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| El Camino de Santiago de Compostella (The Way of St. James) |
Isaiah 55:1-9
Third Sunday in Lent/3rd March 2013
Isaiah wastes no
time. He gets right to the point. How
did your perspective get so skewed? he says. How did your values become so misplaced? How
did your attitudes become so twisted, distorted, warped? How? Or, deeper, why?
Why
do you spend your money for that which is not bread? Why do you labor for that which does not
satisfy? Why do you invest your life in
that which does not feed your life? Why
do you exert energy and waste your time on that which does not bring life,
satisfy your soul?
Isaiah
is calling Israel – calling us – to a time of honest soul-searching. It’s time to take stock of what matters and
what doesn’t; time to reevaluate the way we live our lives, invest and spend
resources; time to question our values, what we hold dear to our hearts. It’s a time to listen to our hearts, be
attentive to the soul, give up a superficial life on the surface and go
deep. Now is the time. That’s what Lent
is for.
Isaiah
is calling them to conduct a moral examen, self-examination, calling Israel to
take stock of their lives. And in love,
with grace, he asks them: Why are you sabotaging yourselves? Why are you undermining yourselves, saying
that you want one thing, but going after another? Why are you looking for love in all the wrong
places, as it were? Why are you striving after that which in the end will only
leave you disappointed? Their moral compass is broken.
Isaiah’s
questions are all rhetorical. He’s not
asking because he doesn’t know the answer.
He’s posing the questions, an effective tool of rhetoric, to move the
argument forward, to make a point, to cause the listener to stop and consider.
He’s not waiting for Israel to answer.
He offers the answer; it’s contained in
the question. Israel’s search for and striving after something, expending a lot
of money and time and effort in the process, suggests that Israel really lacks something
at its core. There’s a desire and hunger
at work here that cannot be satisfied, gratified, fulfilled. It’s that hunger
and desire that Isaiah wants them to
be attentive to. He wants them to feel
the depth of their hunger, to feel the depth of their desire, the desire of
their hearts. For what do you really
hunger? What do you really desire? These
are critical questions because our hungers and desires inevitably push, move,
direct us down either one road or the other, one way or the other. In this sense, Isaiah is calling them to
evaluate what’s really driving their lives, what’s shaping their desires, what
are they really hungry for? What’s
really driving you? If you compass is broken, who knows where you’ll end up?
What’s
ultimately missing, the hunger they crave (or maybe afraid to acknowledge) is
their hunger for God; one need they lack (or a need they won’t acknowledge) is
a need for God and for the kind of life, purpose and meaning that come with
a life rooted and grounded in God.
Isaiah
cries to them, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters,” extending the
invitation to us all. The invitation
stands: the water of life is there. But do you thirst for it? Or do you have other thirsts? For what are you thirsty? Are your thirsty
for this water? Desire it? Long for it?
Dream about it?
It’s important
to remember this bit of wisdom running through scripture: need, want, lack are all required in the life
of faith. If you think you’re
self-sufficient, need nothing, want for nothing, lack nothing, then don’t be
surprised if God seems absent or unnecessary.
There’s a direct correlation between wealth and self-sufficiency and the
decline of faith, particularly North America and Western Europe. There is a direct correlation between the
rise of secularism and the growth of enormous wealth in the West.
What
Isaiah is offering God’s people doesn’t come through us or within us, it
doesn’t come from what we can buy or because we’ve earned it; we don’t own it. What we’re really looking for, hungry for, and
need, cannot be found or fed or met within ourselves or what we have. We have
to acknowledge that we are poor,
because what God gives cannot be bought.
You don’t need money for this. We
don’t have the “currency” to obtain this.
What you need is your poverty, to confess what you lack. Jesus
said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke
6:20). In Matthew, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). Isaiah
says, “You that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and
without price.”
And
so Isaiah calls them to acknowledge their impoverishment,
their need for God; he reminds them of God’s covenant with them, and he invites
them back. “Seek the LORD while he may
be found…let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy…” (Is. 55:6-7).
Seek and return.
In
many ways these two words – seek and
return – in their ebb and flow, sum up the life of faith. Seek and return and seek and return and seek
and return…here we discover the rhythm of the Christian life. It’s not surprising that our life as
Christians has been described as a high adventure, a journey, a quest, a
pilgrimage; then disciples become pilgrims, explorers, travelers on the road,
on a mission, an expedition.
It
all begins with a desire to seek, to search after God. St. Augustine (354-430) said, "To fall
in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure;
to find him, the greatest human achievement." On order to find God one must desire
God. And for some, for most, the desire
doesn’t emerge until we begin the journey, go after God, leave home, and
venture forth toward unknown territory.
The inward search for God was, and is, often matched by the outer
journey. The outer journey helps to clarify what is going on inwardly,
clarifying the desire. Sometimes you have to just set off on the journey and
along the way discover what you’re looking for, discover your true compass,
discover the One who is seeking after you. This is why pilgrimage became so
important early in the Christian experience, particularly in Europe. Medieval Europe was covered with pilgrimage
routes to shrines and cathedrals.
I
was very conscious of this living in St. Andrews, Scotland, with its ancient
cathedral dedicated to St. Andrew, once the destination for pilgrims who arrived
from all over Europe to worship near the relic of Andrew. Many ancient pilgrimage routes are being restored
for modern-day pilgrims; there’s talk of building one from Iona in the west of
Scotland to St. Andrews in the east. Actually,
it’s happening all over Europe, the rediscovery of pilgrimage. The most famous route is the one that
stretches from France, down across northern Spain to the Cathedral of St. James
in Compostella. El Camino de Santiago de Compostella (The Way of St. James), crossing hundreds of
miles, is gaining in popularity, with more than 180,000 pilgrims receiving
their Compostella, the certificate
awarded to those who have traveled 62 miles on foot or 124 miles on bicycle on
consecutive days and who are prepared to testify that they made the journey for
religious, spiritual, or religious-cultural reasons.[1] One day I, too,
hope to walk the camino. It’s on my bucket list.
There’s
a good movie about the camino that came
out several years ago with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez, called The Way (2012). Martin Sheen plays an American doctor from
California who heads overseas to recover the body of his estranged son who died
in a storm in the Pyreness while traversing the camino. When the father
arrives in France, he decides to take the pilgrimage himself, although he
really doesn’t understand the point of it all. As he walks he soon discovers
that he’s not alone, there are others like him on the journey, people grieving,
people searching for meaning, for healing, for purpose, for God. The journey helps the father break free from
what he calls his “California bubble life,” and he begins to fathom something
his son said to him, the last thing he ever heard from his son, he said there’s
a difference between “the life we live and the life we choose.” What we choose. And so we’re back to hunger and desire. What informs our choosing? Sometimes it takes the journey to discover
what we’re really searching for, what matters most in life.
The
Welsh poet R. S. Thomas (1913-2000) expressed the central purpose of
pilgrimage this way:
The point of traveling is not/ to arrive but
to return home
Laden with pollen, you
shall work up
The purpose of the journey is to return,
to arrive home a changed person. T. S.
Eliot (1888-1965) said something similar:
We shall not cease from exploration,
and
the end of all of our exploring
will
be to arrive where we started
My
good friend, Ian Bradley, who teaches at St. Andrews and has written
extensively on pilgrimage. (Ian will be
visiting with us in early May.) Ian makes the point that the goal of
pilgrimage, of the journey, is not necessarily a cathedral or shrine, or a particular
destination; it’s the journey itself, because in the walking, in the searching
itself we are changed. Pilgrims who
attempt the camino often describe the
final arrival in Santiago and the return home this way; “el
regreso es la salida (the return is the departure), in other words, “the
Camino, the way, begins in Santiago.” That’s where the real journey begins. “As one pilgrim put it, ‘You are not the same
when you return as when you started out.
Your very soul is on the move’…
The physical journey concludes in Santiago where the real spiritual
journey begins.’”[4]
Seek
and return. We don’t have to travel to
Spain or France. There are other routes to take, other ways to be on that
journey. What matters most is that we see the life of faith as a journey. We’re
on a road and the Spirit is trying to take us somewhere. It’s our task to engage in the search, to
seek after God – the God who is always elusive – and so we search and in
searching arrive, returning home, home to God’s mercy and goodness and
grace. This is the real “currency,”
grace, goodness, mercy, that allows us to buy and eat food that nourishes,
bread that feeds and satisfies us, drink that revives us.
And
so Jesus gives us this table, with bread and wine, to remind of us of God’s
sheer grace, free grace;
here is food for
our journey toward him,
food for our journey in him,
food for our
journey for him.
For if we seek him we shall most
certainly find and in finding him know we are home.
[1] Ian Bradley, Pilgrimage:
A Spiritual and Cultural Journey (Oxford, UK: Lion Hudson, 2009),
99.
[2] Cited in
Bradley, 22.
[3] T. S. Eliot,
“Little Gidding,” Four Quartets.
[4] Nancy Fey, Pilgrim Stories On and Off the Road to
Santiago (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 4, cited in Bradley, 110.
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