It was a delight to see you on Sunday, in person, feel the spirit of Spring taking root, a sense of expectation and wonder. If you missed the worship time, here it is again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M49aHWycjms
Saturday was an all-day journey with the Lawley family, an early drive to PEI for Ross’ committal service (a 50 car procession awaited us in Stanhope), sharing a reception at a nearby eatery. I invited the large crowd at the cemetery to take handfuls of earth, taken from places Ross walked. Indigenous peoples share the Spirit of landscape, I have been slow to this realization, but I am learning. Walking where others have found joy can bring them to us in what Celts reference as “thin places”, when heaven and earth meet in a sacred moment. At the reception Tom, a friend of Ross, shared with me his understanding of “sauntering”.
Henry David Thoreau, reflecting on the verb “to saunter,” suggested two possible word origins. Sans terre, meaning “without land or a home,” describes those who are perpetually on the road, literally or metaphorically. Sainte Terre, meaning “Holy Land,” was applied in the Middle Ages to pilgrims with a specific destination, on their way to the place where the Sacred has uniquely showed itself. Anyone who has been on pilgrimage, or who understands life itself to be one great pilgrimage, would acknowledge both meanings at work in their own sauntering.
Abraham and Sarah were called to abandon country, home, and kindred; the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness; the displaced Israelites weeping by the rivers of Babylon; Jesus having no place to lay his head; Paul continuously on the move or on the run: so many biblical stories display an abiding sense of being on the way to God knows where. As Frederick Buechner famously describes it, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
We may not always know where the road leads or what will happen along the way. For every saunterer, the road itself, with its perpetual motion “away from here” toward the land of promise, provides a greater sense of belonging than whatever we left behind. I walk, therefore I am. As Catherine of Siena put it, “All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, ‘I am the Way.’” Moving forward. Sauntering in peace.