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And, here I sit, my last day of retreat in a hermitage in the Great Smoky Mountains, looking out onto the vale and the peak before me covered with lovely green trees. And where next? What is the next border to cross, both outwardly and inwardly?
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The pilgrimage never ends, keeps moving, and will not listen to us yelling "Stop!" And while I respect people who find stability in one place, living with one people, that has not been my life. When a young preacher boy, one of my favorite scriptures was of Abram and Sarai being called to leave the land of their upbringing, family, and kin, to, as Yahweh, their god, said, "... a place I will show to you." Perhaps my enjoyment of encouraging others through this scripture was a kind of witness, a foretelling of the life I was to live.
So, Abram and Sarai became the start of what came to be called the Hebrew people, later the Jews, and "Hebrew" means "border crosser." In the process of moving, they were transformed, and their god renamed them Abraham and Sarah to denote the change.
See, some of us are called to keep moving, place to place, for some reason. If a divine call, that is not our choice; Life decides that for us. Abram did not wake up one morning saying, "Hey, honey! Let's go over to Canaan, to live among all those strangers and strange gods and goddesses. That sounds like a fun adventure!" I never awakened, as a boy reared and raised in the deep South, United States - a boy planning to graduate from high school, not go to college, but start serving as pastor in some nearby little Baptist church - thinking, "You know, I think I'll move to Florida, and Louisiana, and Mississippi, and Maine." I did not even know where Maine was on a map. When I traveled to Maine, the farthest I had been northward was a brief trip in Missouri for a convention for religion educators.
And, yes, the adventure is sometimes the call to remain where one is and grow roots deeply into the soil of one place with one people. But, regardless, moving on or staying put, we are all border crossers, for Life is always moving. And, in the moving, we are changed, for as the way changes, we change with it, and in ways we never dreamed, thankfully.
Following is a poem; I wrote it this morning. Reading it inspired the above reflections.
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