Pilgrim Food 2011

Going slow the last two weeks. Not a convenient time to be sick or diminished. You know, at Christmas when you want to take care of everyone? Feed them, love them, give them brilliant gifts.

I have a lot of scraps stuck in my Bible; yesterday one I hadn’t read in a long time fell out.

Pensees from a NYC church bulletin:

I am a poor wayfaring stranger,

While traveling through this world of woe.

Yet there’s no sickness, toil nor danger

In that bright world to which I go.

I’m going there to see my Father;

I’m going there no more to roam.

   I’m only going over Jordan,

   I’m only going over home.

                  - folk spiritual

  

Everyone is on one sort of journey or another: failure to recognize this is to fail to be human and to suffer great deprivation. Walker Percy, the late novelist and metaphysician, once said in conversation, “I have learned that the most important difference between people is between those for whom life is a quest and those for whom it is not.” The vision of a quest confers meaning on our lives. It enables us to see all that happens as moving us closer to or further from our goal, and to make distinctions between what helps and hinders us in our journey.

                 -  Diogenes Allen Spiritual Theology

Christ has planted his Table like an oasis along our pathway, in order that when we become weary with travel, weak and hungry in our souls, discouraged and wounded because of our false steps, stumbling and failing, we may then enter there and be refreshed with the living Bread of Life.

                  -  Carl Olof Rosenius (1816-1868). A Lutheran lay preacher on the Eucharist as the viaticum, the pilgrim’s food

In joy, in adversity, in this new year may you be nourished and blessed by God's good hand. Thinking of many of you I know who stop here for a minute or two.