“By the Grace of God I am a Christian , by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast-pocket a Bible. And that is all.”
The book is the tale of a simple pilgrim who sets out to learn the prayer of the heart - also known as the Jesus prayer and how, through its practice, he can pray continuously.
I have dabbled with the Jesus prayer as a form of spiritual practice and turn to it often as a way to focus myself or when I am stuck in prayer but I am as much attracted to the prayer by its sentiments as by the spiritual practice.
I relate most closely to the first part of the pilgrim's statement. I can not as the Pharisee in Luke 18:11 thank God that I am not like other men. It is all too evident to those who know me that I am all too much like other men and that the appropriate prayer for me is indeed, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner."
I am not a homeless wanderer of the simplest origins travelling from place to place with minimal possessions, dependent on the generosity of others. I carry a great deal of psychological and circumstantial baggage on my journey.
There are several ways in which my journey will be different from the pilgrim's.
I am not a simple man in quest of wisdom I am a complicated man pulled in different directions by my internal contradictions and looking to be made whole.
I will travel over the inter-net rather than hard miles. My failings and limitations will become self evident as we travel on and if there is any merit in the trail of words I leave behind me it will be through the grace of God rather than my own merit. There have been dead ends and false starts and the hardest part of the journey has been getting out of the front door.
The pilgrim journeyed from wise counsellor to wise counsellor, fed and watered on the way by sympathetic and generous hosts. There are like minded souls on the internet but for the most part I will be travelling through alien territory where mention of Christ, or worse still his church will be met by indifference, ridicule and even hostility. The days of my youth when religion was regarded as a 'good thing' (providing of course it wasn't taken too seriously) are long gone. I've lost through my own fault most of the links into church that I once had and have become as such a traveller in a far country.
I believe in a God who loves us while we are still far off and who will bring me home but I still have some distance to travel. I am comforted to know that Christ too faced indifference and hostility and was even ridiculed as 'King of the Jews' but I am conscious too that it was those who did not profess a religion who he called to him and those who congratulated themselves for not being as other men that he was most critical of.
I believe in a God with dust on his feet and dirt beneath his fingernails a Down to Earth God for our messy world. My quest is to find voices crying out to God's people speaking to them in a language they will understand and relate to.
"Pray for me a wretched sinner that the Lord in His infinite mercy will grant me a good journey."
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