The image of the pilgrim anchors the biblical vision for the life of the creature who names the biblical God as Lord. Robert Crouse, the underappreciated scholar-priest who was centered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, made this the focus of a series of retreat talks he gave that form the basis Images of Pilgrimage (Darton, Longman, Todd), the first volume of his works. One of the overlooked features of a pilgrimage is the way it exposes the fragility of our bodies.
A traditional pilgrimage makes little to no use of technological transport. Instead, each person’s body is the means of passage. This sort of travel peculiarly exposes the pilgrim’s body to nature. The power of nature and the dependency of the human body find themselves in an uncharacteristic relationship to one another, and both are changed.
The engine for the pilgrim’s journey is one’s spiritual longing for the Final End, the Face of the Beloved Son, shining in resplendent glory. This longing is transfigured by a particular geographic end: the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket for those in The Canterbury Tales; the Holy Island of Lindisfarne; the beach near the port town of Sirte, Libya, where 21 Coptic martyrs were killed in February of 2015. To walk such a journey — wondering how far they will make it today, where they will sleep, what they will eat — puts the pilgrims in touch with their bodies and with their mortality in a way that is not just novel, but often revelatory.
Advent asks us to look at the paradox of God’s pilgrimage. The Christian theological tradition holds together many seeming contradictions in a way that theoretical physicists will recognize. The unmoved Mover, the perfectly simple God, moves from the realm of the non-physical and the unseen to the world of materiality that he himself has made. And in so doing, this God takes that matter irrevocably into himself. Of all the forms of matter that our Lord could take, he chooses one of the most delicate and fragile. Pregnancies in the Ancient Near East, of course, were exponentially more fraught with uncertainty than now. I never cease to be amazed when I watch a parent holding an infant in the grocery store or at church. My mind often drifts to the hundreds of things that must be done that very day just to keep this vulnerable infant breathing, let alone healthy.
And yet the Uncontainable chooses to save the world by being contained in the body of Israel’s most faithful Daughter. After the lengthiest traverse in the history of the world — “he came down to earth from heaven” — he does not shield himself from a king who doesn’t even pause before slaughtering all the baby boys within a single city. The Holy Parents are directed to shield little Yeshua by a flight into Egypt — now his second pilgrimage — to visit the land where his forebears were oppressed but where he will find shelter. The Father’s eternal Word chooses to remain silent for almost all of his first 30 years.
Whether we look inside or out, we are confronted by an overwhelming fragility: anxiety, loneliness, uncertainty, and doubt within ourselves; the deplorable violence inflicted on the bodies of women and men, girls and boys, in Israel and Gaza, in Ukraine, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, North Korea; the shortage of housing that normal people can afford all over the world. Take 60 seconds and you can easily triple this list. In chorus with every helpless victim, the Church sings,
Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee.
Only the God who, having first raised up Israel out of Egypt and sent his first Light into the world, has a Word that can console, assuage, and redeem. Not only does he destroy death by death. He redeems all our fragilities in his helpless, fragile frame. And in response to this, our tongues cannot keep silent.
Redeemer of the nations, come;
Reveal yourself in virgin birth,
The birth which ages all adore,
A wondrous birth, befitting God.
