Jerusalem Bound. Rodney Aist

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and place as they sojourn through the Holy Land.

      Pilgrimage is Metaphorical

      While pilgrimage thrives on a spirituality grounded in the physicality of everyday life, its incarnational emphasis is complemented by a metaphorical perspective. Metaphor, in many ways, has been poorly understood. Its core function is neither to explain difficult concepts in simpler terms nor to tell us what we already know. Rather, a metaphor is a tool of exploration that allows us to discover things that, otherwise, we would not be aware of.

A metaphor is “a figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another.”11 It pretends that “this” is “that.” It takes something we know (a source) to explore a less familiar target. That, of course, is how we learn: using the familiar to explore the unknown, finding similarities between dissimilar entities. Yet, herein lies the essence of metaphorical understanding: the interaction between source and target creates a new perspective whose meaning cannot be conveyed in any other way. To change the source alters the insight; thus, a given metaphor is irreplaceable and irreducible. The metaphor of life (target) as journey (source) uses what we know about travel and movement to explore the mysteries of our earthly existence. We can use other images—e.g., life is a box of chocolates—but the concept of journey renders insights into the earthly life that we cannot otherwise obtain.

      Whenever we describe abstract concepts, we instinctively resort to metaphor. Since transcendent realities, such as God, cannot be directly known, religious language requires indirection. God is a shepherd; Jesus is a vine. Using one thing to describe another, metaphor employs indirect and non-literal thinking. Jesus is not literally a vine; God is not literally a shepherd, but metaphorical imagery allow us to explore the nature of God in effective ways. The fallacy of literalist thinking is equating the source with the target.

      When Protestants say that the inner journey is what really matters, they are instinctively appealing to the abstract targets of metaphor. We should be careful, though, not to put the physical and spiritual dimensions of the Christian life at odds. Our focus on incarnational theology places a premium on embodied experience and cautions against an overly spiritualized approach to pilgrimage. Metaphor is based on non-literal thinking, but it is not opposed to concrete, empirical realities. Abstract targets are funded by less abstract sources; metaphor uses one to explore the other. In order to probe the spiritual world, metaphor has a foot in both concrete and abstract thought, and it is overly simplistic to equate metaphorical theology with a spiritualized approach to the pilgrim life. If anything, our pursuit of metaphorically produced insights calls us to engage physical expressions of pilgrimage in greater depth and detail. The effectiveness of the life-as-journey metaphor is dependent upon our knowledge of actual, physical journeys. Despite appeals to the metaphorical journey, Christian pilgrimage—and Christian formation more generally—has yet to fully employ the utility of metaphorical exploration. Complementing an incarnational approach, metaphorical theology draws upon the interplay between physical realities (source) and spiritual insights (target).

      Life-as-journey is just one of countless pilgrim-related metaphors. We use metaphorical language to speak about time and place. Our God-talk is a metaphorical discourse. We encounter the unknown, the stranger, and the Other with metaphorical thinking that seeks connections between the unknown and the familiar.

      Metaphor is an unexamined aspect of the Holy Land experience. Pilgrims enjoy a firsthand, empirical encounter with the land as they investigate scripture, history, and archaeology. But metaphor is never far away. We engage foreign places by using what we know to examine what we don’t. As soon as we explore the meaning of Jerusalem or make connections between the holy places, pilgrim travel, and our earthly lives, we are delving into metaphor, thinking of something in terms of something else. Holy Land travelers should engage metaphorical thinking as a tool of spiritual exploration, employing metaphorical language in their reflections of God and the pilgrim journey, including their descriptions of places, events, and emotions.

      Pilgrimage Is Autobiographical

      Pilgrimage is first-person experience, viewed through a first-person perspective. Pilgrimage emphasizes the context and narratives of our individual lives: each unique, distinct, and sacred. Our earthly existence is conditioned by age, gender, health, personality, family, culture, and ethnicity. We have our own thoughts and emotions, passions and preferences, gifts, skills, and talents. Our life stories differ is striking ways, shaped by events and circumstances, incidents and accidents, choices and decisions, obligations and responsibilities. We are on individual journeys of goals, adventures, and plateaus, repentance and return, healing and wholeness. Pilgrimage is personal narrative, and every Holy Land venture is a unique, irreplicable experience.

      Pilgrimage is Corporate

      While pilgrimage assumes a first-person perspective, it is not a self-centered journey. The pilgrim life is a shared experience that takes us beyond ourselves into the company of others. Pilgrims are called to journey as a sacred people: living well together, committed to a corporate experience of God. Pilgrimage is an exercise in collective memory and public commemoration, marked by monuments, rituals, and festivals. Using the holy sites to commemorate the life of Christ, Holy Land pilgrimage is a public act of Christian memory enacted through the context of a short-term Christian community.

      A Comprehensive Expression of the Christian Faith

      Pilgrimage is life intensified, a microcosm of life itself. Pilgrimage must move beyond narrow perceptions of personal spirituality to a holistic approach that values the Other. The pilgrim life speaks to all areas of Christian practice from prayer and worship to acts of mercy and compassion—from the sanctuary to the street. The Holy Land journey is a crash course in the comprehensive claims of the gospel story.

      The Component Parts of Pilgrimage

      Themes

      Themes are unifying ideas, prominent motifs, and reoccurring subjects. Along with the quest for God, self, and the Other, pilgrimage coalesces around two primary sets of themes—(a) time, place, and journey and (b) the stranger, the foreign, and the unknown. The themes are not unrelated—insomuch as a stranger may be one who travels—yet they stand on their own. Pilgrimage contains secondary motifs as well: quest, discovery, and personal challenge; identity, narrative, and autobiography; commemoration, collective memory, and sacred topography; monuments and shrines; feasts and festivals; rituals and embodied prayer. While the Holy Land experience focuses upon biblical landscapes and narratives, history and archaeology, ecumenical and interfaith issues, and peace and reconciliation, every journey has its own personal and incidental themes.

      Templates

      Templates are the common types, or patterns, of pilgrim expression, which are formed by various criteria and degrees of specificity. Pilgrim templates are neither fixed nor finite but are logically and flexibly construed. A given pilgrim expression may be associated with more than one template, while distinct templates may share common features. There are round-trip templates and one-way journeys. A journey to a holy place is a particular pattern, while liturgical processions and prayer walks are another. Some templates focus on people rather than places—some on personal issues, others on the Other. There are local pilgrimages, global travels, secular adventures, and physical challenges. Short-term mission trips and pilgrimage as “the street” embrace evangelism, compassion ministry, and social justice as forms of the pilgrim life. The modern popularity of pilgrimage has focused upon a few specific templates, such as long-distance walking and alternative tourism, while other expressions have received less attention.

      By appreciating the spectrum of pilgrim expressions, we can apply various templates and their corresponding themes to the Holy Land experience. The Abraham story reminds us that pilgrimage is about following God in a foreign land. People-focused templates turn our attention to the Living Stones. Pilgrimage as reconciliation СКАЧАТЬ