Tag Archives: walk
How Many Steps?
Ecumenism sometimes really feels like dreaming the impossible dream. Christianity is so fragmented and has been that way for so long. A hundred years of hard work sometimes seems to have brought us little closer to the goal of restored Christian unity. So many wounds to be healed, so many disputes to be resolved, so many sins to be confessed and forgiven… But we all know that what is impossible for humans is possible for God. And sometimes what looks impossible to humans at first glance is not that impossible after all. Just out of curiosity, I decided to calculate how many steps it takes to get from Erfurt to Rome. The journey itself is, according to our best estimates, 1732 kilometers (or 1076 miles—sounds more impressive in kilometers). The average number of steps in one kilometer is 1320. Multiply the two figures and you get a whopping 2,286,240 steps. 2.286 million! My feet hurt already. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
