Walking and Sleeping through Church History

The one thing bet­ter than 8½ hours of sleep while hik­ing is 9 hours of sleep. I dis­cov­ered this by awak­ing non-groggy, refreshed, and ener­getic for today’s walk. In fact it finally came home to me that I have exactly two jobs dur­ing these 70 days: walk­ing and sleep­ing. Eat­ing usu­ally hap­pens dur­ing walk­ing so it doesn’t get a sep­a­rate cat­e­gory, and every­thing else is some­how sub­or­di­nate to these two. And for that mat­ter sleep­ing is chiefly so I can keep walk­ing. This prob­a­bly sounds far from pro­found, but the fact is that, sud­denly, the extreme sim­plic­ity and clar­ity of pur­pose in this pil­grim­age opened up for me. My job is only to recon­nect Erfurt and Rome with my feet, and every­thing else is inci­den­tal. I’m see­ing again the spir­i­tual pur­pose of pil­grim­age, and why it usu­ally needs to take so much time. Three weeks can go by before you real­ize how sim­ple and straight­for­ward is the task before you.

So, walk we did. A few blus­ters of rain, a few bursts of sun, mostly clouds and wind but not too chilly. We dis­cov­ered that the bike path cut almost 10 km off the day’s hike so at some sac­ri­fice of inter­est­ing scenery we went for that option instead, mostly along a train line. At the impres­sive dis­tance of 10 km away we caught our first glimpse of the Ulm Mün­ster, which has the tallest steeple in the world (just edg­ing out that of our own Stras­bourg). But we were more eager to see Zeke and Andrew’s par­ents again for an earlier-than-usual rest day this week. After a few good hours with them we left till tomor­row morn­ing to take a bus out of town to the home of Car­ola and Andreas Hoffman-Richter, our hosts for the next two days. We enjoyed a good din­ner with them, heard about their 8 years work­ing in Japan, and learned some of the local history—more about it tomorrow.

In antic­i­pa­tion of that, I should note how greatly it has been impressed upon us in this pil­grim­age that the present-day life of the church is always embed­ded in the his­tory of the church. You learn the faith in layer upon layer of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions’ attempts, suc­cesses, and fail­ures in learn­ing the faith them­selves. There is cer­tainly no pos­si­bil­ity of extract­ing your­self from it, even if you live in a less recently Chris­t­ian locale—it only means that the his­tory is less vis­i­ble, but cer­tainly not absent.

It seems to me that ecu­menism often seems threat­en­ing, and actu­ally is at its worst, when it sug­gests that progress lies in peo­ple for­sak­ing or for­get­ting their his­to­ries. We can’t sep­a­rate our­selves from the his­tor­i­cal means by which we came to know the gospel our­selves and shouldn’t be asked to do so. But at its best, ecu­menism asks us to have an hon­est and sober view of our own his­to­ries. Ide­o­log­i­cal his­to­ries are an age-old temp­ta­tion in the church (and, well, every­where else). His­tory always gets writ­ten to serve a pur­pose. We can’t have a per­fect God’s-eye view of church his­tory, but we can look at it in the spirit of the 8th Com­mand­ment which instructs us not to bear false wit­ness, either by say­ing that some­thing was good when it was actu­ally bad (usu­ally in our own his­tory) or by say­ing that some­thing was bad when it was actu­ally good (usu­ally in some­one else’s his­tory). This kind of hon­est his­tor­i­cal retelling prob­a­bly hap­pens best within a com­mu­nity as part of its ongo­ing test­ing of the spir­its, and prob­a­bly will hap­pen only in response to encoun­ters with those out­side the com­mu­nity. I sus­pect that all other ecu­meni­cal efforts at rec­on­cila­tion are pre­ma­ture until we have been able to tell his­to­ries that we all equally acknowl­edge as truth­ful and accurate.

Steve Godsall-Myers says:
September 9, 2010 at 11:12 pm
Dear Andrew and Sarah, Your rest day sounds won­der­ful — for a day leav­ing the walk-sleep-walk-sleep rou­tine. It is not like your expe­ri­ence but I have found myself drawn back into being a fan of the Phillies. After 23 days they have a day of rest — no game. So, I too will have to find a new rou­tine that does not include watch­ing the last few innings of a base­ball game. God be with you as you ‘sab­bath’ on Fri­day — a won­der­ful way to cel­e­brate a new year! Steve Godsall-Myers
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JWm Harmon says:
September 10, 2010 at 3:18 pm
I grew up in north­west­ern Ohio, USA. My fam­ily his­tory includes one of the first Lutheran fam­i­lies in north cen­tral Ohio. That fam­ily built the sec­ond log cabin in the county. I have heard sto­ries about how they decided to set­tle there because it reminded them of home in Germany.
Your pho­tos show fields and scenery that could be right out of Ohio. We have great areas of flat land and areas of rolling hills and forests.
I also have an inter­est in archi­tec­ture so your pho­tos of churches and ver­nac­u­lar archi­tec­ture are most interesting.
Your com­ment about the sim­plic­ity of walk­ing reminded me of Henry David Thoreau’s say­ing, “Our lives are frit­tered away by detail… sim­plic­ity… simplicity…”
Maybe that is what is needed in our rela­tion­ships with oth­ers of dif­fer­ent denom­i­na­tions — Simplicity!
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paul sailhamer says:
September 10, 2010 at 3:33 pm
The last sen­tence of today’s entry seems mil­lenial (or escha­to­log­i­cal, if you prefer)…only then will be “know as we are known” and have that kind of agree­ment on his­tory I would think.
Read­ing your thoughts this morn­ing I also recalled Eber­hard Bethge’s com­ment on the her­itage of Diet­rich Bon­ho­ef­fer: “The rich world of his ances­tors set the stan­dards for DB’s own life. It gave him a cer­tainty of judg­ment and man­ner that can­not be acquired in a sin­gle generation…but in the deeply rooted oblig­a­tion to be guardians of a great his­tor­i­cal her­itage and intel­lec­tual tradition.”
Again, thanks for the oppor­tu­nity to travel and think with you on this journey.
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Sarah Wilson says:
September 10, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Thanks, Steve–and base­ball is indeed like life! Good to hear from you and hope you’ve set­tled into a happy place stateside.
Paul, the faith is all about liv­ing the eter­nal in the present and so it’s an act of faith to try! I’m with you that the rich­ness of long intel­lec­tual and spir­i­tual tra­di­tions can’t be thrown away. It’s when they accu­mu­late sick­nesses or dis­hon­esties that they need pruning.
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