Journeys are us
Lent is most often portrayed as a journey just as the faithful life as a whole is often described as a journey. I recently read a song or poem which put it this way: 'where the journey is the destination'.
Little did I know when I began this blog that my own Lent would be so literally punctuated by journeys. Yes, I knew about the scheduled trips - part of my responsibility as President of the conference, but now I find myself on another trip, a last minute flight booked only this morning. It's a trip to be with family as we gather to celebrate the life of the Chynoweth matriarch - Hilda Annie Louise Chynoweth (née Bryant) - the one and same grandmother that I've written about in my previous two blog entries.
I'll probably have more to say about that time a little further along. It's going to be a bit of an epic ride - Yellowknife, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto - with a very short night in Winnipeg, but it will be good to be there, even if extraordinarily tiring.
What is it about journeys that attract us as a metaphor for life and faith?
Of course there are the scriptural touchstones: the journey of Abram and Sarai, the exodus out of Egypt, the itinerant ministry of Jesus in Galilee, the meaning filled trip of Jesus into Jerusalem, and Paul's trips around the Mediterranean. Both real and metaphorical these stories tell us about leaving one place to find another - perhaps they are refugee stories, or stories of adventure. They might be trips to find something new or oneself. I think it is also about experience instead of answers. We may set out with a destination in mind but we discover that what happens to us along the way changes us, perhaps changes our priorities and our ideas of what it is that we seek.
And so it is that the journey describes an open endedness that allows us to travel ever further on.
And thus ends today's journey....
En route to Calgary, with some additions in Winnipeg
March 3, 2010
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