I’ve often thought how all the halls of fame in American sports are in crazy locations. The most famous one, the Baseball Hall of Fame, is in Cooperstown New York…not exactly a town where we find ourselves passing through the airport. The Football Hall of Fame is in Canton, Ohio, a town so obscure it makes Cooperstown look like Boston or Chicago. The Basketball Hall of Fame is in Springfield, Massachusetts, the home of James Naismith, its inventor. The less mainstream sports seem to have landed their shrines in even lesser towns: U.S. hockey--Eveleth, Minnesota; tennis--Newport, Rhode Island; racquetball--Gresham, Oregon.
The bottom line is if you are a sports nut who wants to get to a hall of fame, you have to set out to go there. It has to be a pilgrimage. You have to get in a car, get out a map, and journey to the holy shrine of Cooperstown or Canton or wherever. You ain’t gettin’ there by accident; it’s going to take some planning and some traveling….it’s going to take a pilgrimage.
My Muslim friends in Uganda understood very well the notion of pilgrimage. One of the great signs of true faith was whether someone had gained the name “Haaj” by completing the journey to Mecca at some point in his/her life. It’s the duty of every good Muslim to do it at least once, and that’s quite a tall order if you are an impoverished Ugandan and have no passport.
Certainly pilgrimages in other faiths can show us how dangerous and burdensome such “requirements” can be, and we should rejoice that our God made the journey, the pilgrimage to a foreign land, once and for all on our behalf. Yet there is an aspect to our Christian walk that is a pilgrimage. The idea that we are on a journey, not arrived, not settled or comfortable, is one that is evident throughout scripture. In fact, I would suggest a good portion of our troubles and woes in faith come when we think we have arrived and start building fences that God never intended we build. The with-God life is a life of pilgrimage.
Mark
The bottom line is if you are a sports nut who wants to get to a hall of fame, you have to set out to go there. It has to be a pilgrimage. You have to get in a car, get out a map, and journey to the holy shrine of Cooperstown or Canton or wherever. You ain’t gettin’ there by accident; it’s going to take some planning and some traveling….it’s going to take a pilgrimage.
My Muslim friends in Uganda understood very well the notion of pilgrimage. One of the great signs of true faith was whether someone had gained the name “Haaj” by completing the journey to Mecca at some point in his/her life. It’s the duty of every good Muslim to do it at least once, and that’s quite a tall order if you are an impoverished Ugandan and have no passport.
Certainly pilgrimages in other faiths can show us how dangerous and burdensome such “requirements” can be, and we should rejoice that our God made the journey, the pilgrimage to a foreign land, once and for all on our behalf. Yet there is an aspect to our Christian walk that is a pilgrimage. The idea that we are on a journey, not arrived, not settled or comfortable, is one that is evident throughout scripture. In fact, I would suggest a good portion of our troubles and woes in faith come when we think we have arrived and start building fences that God never intended we build. The with-God life is a life of pilgrimage.
Mark
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