All Saints’, Dorval
October 1, 2023
One of my favourite ways to pray is to sing. It took me a long time to identify some forms of singing as prayer: for a long time I just thought I was a weird person who would have walked down the street chanting Bach chorales if I could get away with it (and sometimes I did it anyway, if there weren’t too many people around to give me funny looks).
Given this, it’s surprising that it was the afternoon of the second day of my nine-day walking pilgrimage in Norway before it occurred to me that hiking alone in the middle of the woods in Gudbrandsdal was a pretty ideal scenario in which to bellow “He Who Would Valiant Be” (except with the pronouns changed to “she,” obviously) at the top of my lungs.
That second day was a Saturday, and I learned that evening from my host at the day’s hostel that on Sunday there would be a pilgrim service the next day at a church part way through my planned route. I was looking forward to it: I didn’t know whether there would be communion, but I hoped so; and if nothing else, I looked forward to sharing worship with fellow pilgrims. But as I set off the next morning, I discovered that my host had gotten the time wrong: the service was not at eleven, but at ten.
Between me and the church lay six kilometers of some of the steepest terrain I would encounter in the entire walk.
I knew there was no chance I could make it in time. But I set off anyway, at the fastest pace I thought I could sustain, and as I trekked up and down I realized that I was once again singing to myself (to the best of my ability, given my need to breathe):
O food to pilgrims given,
O bread of life from heaven,
O manna from on high …
[Listen to the hymn on YouTube here.]
I’ve memorized a lot of hymns, but at the time that this one emerged from my subconscious I couldn’t summon it all right away. The first verse was complete, but I couldn’t remember all of the second one and had only the vaguest sense how the third went. But my mind and spirit had assessed two things accurately: I was a pilgrim, and I was hungry. Spiritually hungry for fellowship with other pilgrims, but also hungry in the most basic physical sense: I was walking twenty kilometers a day, burning far more calories than I’m used to, and at the mercy of the pilgrim hostel hosts for my daily bread (and while there are many things I find deeply appealing about the culture and landscape of Norway, I confess that pickled herring for breakfast is not generally one of them).
I made it to the historic Rennebu Kirke at about ten minutes to eleven. The service lasted for another forty minutes or so. There was not, in fact, Holy Communion, although there had been at least two baptisms before I got there. The closing hymn was “Now thank we all our God”, which was sung in at least three languages simultaneously.
And while my hunger for the body and blood of Jesus specifically was not sated on that occasion, after the service was over the church folks brought out an enormous spread of cake and rolls and cheese and those ubiquitous Scandinavian waffles served with jam, and of course coffee, and I devoured several servings of carbohydrates and a cup of tea. (And then a couple hours later, back on the trail, my regular packed lunch. And then a couple hours after that, an ice cream cone at a trailside café. And then a hamburger, two hot dogs, and side dishes for dinner. Did I mention that hiking seven hours a day makes you hungry?)
I took a picture of the spread inside the church building and posted it to my Facebook page with the caption “O food to pilgrims given …”
A few days later, I found myself sharing a tiny, adorable cottage one night with a Swiss pastor and his wife, conversing in a chaotic mixture of German, English and French. After dinner, we gathered around an outdoor fire with four other pilgrims, two Norwegians and two Germans. One of the Norwegian women began leading us in Taizé chants, and then we branched out to other songs. I had managed to remember all of the second verse by then (with a little help from Google), and I sang the first two verses. None of the others knew my English words, but they all knew the tune.
The day after that, several of the same people sang Taizé chants in a 900-year-old church another day’s hike down the trail.
And a week and a half later, after I had flown from Oslo to Porto and ridden 125 kilometers on horseback through northwestern Spain, I met the Rev’d Anna Noon, Priest-in-Charge and Missioner to Pilgrims at the new Anglican Welcome Centre in Santiago de Compostela.
Participating in a very Roman Catholic pilgrimage like this one, as a female Anglican priest is, for me at least, the source of a lot of cognitive dissonance. At the pilgrim mass in the Santiago cathedral earlier that day, the clergy had been very careful not to say in so many words that non-Roman Catholics were barred from communion. I and my fellow-traveler the Rev’d Laurie Brock nevertheless crossed our arms for a blessing during the distribution.
But in Santa Susana’s, the church where Anna holds services, there was no need to worry. The three of us together gathered round the altar and as Anna spoke the prayer of consecration, Laurie and I extended our hands to join her in celebrating the sacrament. And for our hymn, at my request, we sang, “O food to pilgrims given.”
I could stand here all day drawing connections between today’s scripture readings and my pilgrimage experience, and I apologize in advance for the number of hiking-in-Norway and riding-in-Spain metaphors I’ll be using in the next six months or so. But the clearest connection, of course, is to Moses’ struggle with the Hebrew people in the wilderness, cranky with thirst and panic as they don’t know where their next source of drinking water will be coming from.
O stream of love past telling,
O purest fountain,welling
from out the Saviour’s side …
The thing about pilgrimage is that two things are simultaneously true: you’re seeking, and hopefully finding, a profound spiritual connection with God, with God’s creation, and with your fellow pilgrims; and you are also focused, as you rarely otherwise are, on your basic physical needs. You need to pack water and food. You need to be prepared to treat blisters and sore muscles. You pay close, not to say obsessive, attention to the limits of what you are physically capable of, because you are much closer to those limits than you’re used to being; and you probably sleep harder than you ever have in your life.
And given how quickly human beings die of thirst, I can sympathize with the panic! I very much doubt I would have behaved any better than the people Moses was leading through the wilderness under those circumstances. I would probably have been one of the principal whiners. (And I do like to point out that God, when appealed to, did in fact promptly fulfil the practical request for the water the people needed to survive.)
Both our bodies and souls belong to God. We can hunger simultaneously for God’s presence in our souls and for something to fill our bellies. And it’s the church’s job to respond to both hungers in the world around us.
In the few days I’ve been back, it’s been a comfort – though not a surprise – to learn that All Saints’ continued joyfully responding to the hungers of the world whether or not I happened to be around. When I saw the headlines about the fire in Garden Crescent, I thought “hmm, I wonder what the neighbourhood will organize to help the people who were affected” – and sure enough, on my first day back Laura let me know that Trevor had already been in touch with Dorval Community Aid to find out how we could help.
Not all of us are formal pilgrims. Most of us, thank goodness, will never spend forty years wandering in the wilderness and not knowing if we can find drinkable water. But we are all on the journey of life together, and we all need both our souls and bodies cared for along the way. I’m glad to be back with you all as we work together with God to care for each other and our neighbours!
Amen.
P.S. If you want to see more pictures and hear more stories, I’ll be doing a presentation and slideshow both at the potluck on October 14 and after church on the 15th (the same presentation/show both times, so come to whichever works best!)
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