The Space In-Between

When we tell peo­ple about this pil­grim­age, of neces­sity we have to say that we’re going from Erfurt to Rome. But that turns out to be a strangely mis­lead­ing statement.

The thing about a pil­grim­age is that you spend the least amount of time at your begin­ning and end­ing points. The bulk of the trip, the sub­stance of it, the trip part of the trip, is all the time you spend in-between.

In-between in our days of rapid mass tran­sit is mostly annoy­ing. It’s the hours spent in traf­fic jams, in air­ports and train sta­tions. The point is never get­ting there or worse yet not get­ting there; it’s all in being there already. The jour­ney itself is a waste of time.

It wouldn’t take much time to get from Erfurt to Rome by mechan­i­cal means. Luther didn’t have a choice, of course, but we do. So what’s the point of tak­ing it so slow, mak­ing the jour­ney by foot? Why not even a bicy­cle, for heaven’s sake?

Part of it, of course, is want­ing to expe­ri­ence the jour­ney the way Luther did—step by step, no short­cuts avail­able. But another part of it is want­ing to spend the time in the space in-between. In a divided church, we live most of the time in our own church homes. We are Luther­ans or we are Catholics or we are Reformed or we are Ortho­dox; that’s where we are and where we belong, it’s home. In mak­ing this an ecu­meni­cal pil­grim­age, though, we’re try­ing to be away from anyone’s home.

Ecu­menism is that space in-between. It’s the space where Chris­tians can pray together even if they don’t acknowl­edge each other’s bap­tisms or share the Lord’s Sup­per. It’s the space where they can con­fess that Jesus is their Lord even as they argue about what exactly that means. It’s the space of log­i­cal para­doxes, where we believe in one church though we look at many, where we dis­cover that I’m in com­mu­nion with her and she’s in com­mu­nion with him but he’s not in com­mu­nion with me, where we notice that some mem­bers of your church share deeper con­vic­tions with me than mem­bers of my own church, where we do church things like wor­ship and Bible study with­out actu­ally being a church. Ecu­menism cre­ates anom­alous sit­u­a­tions that don’t fit in any­where. And they shouldn’t become anyone’s home or end­ing point.

Per­haps “ecu­meni­cal pil­grim­age” is a redun­dant term: by def­i­n­i­tion ecu­menism is a pil­grim­age, far from home and still far from the goal.

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