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Notes from Scattered Pilgrims
Table of Contents
PATH & PLACE
Volume 2, Number 1 // Spring 2010
Preview the listing of all articles and authors featured in this issue of Consp!re
Integrity of Place: Actions to Dwell and Travel Well
How are we to be a good neighbor and local person? When we leave home, how do we travel well? We asked our network of communities for actual practices they engage in to be good locals or openhearted travelers. The questions deepen when we relocate to unfamiliar communities and are suddenly both pilgrim and rooted neighbor at once. We find them threaded into our days. Here you’ll find both our concrete gestures and our wonderings.
Wanderer, Nothing
My first thought every morning is the same. I am sick of this. Straight-up sick of it.
This is the worst part of the day: lying in bed and listening to the other pilgrims shuffling in the dark morning. I despise their eagerness to begin.
My husband is nudging me, already dressed and ready.
I hoist my lead body out of the top bunk and land hard on the floor. Ouch. The bottoms of my feet are so sore.
This is our daily ritual. I fumble in the dark for my shorts, jacket, hat. I rip off pieces of duct tape to cover the sore places on my feet, gently pulling out the thread I inserted into blisters to drain the fluid the night before.
My socks aren’t dry yet. I put them on anyway.
Radical Friendship
by Donna Jones
I used to know how to preach to my church during Black History Month. We’d dress in our finest garb and process to the beats of DNA-memory in our bones, singing the songs that have brought us through. It was the one time a year to celebrate being black; to remember ancestors gone by and saints still present. To move “up from slavery,” “to lift as we climb,” to “go back to the ol’ landmark,” to recount “what mean these stones.” These services were cultural icons for me.
Or at least they used to be. That was before my church’s pilgrimage from 100 percent African American, to now 70 percent African American and 30 percent other (white, asian, bi-racial). I can no longer assume any shared gut-DNA. Even my sermon themes are different.
Take a few weeks ago. I was preaching reconciliation, trying to make the experience of the church at Corinth—the struggles to build gospel koinonia across ethnic, class, and religious lines—real to my congregation. “What do you feel when folks of different races and classes move into this neighborhood?” I asked, almost innocently. “Do they become friends?”
Standing In Place
by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
I was raised in Christian churches by people who loved me well and who charged me to go out there and make a difference. I showed the Jesus film and helped build schools for AIDS orphans in the bush in Zimbabwe, dug latrines in the Dominican Republic, played with kids from the barrios of Venezuela, built houses in Honduras, and tutored kids in Philadelphia’s inner city. A citizen of God’s reign, I tried to put my American passport to work for good in the world. But racking up all those frequent flyer miles for Jesus, I felt lonely. I wanted to share God’s love with others, but wasn’t sure where to experience it myself.
Hung over from all that travel, I stumbled into a little intentional community of Christians who were trying to love one another and their neighbors. It wasn’t easy… and it showed. But I saw something compelling in that little group’s experiment with faith: They had given themselves to God and one another in a particular place.
The Geography of Belief
by the Consp!re editors
As believers, our seeking is shot through with paradox.
On the one hand, the foundational story of our Scriptures unfolds on a piece of earth, a garden, and points to a promised land where we live in convenant. Even the name given to the created human being, adam, is a pun on the Hebrew word for soil. Our metaphors of justice also embody rootedness: That each will sit under her vine or fig tree. That we will rebuild the city. That we will abide in God as branches abide in the vine. Arguably, we are to find our place and dwell in it.
Or are we? We also have a history marked by wandering. Abraham and Sarah left the known world to go into unsettled wilderness as nomads. The people of Israel stumbled forty years through desert land. Jesus said he had no place to lay his head, and sent his followers out with only the clothes on their back to preach and heal. Peter refers to us as sojourners and aliens (1 Peter 2:11).
Clearly, our search for faithfulness elicits the seemingly contradictory impulses of wandering the earth in pilgrimage or grounding ourselves locally in long-term commitment to a particular place and people.
Reflection Questions on Conspire’s Spring 2010
Consp!re’s Spring 2010 issue focuses on Roots and Pilgrimage. How do we live well and sustainably in a place? How do we travel with hearts open to God’s call?
Here are some questions that came up for us as we worked on the material. These are only openings encouraging people to share their real experiences.
