After Sgt Richards bid me farewell I didn’t have to walk too far to enter the outskirts of Leon, where I pulled in to a roadside Citgo station to rest on its outside bench. A few miles earlier I had passed another Way-walker on the roadway (my first & only other fellow pilgrim encountered on my walk across the United States), a walker who seemed to be physically struggling through his pilgrimage. He had assured me then that he was doing alright and he had subsequently told Sgt Richards the same thing (after I had sent the latter to check on the well-being of the former) and sure enough, it wasn’t long before I saw him limp-sauntering into the Citgo parking lot and pull up to my bench. What followed was a most intriguing conversation indeed. It turned out that Chris was a fellow peace pilgrim of sorts; that he was walking to get from a past parsonage to a subsequent one. And yet while he did seem to be a member of the Christian faith, he also seemed to be much more aligned with the Way & the Truth & the Life of Jesus Christ than most of his religion’s compatriots with whom I had previously shared discourse. In truth, we talked about much in depth over the course of our brief time together on that bench – life and love and kindness and pilgrimage and Christianity and Christ and just what we were all to DO with it all in our one fleetingly glorious lifetime. Chris actually felt that the Bible was “still being written” to that day and that we two were both “being chronicled” at that very moment. A nice thought, that, especially considering the kind undertones that had graced the entirety of our conversation up to that point. And then, as if on cue, an elderly gas station patron walked past us on her way into the store and snidely looked at us and asked “So, are you two getting richer or are you getting poorer?” My response to her was smiling and accurate (“I actually gave away all my money to the downtrodden years ago, so I can’t really get any poorer.”) and yet far from top-flight. Indeed, it would have been far better for me to have replied to her crystallized callousness with something both more positive and more provocative – something like “I actually have given all my money away to the poor, and as such am currently the wealthiest man in the world.” (Oh well, maybe next time). Chris complimented my actual answer anyway, and then offered an even greater Wisdom in return – “I started to bite [after she baited us], but chose to smile and chew silently [on her words] instead.”

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing in yourself, you must recognize the sorrow as the deepest thing in others. You must feel their sorrow and live their sorrow and go to sleep with their sorrow and wake with their sorrow. And then you must speak that sorrow until your voice catches the common thread of all the world’s despairs; until you can see and feel the full size of the world’s greater cloak. For in that moment it is only kindness that will make sense anymore – only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to buy bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is my love you have been looking for – let me offer you the same, only kindness that then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow or an ever-found friend … This is the kindness that sees the soulmate in every stranger and the family member in every enemy. This is the kindness that knows everyone met as a friend – the kindness that knows we are each here to nudge everyone we encounter back that much closer to the Divine.” ~ inspired by Naomi Shibab Nye & Abraham Kuyper

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt