gone anywhere all his life, yet she knew of few as
spiritually mature as he! For some of us, our only necessary pilgrimage is
through time.
Due
to economic limitations, my own pilgrimages these days are mostly limited to my
imagination and my morning walks. But I have travelled widely when my
circumstances permitted it.
During
my first decade of ministry at a Presbyterian Church, I was expected to take
study leaves, and I travelled on two Fordham University religious studies tours
led by Byron Shafer: one to Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel; the other
to India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.
Though
we were visiting sacred sites of the world’s religions, these were not billed
as “pilgrimages,” but I approached them as if they were. My personal text for
the first trip was The Bible, and for
the second was Gandhi: Selected Writings.
Given
last week’s post on “Altars in the World,” blog readers may not be surprised
that the open, natural places I encountered felt more “spiritual” to me than
the closed, box-like structures (as beautiful as they are) that housed
religious meaning.
Though
early one morning I walked the Stations of the Cross alone along Jerusalem’s
Via Dolorosa, what spoke more to me were the green pastures beside the Sea of
Galilee, the great rivers of the Nile and of the Ganges, the Egyptian wilderness
devoid of any visible plant life, the gnarled trees of Gethsemane, the everflowing
sea of faces throughout India, the wild-elephant-populated jungles of Sri
Lanka, the Himalayas as seen from Nepal, and the colors of the stone of Petra
in Jordan, which I’ve written about earlier.
Given
my predilection for open spaces, I found that the retaining wall that served as
the Jerusalem Temple’s base, known now as the Western Wall, is a fitting place
for prayer and contemplation all by itself, without reconstructing the temple.
And,
in New Delhi, serendipitously stumbling alone upon the garden where Mahatma
Gandhi was martyred gave me the opportunity to give in to my spiritual emotions
un-self-consciously.
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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser.
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