Unlike my grandfather, who, after collecting his family from Norway, immigrated to Montana, when we left Pittsburgh the next day, Jan and I went to Canada, across the continent all the way to Vancouver and Regent College, where I was installed in the recently endowed James Houston Chair of Spiritual Theology. On our arrival at the bed-and-breakfast we had booked, our hostess greeted us with “Welcome to godless Canada, this godforsaken desert.”
Undeterred by the gloomy welcome, we easily found West Point Grey Church within walking distance, where we worshipped with a hundred or so Christians each Sunday. And we soon discovered that we were only a twenty-minute walk the other direction to the Spanish Banks, an extensive sandy beach on English Bay. It didn’t take us long to establish our Sabbath ritual: worship with the Christians in the morning; return to our apartment and prepare a picnic lunch; then walk to the Spanish Banks, spread a tablecloth on the sand, and eat our lunch in the company of the godless Canadians.
In our thirty years of keeping Sabbath together we had simplified our definition of Sabbath-keeping to three words: pray and play. On Sabbath we would do nothing that was necessary, obligatory, “useful.” We would set the day apart for the unfettered, the free, the unearned. Pray and play.
On our first Sunday lunch on the Spanish Banks, we were struck by the vigor with which the Canadians participated in at least 50 percent of Sabbath practice, these Canadians that our bed-and-breakfast hostess had alerted us to as godless. They knew how to play. We had never been in the midst of such a riot of play—ever. Frisbees sailing, kites flying, volleyballs set up and spiked, kayaks and canoes and sailboats. Maybe we were being introduced to a form of symbiotic Sabbath-keeping: we were helping one another. Each Sunday Jan and I prayed in the morning to kick things off, and the Canadians picked up where we left off and played all the afternoon.
The observation was more than playful. It provided a point of vantage for noticing the trajectory of intentions that had been set in motion long ago, now ripening into maturity. Our bed-and-breakfast friend’s use of “godless” and “desert” to describe our new country revived an old memory. When Jan and I were first married, we had talked seriously of dedicating the last ten years of our working life by offering ourselves as missionaries to a seminary in a third-world country. Now, after a month or so in Canada, we realized that the third world we had intended to go to thirty years before had come to us. The students with whom we were working were from Zimbabwe, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka. Our student body was thoroughly international. If we were in a godless country and a spiritual desert, we were missionaries.
But a godless country? A spiritual desert? Well, maybe. But that was nothing new for us. We had started out as pastor and pastor’s wife to form a Christian congregation in the 1960s, the decade of the funeral of God. The death of God was written up in the obituaries of newspapers and periodicals all over both Europe and North America. Pollsters were busy issuing monthly reports on the precipitous drop in church attendance. There was widespread panic, especially among pastors, at times verging on hysteria.
If God were dead, the church couldn’t be far behind. Life-support systems were being proposed right and left to keep the church going. “Relevance” became the mantra of choice. New forms of church organization were proposed. Innovative strategies of public relations, misnamed evangelism, were launched with impressive fanfare. Worship was replaced by entertainment. Statistics trumped kerygma.
Didn’t these people, especially the pastors who were driving ambulances with their sirens screaming from church to church, from conference to conference, know anything about death? A good death? Didn’t they remember Jesus’s words that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”?
The Negev in Israel is a barren, featureless, and seemingly endless stretch of wilderness. There are no mountains, no rivers, no trees. Understandably, it is not a popular destination for people who go to Israel to get a feel for the biblical world. But that is why we were there, Jan and I, with a few friends, to get a feel for the biblical world. We walked in the Negev for five days. For the first day we didn’t see anything—there was nothing to see. And then gradually, bit by bit, detail by detail, the emptiness of the desert began to show us a fullness that we had not anticipated.
It was our guide who insisted on the walking. “You don’t get this by taking pictures. You have to make the trip.” And the way you make the trip is on foot. “You acquire the biblical story mostly through your feet, only peripherally through your eyes and ears.” My friend Arthur introduced me to the Spanish poet Machado’s line, “The way is made by walking.”
And so we walked—for five days. We walked through the landscape in which our faith was formed. Abraham walked here and built altars. Isaac walked here and dug wells. Moses walked here and herded sheep. We walked and assimilated through our feet the obvious but slowly comprehended realization that faith is formed on unimpressive ground, among invisibles, with few distractions.
We took a bus north to the Galilee and resumed our walking. Another five days of walking. We walked from village to village to village, Capernaum to Bethsaida to Chorazin and back to Capernaum, the “evangelical triangle” that served as the home base for Jesus’s preaching and teaching. There is nothing left of these towns but ruins, but the ruins show that they were small towns and probably not of any political or historical significance since there are no ruins of forts or palaces.
It doesn’t take many days of walking through the Negev, that seemingly godless and godforsaken desert, to realize that it might well be the least propitious piece of geography on earth on which to form a people of God that would “bless all the families of the earth.” And it doesn’t take long while walking in the “steps of Jesus” in out-of-the-way Galilee to realize that he chose to work with a few run-of-the-mill working-class people to launch and live out the story that is the gospel, the good news that is the kingdom of God.
Thirty years earlier, Pastor John of Patmos had supplied me with the imagination that served as the ultrasound that identified my nascent vocation as pastor. He continued to provide me with images that took the sting out of “godless” and “death.” Godless Canada and America’s dying church didn’t seem all that different from Abraham’s Negev and Jesus’s Galilee. Robert Browning, one of our great poets, wrote a long and great valedictory poem on John that he named “Death in the Desert.”
By this time we were used to godless and godforsaken, to death and deserts. Jan and I had been living among the godless in godforsaken deserts all our lives under the patronage of Pastor John of Patmos. Barth again: “only where graves are is there resurrection.” We rather like the company.
Amen Yes.