The Way of the Pilgrim

Good afternoon. Friends, I need you to listen to me. Lean in closely. Because I am not here, sharing, empty musings with useless intellectual jargon. I am a human, just like you, talking to you about the most important thing in our lives. Put down your cell phone, at least for a minute, put down whatever you are holding. Whatever is on your mind, I’m sure it’s important, but just let those problems sit for a second.

Take a minute to be with me, do your best to forget about whatever is troubling you. It will still be there when we are done here. The future will come, but worrying about it in this moment will not help. You might get distracted, and miss what I have to say.

I am speaking to you with the urgency of a person that cares for you, and expects your attention. What will it take for me to have your undivided attention? Are you comfortable? Do you need to shift around in your seat? Are you someone who thinks best while standing, or pacing? Do you need to stand and stretch?

Don’t let the empty rituals of decorum interrupt your listening. Because this is important. This moment is important. I am a person standing here with my own flaws, with my own difficulties, and with a sincere love for you. I am speaking to you to share what I have heard, what I have read, what I have lived, what I have learned. Please do me the honor of listening. You might just learn something. Or worse, you might just feel something.

You see, it is no small thing to stand before a community and offer guidance and support. And those of you who have known me and who have walked with me, and who have asked me for your attention, you can attest to the reality in my words when I say, I see you and hear you. It is with these tools, the looking and listening, that I do my best to show that I love you. I love you now, not for any strength on my part, but for the effort placed in my spirit by forces outside of my control. I am not any more loving than you, I am certainly no smarter than any of you sitting before me, or in the Internet, I am not stronger, and I am not chosen. I am just like you, a person, trying my best with the information presented to me. And, I would be heartbroken if I discovered that you weren’t listening to me. So I ask you with all of my heart right now. Pay attention. Lean in close. This is no small message I bring.

Because Friends, the time is now. It is here. This is our chance. there is no time to waste. As we speak, the dark clouds of violence build in the skies above us. All around the world forces of war gather and consolidate. Here, in our very city, the fragile peace that binds us together and keeps us New Yorkers going is fragile and tenuous, stretched thin by our present moment . Here and everywhere fear holds power over our communities, over our cities, over our nations, over our very hearts. There is no time to waste.

I am not sure if you have seen the news lately, but our world has become a scary place. And in scary places, when scary things happen, it is good and right to be afraid. But it can’t end there.

Every moment we spend motivated by fear, guided away from trust and courage, is another moment spent wasting our time alone. For there is no camaraderie in fear, no trust in cowardice, and no truth in anxiety and worry. Anxiety and worry are fantasies, born of an over-eager imagination, attempting to know the future. And the future is not ours to know. All we have is now, and all we have is each other. And friends look around you. Even if you are joining from home, alone in your living room or apartment, or even if you are alone in a big empty house, I am here with you by the miracle of technology. If you are lucky to be here in this space, in this moment, you are not alone, you have not been forgotten, or ignored, and you Have friends.

Maybe trust for you is not easy to come by. Maybe you have been hurt in the past, or maybe even recently, by someone, you trusted, and now loneliness feels safe. Maybe you are still suffering under the experience of rejection or humiliation, certain that there is no love in this world for you that you deserve. Maybe you Are here now, remembering only the love that you yourself have lost, the happiness and connection that was once yours, but you cannot find it anymore. And I honor the grief we all must endure simply to live and lose. Loss is part of how we live, and it is a powerful motivator for fear. Fear is good common sense. There is plenty for us to fear in the world. But fear is not true. Right now, all we have is this moment, and all we have is each other.

Friends, do not waste another moment, thinking thoughts of sadness, or emptiness, until you hear my words. This is the most important thing we will do today, is to speak honestly with each other about what it means to be a person. What it means to be afraid. What it means to lose. What it means to hurt. What it means to feel alone. We have all felt those things. And we may feel them now just to speak about it.

And yet it is also true that a person cannot be truly alone. If you are sitting down, it is likely in a chair or a pew, or a couch, or a piece of furniture built by someone else. If you stand, you likely stand upon the soles of shoes that you did not construct yourself. If you are listening to me through the miracle of technology, there is not one of you among us capable of producing the device that brings you my face and my voice without help. Maybe you remember a time when an imaginary friend helped you too, or the thought of a comforting presence was truly comforting.

What I am saying to your friends is that all around us are forces that try to keep us apart. And in this moment, by our collective strength and intention, we can be together. And even if we are not truly together, we can come together. We can see each other, and feel seen in return. We can be present to all that we are, and all we have been. No one is trying to hurt you right now. So breathe. The world is a scary, lonely place and we need to take and hold every opportunity we have to be together.

Perhaps this is not news to you. Perhaps you already take every chance you can to feel seen and connected. Maybe it feels like you have heard all this before. Maybe you’re listening to me thinking,

there is nothing new in his words, no great insight in his musings, no help in his effort, no foundation to his outbursts of emotion.

And friends you may very well, be correct. I don’t stand here, pretending to be an original, I am one person having learned and still learning from those who came before me, sharing the best that my mind has to offer, and none of it is new. these are very old ideas. And you have likely heard all of this before. Many others who are stronger and smarter and better with words have spoken wisdom with clarity I can only admire and emulate. But do not think for one moment, friends, that the reason you have heard all of this before, is because you have seen at all. Do not think for a moment that you have experienced all that this world has to share, that you have collected all of the knowledge and wisdom there is to be found.

And I imagine in your heart, if you are feeling this way, you must know that it is wrong, and that there is more to see and feel in this world than you have exhausted in your years. None of us has experienced all this world has to offer. None of us can know with true knowledge all that has transpired in this world. None of us knows everything, none of us can be everything, because we are all just people. We are all living this Life one moment at a time, all we have is now, and all we have is each other.

To leave behind our petty worries and fears is not folly or ignorance. To accept our interconnectedness, and to reach out to one another in trust is not naïve or foolhardy. It is a recognition of our true place in the world, here, now, surrounded by one another. It is not foolishness to admit we cannot know the future, it is wisdom. It is not foolishness to admit we can’t do this alone, that is wisdom.

Today is an auspicious day to be talking of wisdom. It is the feast day of Saint Patrick, a guide and sage from catholic tradition whose life continues to inspire lives of urgency and presence across the world. And what a strange life it was. The most reliable account of the life of Saint Patrick is his own autobiography, and in it we hear incredible stories of miracles. Saint Patrick is believed by many to have raised more than 30 from the dead, including horses and children.

I don’t have time to recount all of these miraculous events in his life here and now, and it is likely you would not believe me anyway. These fantastic stories of miracles do not land well with a modern audience. The boundaries of what is possible are smaller for us than they were for the ancients.

We believe in What we can see, we believe in the tradition of empirical evidence we call science. We mistrust, with good reason, strange fantasies and stories that defy what we believe about the world. Doubt and skepticism are themselves forms of wisdom, that teach us to discern the truth rather than accepting everything we hear at face value.

But they can also be misleading, intoxicating assurances of our own self-sufficiency and strength of mind. Our doubt and skepticism can make us believe that we alone know the truth, that we understand all there is to understand in this world, and then by the strength of our good sense, we alone know what is true. We can’t leave behind our down and skepticism, but neither can we trust it with our whole hearts.

And if he were with us today, Saint Patrick would insist on all that we do not know in the world. He would talk about his own inadequacies, his own lack of education and his own illiteracy he would talk about his stumbling and feelings, about his mistakes and missed opportunities. He would talk about the things he saw that he didn’t understand, the things he felt that were beyond his knowledge, And the times that his God spoke to him from another world.

He would talk to us about the love he felt by talking to his imaginary friend, Jesus, and the strength that this imaginary conversation brought him through his time in captivity. He would say to us, “do not think for a moment that you have experienced all that this world has to share, that you have collected all of the knowledge and wisdom there is to be found.”

We can imagine this man saying these things, but that is just our imagination. St. Patrick is not actually here today. I am not Saint Patrick, and I have not lived a life like his. But I do know something about loss, and I know something about wandering. I know something about leaving and returning, and I know something about stepping out onto a new path with nothing. It is only in the losing that we can be reminded of what we have. It is only in our memories of times past that we can recognize the beauty in our present community. It is only through knowledge of love that we feel the pain of loneliness.

My grandmother’s house was a big house, enclosed by a concrete wall with a big iron gate. It was surrounded by shrubs and trees, and in my childhood imagination, it was, in a magical way, eternal. It had always been there, and I assumed it would always be there. I was an adult, and I had been living here in New York for more than 10 years when my grandmother sold her house.

It was not my house, I had never lived there, but my grandmother had lived there since before I was born. It was the house we gathered in for holidays. It was the house I met my cousins in. It was where my mother‘s childhood bedroom Still held her bed and sheets and dolls. And when my grandmother sold that house, nobody asked me. Why should they? It was not my house. I had never lived there. I had been living in New York for over a decade.

But I felt the sting and pain of loss, as if a family member had died. The house lived in me, and though I never called that house my home, I had a life there, with stories. Only I and those four walls and possibly my imaginary friend Tristan knew.

It wasn’t my home. But I felt I had lost a home. I felt like I was suddenly stranded, wandering, without a tether. I felt like I had lost my center, and I felt my steps wobbled without direction. I was not wrong to be sad, or to feel loss, but the intensity of the feeling told me I was, in some way, wrong to have relied upon my grandmother’s old house for some sense of balance and direction. Because that house like everything else in this world, eventually moves on. Eventually, all of us, and everyone we know, will move from this world, and this place, to the next. Our memories and our imagination are all we have to keep us connected to the things in the world that pass on. This feeling of wandering without a tether is disorienting to us. But to the pilgrim, it is the beginning of freedom. The pilgrim lives in the moment, filled with these memories and imaginings.

And these memories, real or created, live in us in every moment. Those memories, these imaginings, do not move on - they linger. They can be for us a comfort, or a burden.

When I began this message, friends, I asked you to put aside your worries and listen to me. I asked for your attention. Now, I invite you to consider what in your life is heavy or tiresome. What are your worries, what are your fears? What have you lost? What pains do you carry with you? Who has gone on before you, that lives only in your memories and imagination?

Friends, we are all in this together, as the song goes. Walking the line between faith and fear. This life won’t last forever. But here and now, in this moment, it is the truest thing ever said when we assert that we have each other. This is the way of the pilgrim - we do not sit in one place, and we do not linger in the places and people that eventually leave or die or fall. We do not linger in our fears or worries, looking for an escape into the future we cannot understand or predict.

The pilgrim is tossed and turned by the weather - the pilgrim wanders sometimes without direction, or moves swiftly with conviction and certainly. But The pilgrim moves on. The pilgrim keeps going. The pilgrim is motivated by an understanding not that the future holds any particular promise, but that the moment, this very moment, miracles are happening, both outside and inside us.

The pilgrim talks to imaginary friends, not to escape the pain of the world because the truth of loss is so heavy that it must be shared at every turn! The pilgrim knows that in our loneliness, though it seems that we walk alone, we are always, constantly, guided and supported by the spirit and memories of those who have gone before us.

The pilgrim knows that though we are each of us only one person, we each contain multitudes of stories and memories and imaginings to carry us through. And, most of all, the pilgrim knows that not every friend is imaginary. Not every person whom we have loved or who has loved us is gone. The pilgrim knows that the past and future live in us but friends live outside of us, and outside of us, in that special place of connection and sharing, when we experience a moment filled with wonder and beauty, or even in the midst of sadness and suffering, not all of our friends are imaginary. Sometimes, there are very real people around us, sharing the same moment, thinking the same thought. Look at them. See them as the pilgrims we all are, as the travellers that we try not to be, but become eventually anyway.

Friends, this is the way of the pilgrim - to be guided by our past, not consumed by it. This is the way of the pilgrim: to be curious about the future, not obsessed with it. Because if we spend too much time in the past or the future there, we miss the miracles passing us by in each and every moment. The miracle could be the fantastic, the imaginary, the transcendent - or the miracle could be the regular everyday person, sitting next to us, who loves us and we didn’t even know it. The miracle could be somebody trying to get your attention, saying good afternoon, who sees you and hears you and calls you beautiful.

The way of the pilgrim is to stop for a moment, put down your stuff, and look at the people around you. Truly look at them. Listen with your whole heart. Share the weird parts of your heart with recklessness. Because we are all in this together. Amen.