On the Way to the Way 4: Standing on Holy Ground, Everywhere

We begin today with a quote from pg. 90 of the The Sacred Journey by Charles Foster.

"Fetish Worship"? Because they climb a staircase of dubious historicity? Hardly. We all worship our own synthetic images of God. Growing Christian maturity simply means that the images become incrementally less inadequate. "[God] is the great iconoclast," C.S. Lewis truly wrote. He is constantly smashing up the images we have of him. And anyway, no one is in any danger of confusing God with a staircase or a saint's mummified head. There's a real and malignant danger of confusing God with the things that Scripture says about him.

Foster writes this when talking about the Scala Sancta [Holy Staircase] in Rome that is believed [most likely incorrectly] to be the stairs that led to Pilate's Praetorium which supposedly Jesus walked up and down going to and leaving his 'trial'.

Tomorrow I will be preaching out of 1 Samuel 16 the story of the anointing of David as the future king of Israel as well as David being chosen as Saul musical soother and armor-bearer. 

What do these two things have to do with each other? Fair Question.

I see it this way. Samuel first thinks that David's older brother would be selected the next king because he fit the role. God told Samuel that God does not look at people the way that we do, so one after another after another of David's brothers are looked at and discarded until David is called back from the field and chosen.

In the same way, through the ages we have chosen things/places/events that we consider more holy than others. For some it may be a grand cathedral [like St. Peter's Basilica or the Brooklyn Tabernacle], for others a battlefield [like Ghettysburgh or Normandy] for some its a destination after a 500 mile walk [like the remains of St. James] for some its a place where they feel they experienced God. None of these are wrong if we are seeking with the correct heart. 

Remember when Moses was wandering the desert and he came upon a bush that was burning but not consumed? Remember what God told him? Moses was standing on holy ground. Most likely it was a patch of land that Moses had passed a hundred times, with the same bush growing there [probably not on fire each time unless Moses was extremely unobservant]. Had the land just become Holy? Or had the land always been Holy and Moses was now just being told it was. Are any of those places/events/things really holier than any other place/event/thing? I can't definitively answer one way or the other, but may guess is no, each spot is holy, we just need to open our eyes to it.

So why pilgrimage? To some extent with an understanding that all ground is holy I should be able to walk outside my door [or stay inside] and be as close to God as I would be if I took a long way across Spain. But there is still that part of me that longs for the journey, it is my belief that the journey is what is important, not the destination. So I could walk 500 miles anywhere, I just think this particular journey is the journey for me.

Buen Camino,
Pastor K