Day 86 of Pilgrimage – Home is in sight!

Friday 13 November 2020

In one way it is sad to think that my virtual pilgrimage will finish in nine days. I arrive back at St Paul’s Cathedral next Friday and back to my home parish of St Peter’s on the Feast of Christ the King and I will have completed 945k round trip.

Due to the generosity of so many the funds raised during the pilgrimage have just passed $3900 and I hope to be able to report next week that we have raised $4000 – a fantastic effort of which I am so proud and humbled at the same time.

The days are getting warmer and the flowers are in bloom. Here are some recent shots taken in the last week:

While I have been continuing my reading of the Rule of Benedict I have also been reading a fascinating book – The Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News from the Lost-and-found of Church History by Robert Capon.

I have been thinking a lot about the church post-COVID. I have been asking myself whether this year will just be a blip and normal business will resume once a vaccine has been developed, or whether this year is the start of a major reformation in the way WE do church and BE church. Robert’s book is astounding and is a sign of hope that the church will go on. Robert writes:

Because the church is not a club; it is a divine Mystery – the body of him who fills all in all and who, when he is lifted up, draws all to himself. We are in a dance of desire over which we have no final power to throw a wet blanket. The thirst of the astonished heart lies at the root of all thirst, however trivial, and it is the thirsty, therefore – and the hungry, the last, the lost, the least, the little, and the dead – who are the sacraments of the church’s hope. Only fools, of course, willingly embrace those conditions. But the divine Fool who died and rose needs only one of them – himself – to bring the dance to its wild conclusion. Even if the rest of us are tripping over our feet to the end of time – even if we spend every one of our days trying to wallflower our way through the corporate church, the mega-church, the Christendom church, the country-club church, or the self-improvement church – even if we never get the dance of desire right, God never gets it wrong.

Next Friday’s blog post will be the last of the Friday posts. I hope to be able to share one final meeting with the Dean of Melbourne next week and then one last post on Sunday 22 November as I officially finish the pilgrimage where it all started – St Peter’s Anglican Church, Box Hill.