On the Way: 100 Reflections on the Journey of Faith

By James J. Rawls

On the Way is a book of reflections on one man’s journey of faith. Its origins lie in the universal longing of humankind for something beyond ourselves, for something once present that has diminished with the passing of time. This presence now is sensed only fleetingly, yet the longing persists. The title of the book has a double meaning. On the Way refers to the journey of faith, our lifelong pilgrimage from God and to God. But it also points to the one who leads us on this journey, the one who says: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

On the Way is a collection of one hundred devotional readings, reminiscent of Spurgeon’s classic Morning and Evening Daily Readings and the Benedictine Lectio Divina. It is intended to stir within the reader some forward movement in their own journey of faith.

What people are saying about On the Way:

“James J. Rawls draws on wisdom from across the ages. Here he shares his ongoing conversation with these many voices within the framework of a deep personal and practical faith. This book is a great gift and blessing!”
—The Rt. Rev. Barry L. Beisner, VII Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California

“This is a wonderful book—beautifully written, insightful, and filled with wisdom and warmth.”
—Gil Bailie, founder of The Cornerstone Forum and author of God’s Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love (2016)

“James Rawls has a capacity for clarity of thought and graceful articulation that the reader will find fully present in these meditations. Savor, consume and digest them. Repeat again and again.”
—The Rev. L. Ann Hallisey, D.Min., Professional Coach and Organization Consultant, former Dean of Students, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: May 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781973628644

James J. Rawls

James J. Rawls is a graduate of Stanford University and received his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Author or editor of more than two dozen books, he is also a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and founder of an international pilgrimage ministry. He currently serves as a staff historian aboard expedition ships dedicated to adventure travel worldwide. He and his wife Linda divide their time between Northern California and London.

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Copyright © 2018 James J. Rawls.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Author photo courtesy of Becky Hale, Studio Photographer, National Geographic.

Excerpts from The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding are from FOUR QUARTETS by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1941, 1942 by T. S. Eliot; Copyright © renewed, 1969, 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Revelation from THE COMPLETE STORIES by Flannery O’Connor. Copyright © 1971 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again, from THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lyrics by Charles Hart, Additional Lyrics by Richard Stilgoe, © Copyright 1986 Andrew Lloyd Webber licensed to The Really Useful Group Ltd., International Copyright Secured, All Rights reserved, Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-9736-2865-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-2866-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-2864-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905848

WestBow Press rev. date: 05/25/2018

Contents

Introduction

1 Prepare the Way of the Lord

2 Wilderness

3 The Coming of the Light

4 ¡Bienvenido!

5 Christmas

6 Contingency

7 In the Flesh

8 The Turning of the Year

9 A Thousand Epiphanies

10 Another Road

11 Water and the Spirit

12 Abide with Me

13 The Last Temptation

14 The Turning Point

15 Gaudeamus Igitur

16 Head, Hands, Heart

17 Living among Scorpions and Thorns

18 Fears Relieved

19 Follow Me

20 Deep Water

21 The Gospel as Dance

22 Blessed Saints

23 The Call

24 The Fruit of the Spirit

25 Kinfolk

26 On Belay

27 Coming Home

28 Costly Grace

29 Kindness and the Kingdom

30 Little Things

31 Sempervirens

32 The Tree of Faith

33 Passing Through

34 The Ways of Paradox

35 The Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever

36 Compassion

37 In His Name

38 On Pilgrimage

39 A Deserted Place

40 A Peak Experience

41 The Glory of the Lord

42 Mountains and Towers

43 The Way of the Cross

44 The Story of Salvation

45 Filled or Fulfilled?

46 The Living Bread

47 The Good Shepherd

48 Castaways

49 Reconciliation

50 Expectancy

51 Commitment

52 The Church

53 Surrender

54 Priorities

55 On the Watching of Birds

56 Dressed for Action

57 The Whole World

58 The Dishonest Steward

59 A Rich Man

60 Other Sheep

61 Two Paths

62 Do You Believe This?

63 The Most Difficult Thing in the Universe

64 The Cornerstone

65 Pray Always

66 Seals and Seekers

67 First Fruits

68 Deep Simplicity

69 Fruit of the Spirit

70 Full Lamps

71 A Plumb Line

72 Widows

73 Bearing Fruit

74 How to Travel

75 The Way, the Truth, the Life

76 Hold Fast

77 Piebald

78 Loving Back

79 Ubi Caritas

80 On Balance

81 Cleaning Windows

82 Cloaks and Branches

83 A New Commandment

84 A Community of Love

85 In Remembrance

86 The Middle Virtue

87 Be Still

88 The Tree of Life

89 Good Friday

90 Chiaroscuro

91 The Light of Christ

92 The Theology of Laughter

93 The Decisive Moment

94 A New Vocabulary

95 Absence Makes the Heart

96 A Way Through

97 Not Drunk

98 To the Heart

99 A Question of Sovereignty

100 The Trinity

Appendix

Endnotes

About the Author

Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations herein are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture verses marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible. Those marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Images courtesy of: p. xxv, Cozy nook/Shutterstock.com; p. 26, Koshevnyk/Shutterstock.com; p. 65, Duda Vasilii/Shutterstock.com; p. 64, Susan Minker, MD; p. 69, Fona/Shutterstock.com; p. 84, gomolach/Shutterstock.com; p. 110, Gallinago_media/Shutterstock.com; p. 126, Duda Vasilii/Shutterstock.com; p. 137, Duda Vasilii/Shutterstock.com; p. 179, Koshevnyk/Shutterstock.com; p. 184, Gallinago_media/Shutterstock.com; p. 184, Susan Minker, MD; p. 185, AlexHliv/Shutterstock.com; p. 185, mohinimurti/Shutterstock.com; p. 255, GranadaStock/Shutterstock.com; p. 265, Susan Minker, MD; p. 278, SvartKat/Shutterstock.com; p. 283, YIK2007/Shutterstock.com; p. 288, Gallinago_media/Shutterstock.com; p. 306, Luccia/Shutterstock.com; p. 331, Cozy nook/Shutterstock.com.

For Asher and Brighton

Ego sum via et veritas et vita.

Introduction

On the Way is a book of reflections on one man’s journey of faith. Its origins lie in the universal longing of humankind for something beyond ourselves, for something once present that has diminished with the passing of time. This presence now is sensed only fleetingly, as in a sideways glance or the barest hint of a waning fragrance, its dimming caused by the passage of time in our individual lives or by the collective passage of the ages. Yet the longing persists.

Twentieth-century Nobel laureate philosopher and atheist Bertrand Russell expresses most poignantly this universal longing: The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain, a curious, wild pain, a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite. … I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found—but the love of it is my life.

A millennium and a half earlier, another ardent philosopher confessed a similar pain. I carried about me a cut and bleeding soul that could not be carried by me, and where I could put it, I could not discover, writes Saint Augustine of Hippo. Not in pleasant groves, not in games and singing, nor in the fragrant corners of a garden … I remained a haunted spot, which gave me no rest, from which I could not escape. Then, at long last, this seeker discovers the object of his quest: Man is one of your creatures, Lord, and his instinct is to praise you. … The thought of you stirs us so deeply that we cannot be content unless we praise you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.

My own journey of faith leads me to affirm along with Augustine that the restless seeking within us is a gift from our loving Creator. It is a kindling of our desire for the ultimate truth that is God, a desire we are helpless to fulfill with anything other than the one who engenders the seeking. Seventeenth-century French physicist and theologian Blaise Pascal asks,

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him … though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

English Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, whose words will appear throughout the reflections that follow, argues that it is the lingering imprint of God in humankind that drives us to desire full communion with the one in whose image and likeness we are created. In a masterful sermon called The Weight of Glory, preached before a congregation at Oxford in the early days of World War II, Lewis refers to this desire as a longing for something beyond. In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each of you. This deep and profound longing is beyond expression; it remains ineffable. In addressing such matters, Lewis by necessity speaks elliptically and metaphorically. His words have a cumulative effect of invoking a great mystery. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? he asks. Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.

This is a book for all who long for something beyond the world you and I share today. And what kind of world do we share? It is most decidedly a disenchanted world.

Since at least the heady days of the Enlightenment, we who claim Western civilization as our birthright have celebrated steady advances in scientific discovery and technological innovation. Through rational thought and application of the scientific method, there seemed no limit to what we could achieve. Progress toward an ever brighter future bred an unshakable optimism among the peoples of the First World. Then came the First World War. That cataclysm of massive human destruction was just the opening act, of course, of an era of escalating horrors. The depravity of our species proved as resistant as ever to the nostrums of amelioration. The last century’s advent of potential nuclear annihilation was matched in our own by global habitat devastation caused by the very technologies we once celebrated. As American essayist Jonathan Franzen comments, The great hope of the Enlightenment—that human rationality would enable us to transcend our evolutionary limitations—has taken a beating from wars and genocides, but only now, on the problem of climate change, has it founded altogether.

The Enlightenment engendered a faith in progress, now foundering, even as it welcomed the retreat of religious faith. You may remember the reply of an eighteenth-century French mathematician when asked about God’s role in his scientific worldview: I have no need of that hypothesis. Contemporary Scottish philosopher David Hume contended that works of metaphysics, works addressing questions unanswerable by science, should be tossed into the flames, because they contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

It is difficult to say when the disenchantment of the modern world began, but there can be little doubt that a profession of faith today is an act of countercultural defiance. Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach (1867) is a mournful epitaph for the Sea of Faith that once lay full round the earth’s shore.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

The hallmark of modernity is skepticism in the face of the sacred. Italian sociologist S. S. Acquaviva, author of The Decline of the Sacred in Industrial Society (1979), puts the matter bluntly:

From the religious point of view, humanity has entered a long night that will become darker and darker with the passing of the generations, and of which no end can yet be seen. It is a night in which there seems to be no place for a conception of God, or for a sense of the sacred, and in which ancient ways of giving a significance to our own existence are become increasingly untenable.

Austrian-born Christian sociologist Peter Berger concurs: If anything characterizes modernity it is the loss of the sense of transcendence—of a reality that exceeds and encompasses our everyday affairs.

The twenty-first century’s four horsemen of the new atheism—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett—have ridden to considerable fame in their campaign to expose religious faith as untenable superstition. The God question has spawned gladiator-like encounters between skeptics and believers on college campuses and countless online forums. Not surprisingly, the defenders of faith have been fair game for ridicule in popular culture. I don’t know why they call it The God Question, comments one bemused British comedian. He continues as follows:

Research at Cambridge and other leading universities has shown there’s simply no question about it. He doesn’t … exist. I’m very sorry, but to a person of above-average intelligence, the very notion that somewhere up in the sky there’s a grumpy old man saying You are wrong to think that! strikes me as utterly ludicrous.

And yet—and yet—longing for the sacred and seeking the transcendent remains present all around. The thirst for ultimate truth has yet to be quenched by the Modern Project. The still small voice continues to kindle our desire for something more, something beyond. The God-shaped vacuum still yearns for fulfillment. Virginian Kelly Cherry’s poem The Same Rose (1993) offers a hopeful rejoinder to the sense of retreat in Arnold’s Dover Beach.

For so long we kept trying to

Kill the divine in ourselves

With every possible instrument of destruction,

Tangible and intangible,

But the divine kept resurrecting itself

Quite in spite of us.

One is tempted to add and quite in spite of the church. I say this with the utmost affection for the ministry of the church. As will be evident throughout the reflections of On the Way, I am wedded to the church and remain unshaken in my loyalty to it. I have been a member of several vibrant worshipping communities at home and abroad, counseled and inspired by faithful ministers of the gospel.

So it is my heart is saddened when I consider how far the church has fallen from its historic mission. Just as the sense of the sacred is absent in the culture at large, its presence is far too rare in the one institution that should be its special preserve. Much of the mainstream church neuters itself in its rush to remain relevant in an age of triumphant secularism and rampant consumerism. Well-meaning clergy have jettisoned orthodoxy as so much embarrassing baggage. The church too often becomes an innocuous irrelevancy, enervated by mediocrity and apathy and an unseemly timidity. Welsh poet and Anglican priest R. S. Thomas, a fierce critic of modernity, understands well the appeal of the simple rural chapels of his homeland where one might see a preacher caught fire and where the people were narrow but saved / in a way that men are not now.

Berkeley religious studies scholar Huston Smith, author of a magisterial survey of world religions and no defender of fundamentalism, has issued a passionate cri de cœur for his beloved church to embrace the orthodox fundamentals of its faith. In The Soul of Christianity (2005), Smith takes aim at mainstream churches that have transformed theology into ethical philosophy, and piety into morality. What future is there for a church in which the Divine mystery is reduced to nothing more than social agenda? Liberal churches, he concludes, are digging their own graves, for without a robust, emphatically theistic worldview to work within, they have nothing to offer their members except rallying cries to be good. Smith quotes novelist Saul Bellow on the disastrous consequences of the capitulation to secularism:

It is hard to see how modern man can survive on what he now gets from his conscious life—now that there is a kind of veto against impermissible thoughts, the most impermissible being the notion that man might have a spiritual life he is not conscious of which reaches out for transcendence.

My own Christian denomination, the Episcopal Church, is among those mainstream churches subject to withering criticism from advocates for reform and revival. As part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, we Episcopalians have been in the eye of the storm among dissident factions confronting modernity. My position among these factions is ambiguous; no doubt my conservative friends consider me too liberal while my liberal friends think me too conservative. Perhaps this is why I feel at home among Anglicans, a people professing to follow the via media, the middle way. But this middling position only intensifies the misery as divisions within the body of Christ widen. Despair deepens.

And yet—and yet—I am mightily encouraged by the voices among us who continue to speak truth with an astonishing clarity. In the pages that follow, these voices often will be heard. Alan Jones, former dean of San Francisco’s Episcopal cathedral, is the author of a series of absolutely fundamental books that have been constant companions on my journey of faith. Among these are Journey into Christ (1977), Soul Making (1985), Passion for Pilgrimage (1989), and Sacrifice and Delight (1992). In this last volume, Dean Jones takes aim at those in the church who would domesticate the very idea of holiness. We have substituted niceness for holiness … as a way of neutralizing our reaction to the deep encounter with the holy.

Likewise the works of Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, have been a source of continual inspiration. In his preface to a little book titled Anglicanism: The Answer to Modernity (2003), Williams characterizes modernity as "an atmosphere in which people become increasingly formless, cut off from what could give their lives in any given present moment some kind of lasting intelligibility. Anglicanism is well suited to providing that meaning because it takes seriously the challenges of modernity and engages in dialogue with it. The truth is ours to proclaim, because we Anglicans have a confidence about the categories of classical orthodox doctrine and ethics, and about the resources of Holy Scripture." May it be so!

I am particularly encouraged by the 2015 election of Chicago native Michael Curry as the first African American presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. No one ever has charged this Episcopalian with innocuous irrelevancy or unseemly timidity! He is unambiguously committed to the orthodoxy of the Christian faith, and he proclaims the message of Christ with boldness. Michael is a disciple of Jesus Christ, one of his colleagues observes. He can say the creeds without crossing his fingers. Knowing full well the challenges before him, Bishop Curry sees his mission clearly: At a deep level I am suggesting a church-wide spiritual revival of the Christian faith in the Episcopal way of being disciples of Jesus.

If I were to identify myself within the maelstrom of contemporary theological trends, I would find a congeniality among those who share a skepticism about the sufficiency of the liberal worldview. Associated initially with Yale Divinity School in the 1980s, postliberal theologians question the Enlightenment’s appeal to a universal rationality and the liberal assumption that a core experience of the transcendent informs equally all world religions. Longing for transcendence is part of the universal human experience—absolutely—but I have come to believe that the ultimate fulfillment of that longing lies in the revelation of God in the unique person of Jesus Christ. In this respect, argues Anglican theologian Alister McGrath, "postliberalism reintroduces a strong emphasis on the particularity of the Christian faith, in reaction against the strongly homogenizing tendencies of liberalism, in its abortive attempt to make theory (that all religions are saying the same thing) and observation (that the religions are different) coincide."

Long before the term postliberalism came into vogue, I was attracted to the orthodox wisdom of one of my earliest spiritual mentors. While yet an undergraduate at Stanford University, I had the good fortune to become acquainted with Presbyterian theologian Robert McAfee Brown. Already in the 1960s, Professor Brown was distancing himself from liberal twentieth century men intent on abandoning orthodoxy in pursuit of a spurious relevancy. In one of his many pronouncements of faith, he counted himself among those who are trying to be evangelical Christians faithful to the gospel in all the scandal of its particularity as it speaks to us through the pages of the New Testament. In the spirit of this Christian scandal of particularity, I offer this book of reflections on one man’s journey of faith.

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It seems I have been on the move since childhood, both in the externals of my life and in my innermost restless heart. My father was a career army officer, so our young family moved constantly across the country, traveling from one posting to another. These multiple cross-country jaunts stirred within me a profound joy of being out on the road, on the way toward some new home or destination.

Geographic travel eventually spurred my interest in traveling through time. In due course I became an academic historian, probing the far reaches of the human experience, even as I sought new opportunities for visiting remote lands. While teaching at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, I incorporated my love of travel into the curriculum. I developed travel-study courses, sending students out on the road with CDs of prerecorded historical commentaries. Later I began serving as a lecturer on expedition ships, traveling worldwide with an observant mindfulness of historical realities and the wonders of the natural world, visiting every continent, every ocean. I developed a keen interest in bird-watching, an avocation that has sent me on countless excursions to the most out-of-the-way places.

There was a nascent spirituality in all this traveling, but it was hidden in the secluded background of my professional life. Then somewhere around midcareer, I wanted to bring what was implicit into more explicit expression. I began taking courses in theology and spirituality at Berkeley, London, and Oxford; I became licensed as a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church. Eventually I brought the strains of my peripatetic life together in a lay ministry I called On Pilgrimage, an enterprise informed by my interests in travel, history, and spirituality. In partnership with companionable clergy friends, I began leading pilgrimages to sacred sites in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Spain, and the Holy Land. Inspired by Rick Steves’s Travel as a Political Act (2009), I appropriated travel as a spiritual act.

Drawing upon Phil Cousineau’s groundbreaking The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred (1998), I came to define pilgrimage as a transformative journey to a sacred center. Going on pilgrimage is sacramental travel—a journey outward as well as inward, a soulful movement into a heightened awareness of God’s graceful presence. A pilgrimage is a journey both physical and metaphysical.

I began to see pilgrimage as an apt metaphor for our lifelong journey of faith. Daniel H. Martins, Episcopal bishop of Springfield, recently completed a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Upon his return, he reflected on the universality of the journey of faith and the particularity of the Christian journey:

We all come from God, and the fulfillment of our human destiny and purpose lies in our return to God. A Christian may see returning to God as a pilgrimage writ large, beginning in baptism and culminating in the Celestial Banquet. A traditional church interior reflects this mystical reality, with the baptismal font near the entrance, a place of welcome and initiation, and a central aisle leading to the altar, a place of communal feasting and adoration.

Franciscan priest Murray Bodo, author of The Place We Call Home: Spiritual Pilgrimage as a Path to God (2004), believes pilgrimages are motivated by the universal longing for an eternal home. Pilgrims seek out places where their sense of the presence of God is heightened. Pilgrimages are not about one place being more holy than another, he explains, "for God is everywhere. Making pilgrimages involves a response to something inside us that longs to move toward, that seeks the holy beyond." And more than that, a pilgrimage is a sacred symbol of what we seek not just in this life but also in the life to come.

Of all the symbolism of pilgrimage, this is the deepest, this sense of rehearsal for the soul-journey we are all making as we journey through this life to eternal life. It is a journey we hardly advert to when we are young, but which we become increasingly aware of as we age and move inextricably toward our final pilgrim goal, union with God.

Doris Donnelly, professor of theology and Wall Street Journal columnist, has written an extraordinary commentary on pilgrimage as a metaphor for the Christian journey. Her article in Spirituality Today (1992) begins with a bold declaration: Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of roots and the kingdom of motion. She focuses her attention on the latter, exploring the journey of faith to which pilgrims commit their lives. Pilgrims who undertake physical pilgrimages, Donnelly concludes, understand that it is their own interior incompleteness that leads them to seek contact with holy places and persons to do for them what they cannot do by themselves: to deliver them from fragmentation and effect a glimmer of wholeness which invariably opens unto God.

With Bishop Martins, Father Bodo, and Professor Donnelly, I believe all of life is a journey, a pilgrimage from God and to God. Our origins lie in the one who made us in the very image and likeness of our loving Creator. This is how it all began: God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Somewhere along the way we became separated from the Divinity who created us; we got distracted or forgetful, or no longer felt the need for God. A great divide opened between us and our Creator, leaving us on our own—self-reliant and (let it be said) self-absorbed.

We Christian pilgrims find this separation to be intolerable. By the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, we experience a call to come home, accepting the responsibility for having turned away and seeking God’s forgiveness and acceptance. Our journey back to God is never a simple and straight path. We find ourselves on a circuitous journey, twisting back and forth, often losing our way and then finding it again. Nor is the journey ever complete in this world. We have glimmers of our destination, but the final and complete arrival awaits us in the world to come.

This epic journey of faith is the subject of the Bible, acted and reenacted in many times and places. The journey begins with the expulsion of our progenitors from their Edenic paradise; it continues through stories of repeated exile and return to a promised homeland; and it culminates in the appearance among us of the one who bids humankind, Come, follow me. As the reflections of On the Way will reveal, my own journey of faith has been a response to this bidding. During my three score years and ten, I have traveled with a clear purpose: to become an ever more faithful follower of Jesus in the here and now, and to enter God’s nearer presence in what lies beyond. My journey has been oriented (and reoriented!) Godward, toward the loving Creator who made us all, who kindles within us a desire to seek communion with him, and whose Christ calls us to follow him in loving service one to another.

A dear friend and former Roman Catholic priest recently returned from a pilgrimage to a chapel of bones in the countryside outside of Prague. Overwhelmed by the sense of death among the tens of thousands of bones on display, he paused and considered again his own journey of faith as a disciple of Christ. He concluded that those desiccated human remains convey a visual message about all humanity, created in God’s image and likeness, with a universal calling to give love and receive love for the brief time we inhabit our bodies on earth.

That is the rub, is it not? The world you and I share today is a place we inhabit but for a brief time. With a seriousness of purpose appropriate to our brevity, we should be in earnest to address the most basic questions about the meaning of our existence. In the reflections that follow, these questions are addressed in ways that make sense to me as a follower of Jesus Christ. The questions are fundamental. They may appear naïve to some, but I believe they are ones that press upon us all.

Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, in her Map: Collected and Last Poems (2015), shares an exchange about the sort of questions addressed in the pages that follow:

How should we live? someone asked me in a letter.

I had meant to ask him

the same question.

Again, and as ever,

as may be seen above,

the most pressing questions

are naïve ones.

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It has been my great joy to be a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church for the past quarter century. The reflections in On the Way began their life as sermons, but they no longer are what they once were. Through repeated reconsiderations, the original writings have been revised to assume their present form—a series of reflections on my journey of faith, reflections intended to stir within you some forward movement in your own journey.

With the widest possible readership in mind, these reflections are by no means exclusively or even primarily for my fellow Episcopalians and Anglicans. The breadth of my religious experience includes preaching and fellowshipping at a wide variety of churches—Episcopalian, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Reformed, and Roman Catholic—and my theological education was among Jesuits at Heythrop College of the University of London and Episcopalians at Berkeley’s ecumenically minded Church Divinity School of the Pacific. The reflections in On the Way are the product of all that I have experienced. No longer sermons at all, they are not intended solely for preachers, whether lay or ordained. (However, an appendix identifying the location of each reflection on the ecclesiastical calendar will be of special interest to anyone tasked with preaching.) I come to these reflections from an Episcopal way of being a Christian—to be sure—but I honor your own point of origin as we travel together the journey of faith.

Some of these reflections are more redolent of their origins than others. In long-standing Episcopal tradition, each Sunday service includes a set of readings from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the New Testament Epistles, and the Gospels. Many of these passages from the Bible are retained in the revised reflections that follow, often in the sequence in which they were heard by the congregation and containing the words of such biblical giants as the prophet Isaiah and the apostle Paul. Each reflection begins with a brief verse or two, a passage from the Bible that may or may not have been included in the original readings. Episcopal services usually include short prayers or collects that summarize a common theme in the readings. When appropriate these collects appear as well.

Someone once remarked that every preacher has just one sermon that she or he preaches time and again, outfitted in a variety of rhetorical guises. With that in mind, you will not be surprised to discover that some expressions and admonitions appear more than once throughout the one hundred reflections of On the Way. Certain scriptural allusions, touchstones on any Christian journey, inevitably are repeated. You soon will begin to recognize them: This is the first and greatest commandment; All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; For by grace you have been saved through faith; God so loved the world …

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With a penchant for etymologies, I frequently resort to word studies to explore the meaning of basic concepts associated with the Christian faith: grace, salvation, glory, blessing, parable, conversion, reconciliation, righteousness, the kingdom of God, and (my favorite, although maligned by many) religion. I also make repeated references to favored mentors: Augustine of Hippo, Julian of Norwich, George Herbert, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Alan Jones, and Rowan Williams. Already evident in this introduction is my enjoyment of poetry, augmented in the reflections by quotations from favored hymns and songs of praise. I am easily drawn to theological reflections sprung from popular culture, from movies and contemporary drama. Appearing throughout these pages are references to such, as well as to my own worldwide travels on pilgrimage and expedition (and bird-watching excursion).

Although this is a book of reflections on my own journey of faith, its organizing principle is the life of another. The order of reflections follows the life of Jesus Christ as echoed in the liturgical seasons of the church year; woven through the narrative of this hallowed life are episodes in my own individual journey. Thus we begin with the time of preparation for the birth of Christ in the season of Advent, followed by the joys of Christmastide. The heart of On the Way is the emerging identity of Jesus as revealed in his words and deeds, arranged here in rough chronological order. The later reflections take the story through Holy Week and Eastertide, the grand climax of the church year. The book concludes with Ascension Day, Pentecost, and the final vision of Christ in glory on the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the church year. A coda adds a final reflection on the ultimate and most mysterious truth of God: God who is three persons and yet one substance; God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; God who is the Trinity.

The title of this book has a double meaning. On the Way refers to the journey of faith, to our lifelong pilgrimage from God and to God. But it also refers to the one who leads us on this journey. The earliest followers of Jesus were known as people of the Way. They are the ones whose persecution by zealous opponents is chronicled in the New Testament book of the Acts of the Apostles. Before his blinding conversion on the road to Damascus, Saul the Pharisee was scouring the Roman province of Palestine so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Once the persecutor met the risen Christ, his life was turned upside down. Once he encountered the ultimate truth, he gave his all to sharing that truth with others.

Nineteenth-century French mystic Charles de Foucauld describes his encounter with Christ in similar terms. An atheist in early life, de Foucauld underwent a profound conversion in Paris at age twenty-eight. When I came to know God exists, he professes, I could do nothing but live for him. Encountering the ultimate truth that is God left de Foucauld impatient with any other species of truth: I am captivated; do not entertain me with relative reality. In a similar vein, Jesuit scholar Gerald O’Collins speaks of the challenge to move beyond merely relative reality and fall in love with the Absolute—something that can give us only serenity and peace. Fellow Jesuit and psychotherapist Anthony de Mello, quoted by O’Collins, insists that the secret of human life is to achieve union with the Absolute. Nothing else fulfills the deepest yearning of our hearts; we must center our lives on God. When we experience this centering on God, then everything else becomes relativized.

And what is the way to the Absolute? How are we to find it? On the night before Jesus was handed over to suffering and death, he delivered a farewell discourse to his followers. His words have been a comfort to generations. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going. Then one of his followers, the one unfairly known to us as doubting Thomas, says: Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way? In answer to that abiding question—the question that sets the direction for all seekers of truth, the question pressing on each seeker impatient with anything less than ultimate truth—Jesus replied: I am the way, and the truth, and the life.

Please join me now in some reflections on the Way that is Jesus Christ.

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Prepare the Way of the Lord

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

—Luke 3:4

The four Sundays in the liturgical season of Advent have a singular theme: the preparation of humankind to receive the Divine. Traditionally the first Sunday reminds us of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive and bear a son. The second and third weeks feature John the Baptist filling the people with a sense of expectation. On the fourth Sunday, we hear of Mary meeting her relative Elizabeth, two mothers-to-be who are most definitely expecting.

The gospel of Luke quotes from the prophet Isaiah a phrase that sums up the message of