Pilgrims of Faith Based Hope
Everyone is on a journey, but pilgrims know where they are headed
A foot pilgrim trod by our house on Graham Hill Road and my mother had me bring water to him and his donkey. Whoever he was, he was walking to San Francisco through the Santa Cruz Mountains, preaching on street corners along his way. Giving him a cup of water was as if giving it to Christ himself. There were a few of these pilgrims walking around in the mid-70s and early 80s. They were the prophets of a much more radical cultural revolution than the oversexed and drugged run of the mill radical out could possibly fathom.
One of these started in Pennsylvania. After leaving seminary, Pilgrim George F. Walter carried the cross to California and would eventual go up through Canada and Alaska, crossover to Asia. From what was then the Soviet Union, he continued down through Mongolia, China, and was honored in India for his holiness. Eventually, his feet carried him up into the Holy Land.
I nearly met up with Pilgrim George at the Mt. of Olives for the great Jubilee. Instead, I discovered that pilgrims form a spiritual lineage. St. Francis himself was a pilgrim and Franciscans serve as custodians of Holy Sites in the Holy Land because of him. When I asked one of the Franciscan Custodians about Pilgrim George, he informed me that the pilgrim had left the day before to go meet St. John Paul II in Egypt. Seeing my disappointment, the priest introduced me to another pilgrim. Fr. Anastasius, he told me, had taken the same path across the globe as Pilgrim George twenty years earlier, inspiring the generation of pilgrims of which George Walter was part.
In the 90’s, at a dinner at the Bellarmino in Rome, a group of Jesuit priests shared stories about Pilgrim George who wrote letters to them about his journeys and adventures. They found in witness of this pilgrim truths about the journey of faith to spiritual maturity as well as an important critique of our own culture. Years later, reflecting on some of my memories of what they shared, my heart goes to what Tolkien once penned in a poem about Strider, a pilgrim who becomes King:
“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.”
Not all who wander are lost, indeed! To be human is to be a wanderer, homo viator, and a pilgrim is simply someone who has submitted this human reality to grace. This means man’s fundamental experience in this life is as a pilgrim. The fundamental restlessness of our lives suggests as much. We feel driven but we do not know why. We sense something is out of harmony with the world and with ourselves, but as long as we are left to ourselves, we are not sure what it is. Unlike animals, we goad against death even as it takes hold of us. These questions of desire, disharmony and death compel us on a quest. They insert us into a story that is older than we are and that will continue long after we have departed this world.
If a pilgrim lives by faith, the faith of a pilgrim is not aimless. . If those without purpose go along with life not certain where they are headed, the pilgrim holds fast the truth from where comes the heart comes and to where its movement. Animals do not seem to be worried about such things, but such things haunt the human heart and the pilgrim allows himself to be haunted. He suffers how we are conscious of not being fully conscious of the mystery of our lives, and he aches to take up the quest for answers. A pilgrim has the courage to journey in the face of these questions and seek answers strong enough to live out on his journey. He comes to see that the answers faith gives only make the questions ache all the more. The faith of a pilgrim does not remove but sanctifies the questions of life, fills them with meaning, until a man becomes a sign of hope. So he longs to see the face of God with the certainty that insofar as we put off or ignore life’s questions, we have not yet even begun to live. In the end, if he perseveres on his quest, he becomes an answer, or at least, the icon of the only answer that satisfies.
The true pilgrim has heard the voice of His pilgrim God calling out to him. He leaves boats and fishnets and whatever other livelihood in pursuit of the Master’s shadow. He sees with the eyes of his heart that the risk of life is worth taking and so he puts his faith in, and chooses to follow, come what come may, the Life Himself.
The reasoning taken up by a pilgrim stays under a shadow of glory so that as he reasons by faith. He constantly finds a new homecoming in his own heart that spurs him to even greater progress in his journey. This faith based hope takes him beyond the merely measurable and quantifiable and baptizes him in immeasurable and unquantifiable mystery. Faith based hope makes him realize that we cannot find what truly satisfies in anything that our eyes can see or our minds can grasp. This faith protects him from being enchanted with the spirit of this age. Instead, a true pilgrim allows a light that is more profound than the cleverness of the age to guide him toward divine purpose.
In this spirit of our own age, engineers of progressivism have mastered technologies that manipulate physiological causes, psychological mechanisms, and sociological trends to suggest a certain historical development with visible and tangible progress. They make themselves instruments of the anti-Christ. They are the builders of Babel, of towers designed to dethrone the heavens. They see themselves as offering humanity salvation without the help that comes from God. But they make only idols - and they render themselves and all those they seduce into false worship as no more than the work of their hands.
This is not to single out engineers in general. There are true engineers, those who have dedicated themselves to how things work and who cultivate this art for the betterment of humanity. Indeed, many engineers are also pilgrims of faith. Instead of allowing technology to become the tool of the anti-Christ, they see their craft only to help humanity rejoice over the unhindered benevolence of God through the things He has made. They apply themselves to the development of science and technology for no other reason that that human beings should thrive to their fullest so that they might find greater freedom to praise God. To these hidden leaders, we all owe a great debt of gratitude for their many life-saving and life-improving discoveries.
An engineer of progressivism is, on the other hand, a servant of technocracy. Such a technocrat is very different than a true engineer whose craft is augments rather than obscures the great questions of life. Technocrats might themselves not be engineers at all but simply able to employ engineers and direct them toward the exploitation of technologies to further a materialist vision of the world and of a life.
These progressive engineers play the role of the Grand Inquisitor proposed in Dostoyevski’s Brothers Karamazov, the one who keeps God out of secular affairs because they imagine a better world without Him. They have figured out that God lifts up human freedom and dignity into realms in which they may not be manipulated. So they try to constrain the sacred, and herd societies into bullpens of the merely profane. Through stirring resentment and anxiety, these technocrats nudge us into the narrow confines of a materialistic, if utopian, future. Such engineers are always promising that the danger and frustration of human existence can be finally eliminated if only we will surrender our freedom and dignity to what is not God.
These engineers reckon that, at least for most people most of the time, the ache of eros can be put in abeyance through divergence, dissipation and distraction. Their goal is to diminish the overall pain of existence. Nudging us toward trivialities, they would dissipate the great restlessness of the human heart that would otherwise drive it beyond itself. With a host of pharmaceuticals, they have devised manifold means to numb the sting suffered from the disharmony in the world and in the heart to render us a little less aware of the guilt that haunts our existence. They have even found ways to distract us from the foreboding fear of death’s alienating power so that we die as unaware as might any animal.
Such a technocratic engineer represents what is perhaps that antithesis of everything a pilgrim travels for. Animated by idealism if only unconsciously, the engineer is about acquiring as much power as possible, while a pilgrim is a realist who disencumbers himself of all that is not necessary for the journey. The realistic faith of a pilgrim walks grounded in this world toward mysteries too great for this world to hold.
Such realism holds firm to a personal and cosmic restoration and recreation, not for control, but for freedom. Rather than in resentment or anxiety about the past or future, a pilgrim lives in the present even in extreme conditions with certitude in the reality of Divine Providence. This allows him to journey on a crashing flood of new meaning, a rush of eternal exchanges in which he is already caught up even as ventures into all kinds of adversities.
For such pilgrim souls, if they suffer frustration or face danger, there are no obstacles or blockages but only thresholds and passages. In the most uncomfortable and inconvenient circumstances, these pilgrims experience time as eternity already begun but still in progress (to use the language of St. Elisabeth of the Trinity). They wander into unfamiliar horizons guided by an ever shining Light that the world cannot see, the Light that holds it all together. This unseen radiance makes known all the blessings that are already breaking in on them until a pilgrim steps forward with a very real, even if inchoate, foretaste of the wonder that awaits at journey’s end.
Engineers of progressivism, in contrast, promise power to overcome every problem here and now, to define oneself according to one’s own desires, to manipulate the world according to one’s own designs, even to change one’s own physiology according to one’s own whims. Yes, this is the promise of the very hubris and pride that contradict everything that is good, beautiful and true about humanity. All of this power allows one to avoid having to accept any state of affairs for what it is. One approaches life no more than a self-made myth to be manipulated into the fantasy one believes it should be rather than a greater narrative in which one is only a minor actor. But such power is not free. It comes at great cost, the cost of freedom and dignity, of the very vitality of what it means to be human at all.
Faith helps us see that the technocrats promise of future salvation is simply the spirit of the anti-Christ. When the technocrats cry out that we should not ask the great questions of life, this is simply the anti-Christ attempting to silence the great quest of the human heart, a quest that he has no authority or competence to answer. And it is nothing other than an act of cowardice to refuse to ask such questions simply because technology cannot answer them. If it drives us and haunts us, courage calls us to seek an explanation. Faith brings into focus and intensifies this drive, even as it provides the answer because the answer of faith is the very source of this vitality. The anti-Christ is at war with human vitality, with the love that compels humanity forward in history, and the pilgrim, as an icon of the Church, safeguards and protect it, walking with and through humanity until it finds its way.
Not all who wander are lost. While I still do not know who the pilgrim was that I met in my front yard, there are pilgrim prophets hidden in our midst. Having forsaken everything to follow Christ, their witness is revolutionary before the technocratic engineers who would otherwise exhaust humanity to ‘extinction’. These pilgrims are a reminder that the purpose of humanity is not extinction but rather to journey into the sacred, that the holiness from which humanity comes and for which it was made is the very source of its vitality, and those who choose to walk with them find themselves on a journey to the true place that we belong, the Father’s house.