Walking the Way in the Dark
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday in Lent, March 5, 2023 by the Rev. Holly Huff.
Many of you know I walked the Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James, a number of years ago. A spider web of ancient pilgrimage paths stretching across Europe starts to converge in northern Spain and lead west, toward the sea and toward Santiago de Compostela and its medieval cathedral that reportedly houses the relics of St. James the Apostle as recovered and transported by angels. I don’t claim to know about the post-mortem mechanics of it all, but it does seem St. James has taken up his patronage over the pilgrimage in good humor, and every year thousands of pilgrims walk portions of this Camino.
Camino of course means “path” or “way”. Buen camino! pilgrims say to each other in passing, the meaning sliding between, “Have a good walk!” and “May the path be good to you!” I decided to walk the Camino in 2015 on something like whimsy but unbeknownst to me it set a path for my life that is still revealing itself just around the next curve. Incidentally it’s how I came to set foot in this church, St. Mark’s, for the first time, and how Brooke Parker got involved here, too—thank you, St. James! Thank you, Jesus, who is the Way, for guiding us onto the Way.
The traditional pilgrim’s blessing used as the sending out after mass in all the churches along the Camino is based on our reading from Genesis today. “The Lord said to Abram, “Go!” “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house—to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you.” So Abram went.” During the month I was walking the Camino—it was July, a very HOT month—pretty much every day I went to mass and was sent out again with these words. “Go to the land that I will show you. Go from your country, your kindred, all you think you know, the place where your understanding reigns, and go to the land you do not know, the land that I will show you.” Pilgrims get to practice letting God take the initiative, relying on God for everything, and letting God lead the way.
The first days were tough. Walking so far each day was physically rigorous: I was weary and sore and aching and covered in a fine layer of red dust. The physical exertion wrung painful emotions that needed tending to the surface, and that too was hard going. Meanwhile, pilgrimage was not the pious fantasy I had imagined. Dreams of scenic solitude in the Spanish countryside more often than not had to yield to the reality of hordes of wandering 20-some backpackers, sweaty and jostling in the shoulder of twisting highway roads as cars whizzed past us. Utter futility. Why was I doing this? Why were any of us doing this? One foot in front of the other. Just this next mile (or kilometre), this next stretch to that hill out there, just this step.
Pilgrims practice relying on God, and this dependence is enacted by relying on other people. More than anything I became a pilgrim by receiving the devastating heart-cracking hospitality of strangers. Cold tea and cookies baked by nuns to greet us at the hostel after a parched day. The lady at a roadside stand who filled an honest-to-god film canister with precisely the amount of shampoo I wanted to carry. A waiter who, after weeks of sugary café con leche and pastries in the morning agreed to cook up eggs and toast and jamón even though he could not comprehend why anyone would want to eat that for breakfast. These kindnesses, they were not anything I could explain. It was tenderness I could not account for, with no way I could pay it back. I just had to let them be a blessing to me. And in that blessing I felt lighter, freer, stronger though sunburnt, and more trusting. In the echo of the Lord’s words to Abram, I started to believe in an embodied way that I was on a journey, where God would provide. My efforts to provide for myself were keeping me stuck. Leave your country, leave your comforts, your habits of mind behind—they trap you just as much as they console you—and go to the land that I will show you.
I started to feel my way into an unburdening, becoming a pilgrim, leaving home behind. Country and kindred and all the various masters’ houses notoriously feed us twisted stories about who we are that hinge our worth on external things. It’s a lie. We are each infinitely precious, beloved of God, created by love and for love, and so there is no true fulfillment to be found out there, in external things apart from the effervescent ever-present shining love of God humming steadily in the pulse of all things. Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, O Lord. St. Augustine. Or, since we’re still in Spain, St. Teresa of Avila: The one who has God lacks nothing; only God suffices. Solo dios basta. Only God is enough.
Only God is enough. Everything else, country-kindred-father’s-houses, comes up short. And it’s worth looking at exactly the ways we’re held captive there. Call it power, possessions, and prestige, that’s the postage stamp version of our hopeless programs for happiness. Power: What can you accomplish, what do you control? Possessions: What do you own, what have you secured? Prestige: How do other people see you? How can you win praise and escape blame? Some version of one of these questions runs in the background of each of our lives, ticking away automatically, running people places events through its little mechanical filter, sifting them accordingly, tempting us away from unconditional baptismal belovedness.
Freedom, new life reborn in Christ, starts in heeding God’s call into the unknown. What we know is very much framing the problem! The Lord says, Go from your country to the land that I will show you. Life in that country under those limiting stories is killing you—step outside into the desert and let it all come undone. Trust me, and I will show you the path of life. Unburden yourselves and take up my easy yoke, Jesus says. No bag, no staff, just the sandals on your dusty feet.
I remember about three weeks into my long walk, I started to delight in how much I didn’t need. Something was coming undone—I was never a Boy Scout (which I felt as a great unfairness) but I still like to be prepared. It’s a way of keeping myself safe, safe on my own: possessions and know-how and hyper-independence as a defense against what’s unpredictable. This fear that I can’t trust anyone will be there to care for me has its own specific twists in of my own history of course. And walking the Way, that defense started to loosen up. That temptation to source myself in external possessions faded. I started to delight in how very unprepared I could be. I didn’t really need that much stuff anyway, it turned out. I started to leave things in the free boxes at the hostels—do I really need 3 T-shirts? Probably just two! One to wear while I wash the other. And really, how many kinds of soap does a girl need? Shampoo and conditioner and laundry soap… turns out if pressed you can make regular bar soap do all of those jobs. (I will admit the effect on my hair was not becoming.) And did I really need the historical guidebook describing the Camino? I was actually there walking it, with the sunburn to prove it, experiencing it for myself, with signs and people in the actual places to answer any questions. Into the free box went the guidebook. I lost my handy first aid kit, too, left behind while patching blisters one day. It turned out my fellow pilgrims were happy to share with me. I remember exclaiming, “I really think I could lose absolutely everything except my map and still be totally fine!” I believe I mentioned James has a sense of humor. The next day, somewhere on a deserted 15-mile stretch, the entirety of which I spent furiously batting at the horse flies trailing me, my map made its escape from the elastic side pocket of my backpack, never to be seen again. And at that point I could actually appreciate the constant blue and yellow arrows in the shape of the pilgrim’s shell marking the entire 500-mile route. I didn’t need a map, either. Others had traveled this Way before.
When I arrived in Santiago a few days later, it was with my own pilgrim’s shell clanking against an almost empty backpack. We sat in the plaza in front of the cathedral for hours, me and all the friends I hadn’t wanted to make, dirty, smelly, visibly worse for the wear, and so, so content. The entire cathedral was covered in orange tape. It was all under construction. That didn’t matter, seemed fitting, actually. Sitting in that plaza was the kingdom of heaven, no question. Born from above. Not by our own efforts but simply receiving moment by moment what God was giving.
Nicodemus, that teacher of Israel with the great reputation, had to come to Jesus by night. He had to lose the posture of expertise and let his own knowing go dark, so that his thirst for the living God could be answered. Answered not in words, but with relationship. We see him here, at the outset of his journey, being called to leave the country of his intellect. And we see him again, at the end of the Gospel of John, after Jesus has been crucified, when he joins Joseph of Arimathea to receive the wounded body of Jesus, anoint him with oil and spiced and wrap him in linens and lay him in the tomb. No more skeptical, aloof Nicodemus, hiding in shadow. In the end he’s offering incredibly intimate, risky, trusting, flesh-and-blood care to someone he loves, when everything he thought he knew has dissolved. That’s what faithfulness looks like.
And that’s the intimacy with God all of us are invited into. I’m very wary that now you’ll think you need to go to Spain. The Camino’s great, but God is right here! Christian faith is a path, we are all people of the Way—that’s what the first Christians called themselves, people of the Way. Life is a pilgrimage, Lent is a journey through the desert, all of this applies to all of us. There is no division between special spiritual people and then the rest of us dunces. The call to holiness is universal, and it’s not a call to try harder or be better. It’s a call to leave home, lose our maps and trust God, God who loves the world and sends Jesus to save the world as he walks with us, into the country that God will show us.
So I want to pray that Pilgrim’s blessing I heard so many times over all of us as pilgrims on our Lenten journey:
O God, who brought your servant Abraham
out of the land of the Chaldeans,
protecting him in his wanderings,
who guided the Hebrew people across the desert,
we ask that you watch over us, your servants,
as we walk in the love of your name.
Be for us our companion on the walk,
Our guide at the crossroads,
Our breath in our weariness,
Our protection in danger,
Our refuge on the way,
Our shade in the heat,
Our light in the darkness,
Our consolation in our discouragements,
And our strength in our intentions.
May our intention on this journey be simply to drink deeply from the fountain of living water that is the love of God. That is after all what the pilgrim’s shell is for. Amen.