Sermon quotes on pilgrimage
An American Pilgrim
Now my body seemed to walk itself, the road walking my body.
Recalling His Journey To Santiago de Compostela
Augustine of Hippo
In all trouble you should seek God. You should not set Him over against your troubles, but within them. God can only relieve your troubles if you in your anxiety cling to Him. Trouble should not really be thought of as this thing or that in particular, for our whole life on earth involves trouble; and through the troubles of our earthly pilgrimage we find God.
John Baillie
I am sure that the bit of the road that most requires to be illuminated is the point where it forks.
Hillaire Belloc
[The road] was the most imperative and first of our necesseties. It is older than buildings and than wells.
David Brooks
A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in response to a story.
The Second Mountain, Random House Publishing Group, 2019, p.213.
Frederick Buechner
Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.
Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, Harper San Francisco, 1973.
Helen Keller
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
Helen Keller
To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.
John Bunyan
“a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it. It shall belong to those who walk on the way; even if they are fools, they shall not go astray”
Paul Chandler
You’re not a pilgrim if you stay where you are.
Paul Chandler
Pilgrimage happens when you’re not moving. You learn when you’re unlearning. Revelation comes in gulps that leave you gasping, but sometimes it seems to come in the slow accumulation of small insights that you hardly know have happened, in chance encounters and odd surprises, in little glimpses of what you did not go to see and did not know was there.
Geoffrey Chaucer
“For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so Then people long on pilgrimage to go And palmers to be seeking foreign strands To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.”
Phil Cousineau
Pilgrimage is a powerful metaphor for any journey with the purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler.
The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred, Conari Press, p.25.
Nelson DeMille
We’re all pilgrims on the same journey, but some pilgrims have better road maps.
William Faulkner
“They are not monuments, but footprints. A monument only says ‘At least I got this far,’ while a footprint says, ‘This is where I was when I moved again.”
Paul Goodman
On the highroad to death
Trudging, not eager to get
To that city, yet the way is
still too long for my patience
-teach me a travel song,
Master, to march along
As we boys used to shout
When I was a young scout.
Little Prayers and Finite Experience, Harper & Row, 1972, p.16
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
Phileena Heuertz
Whether we are walking to a holy site or being mindful of our spiritual life, in both cases we can willfully embark on the journey or not. The choice is ours: either we decide to journey in hope of growth and change or we resign to life as it is.
John of the Cross
If you wish to be sure of the road you are traveling, close your eyes and walk in the dark.
C.S. Lewis
All joy, as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement, emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Out best havings are wantings.
Letter dated November 5,1959.
Lennart Meri
If geography is prose, maps are iconography
Thomas Merton
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer journey. One can have one without the other. It is better to have both.
Thomas Merton
I believe my vocation is essentially that of a pilgrim and an exile in life, that I have no proper place in the world, but that for that reason I am in some sense to be the friend and brother of people everywhere, especially those who are exiles and pilgrims like myself. . . My life is in many ways simple, but it is also a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in the night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the Love and Protection of Him who guides me.
Lennart Meri
If geography is prose, maps are iconography
Wayne Muller
To pray is no small thing. It is nothing less than a sacred pilgrimage into the heart of the whole world.
Wayne Muller
What we choose to love is very important for what we love leads our eyes, ears, and hearts on a pilgrimage that shapes the texture of our lives.
Eugene Peterson
Pilgrim (parepidēmos) tells us we are people who spend our lives going someplace, going to God, and whose path for getting there is the way, Jesus Christ.
Taken from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society by Eugene Peterson Copyright (c) 1980, 2000 by Eugene Peterson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Victor Turner & Edith Turner
Pilgrimages are probably of ancient origin and can, indeed, be found among peoples classed by some anthropologists as “tribal,” peoples such as the Huichol, the Lunda, and the Shona. But pilgrimage as an institutional form does not attain real prominence until the emergence of the major historical religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Michelle Van Loon
A pilgrim is formed by the question “Do I trust Him?”
Robert E. Webber
I find when most people are honest about their spiritual pilgrimage, they admit to the difficulty of maintaining the habit of a spiritual discipline. What attracks me most about the Anglican spiritual tradition is that it provides purposeful spiritual direction in the life of Christ.
William Williams
Guide me ever, great Redeemer,
pilgrim through this barren land.
I am weak, but you are mighty;
hold me with your pow’rful hand.
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven,
feed me now and evermore.
feed me now and evermore.
Guide Me Ever, Great Redeemer, Stanza 1
N.T. Wright
Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.
Rupert Brooke
O Thou,
God of all long desirous roaming,
Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing,
And crying after lost desire.
Hearten us onward! as with fire
Consuming dreams of other bliss.
The best Thou givest, giving this
Sufficient thing — to travel still
Over the plain, beyond the hill,
Unhesitating through the shade,
Amid the silence unafraid,
Till, at some sudden turn, one sees
Against the black and muttering trees
Thine altar, wonderfully white,
Among the Forests of the Night.
The Song of the Pilgrims, 1907.
Martin Luther
If I rest, I rust.
Charles Spurgeon
By perseverance the snail reached the ark.
John Bunyan
He who would valiant be ‘gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent,
His first avowed intent
to be a pilgrim.
Mendelssohn
When in some future time I shall sit in a madly crowded assembly
With music and dancing around me, and the wish arises to retire
Into the loneliest loneliness, I shall think of Iona.
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson
“It is good once in a while to feel oneself in the hands of God,” Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “and not always eternally slinking around the familiar nooks and corners of a town where one always knows the way out.” That’s the yearning that pushes pilgrims out the door, physically or spiritually, stepping away from home in order to search for the soul’s true home.
Without Oars: Casting Off into a Life of Pilgrimage, Broadleaf Books, 2020.
Wesley Granberg-Michaelson
Religious faith is an embodied journey, not a protected cocoon of beliefs. It’s a pilgrimage.
Without Oars: Casting Off into a Life of Pilgrimage, Broadleaf Books, 2020.
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