Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

The worshipping life is a journey that leads to the experience of paradise. We discover by God's grace that we have always been in our Father's house and heart.

The Rev. Ralph Peterson interim pastor, St. Mark's, 1995-96

It was at St. Mark's that I began to think of my life as a pilgrimage. I'd encountered this concept years earlier - and rejected it.

It was in 1955, as my depression deepened, that John's parents had come out from the city for dinner. With the heightened perception of the blind, Dad Sherrill was unusually sensitive to people's moods. His question to me that day, however, seemed dismally unrelated to mine.

"Have you ever heard," he asked, "about the treadmill, the saga, and the pilgrimage?"

When I said I had not, he explained that these were the three basic ways of looking at our lives. The treadmill sees existence as meaningless, an endless round of activity repeated over and over. I looked at the sink full of dishes, the laundry piled on the washing machine. I could relate to treadmills!

The saga, he went on, while agreeing that life is basically without purpose, sees nobility in the way people cope. Heroes of all cultures, from Homer's Ulysses to John Henry who died with a hammer in his hand, live out the drama of human courage. Nothing heroic, I thought, in my defeat before ordinary domestic challenges.

Only in the pilgrimage, Dad concluded, is life, all of it, past and present, the good, the bad, the seemingly indifferent, seen as going somewhere. The pilgrim is not simply reacting to events around him or her - a child with mumps, the next payment due on the car - but seeing beyond and through these things to a goal. The particulars of daily life become stepping stones to a destination.

In 1955 the concept of pilgrimage was even more alien to me than the heroics of a saga. How could I concern myself with some way-in-the-future goal? My problem was how to get through the next twenty-four hours.

The conversation stuck in my mind, however, and as the clouds began to lift, I started to read about pilgrims, especially accounts from the Middle Ages, when pilgrimage meant a literal journey. There were three principal destinations, I discovered, for the millions who took to the roads - Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela.

Like many seekers, John and I, in time, went to Rome and Jerusalem. But these trips, in medieval times, would not have made us pilgrims. People who'd been to Rome were "romeros," those who went to Jerusalem, "palmers," from the palm branches they brought back. Only travelers to the remote shrine of St. James at Compostela in the northwest corner of Spain were "pilgrims."