Book Review: The Sacred Journey
When my children were babies, I walked for at least an hour every day in our neighborhood, one strapped to my chest, two buckled into a double jogging stroller. I pounded out frustration on the pavement, sweated, prayed. Weariness and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy had found their way in, and this was how I did battle: leaving it all on God’s knees as He bent to listen. For the battle has never really been mine anyway, but His. And the spoils of the victories, well, I want to lay those on His knees too.
There’s something about literally walking with God, the bare communing with the Spirit while pressing against and feeling truly the abundance I’ve been given now, in flesh. I’m convinced I wasn’t just made for later but also for now, that this flesh of mine can be put to good use, that He pours out gifts of experience and beauty because He means life to be full. And every lap around the neighborhood in those early years, leaving everything behind just to be with Him, each was it’s own pilgrimage.
Recently I finished The Sacred Journey by Charles Foster for the second time. I mentioned it in last Friday’s post, and I hope that you’ll pick up a copy and read it. From start to finish, this book captivated me and drew out every bit of the free-spirited nomad within. I read it the first time sitting on a beach with some friends, and even though it’s not what most people would think of as “a beach read,” for me the coast was the perfect first place to taste the adventure. No where else am I so unencumbered. I put the book aside and walked for three hours, literally.
This book will stretch your heart, especially if you’re like me and you’ve never put much stock in pilgrimage to sacred places. It will make you rethink gnosticism and what it looks like in the modern church, and it will challenge you to consider carefully that Christians from other tribes just might walk with equal sincerity. It’s a book that also just might motivate us to treat with respect those with whom we disagree, even if we will always pray that their future stands in Christ.
Charles Foster’s prose is engaging and honest, unapologetic and daring. He pours out a wealth of knowledge, education, and experience on the pages of this book, as well as a true heart for God and the tender desire to draw nearer to Him. I enjoyed the history documented in The Sacred Journey, as well as the insights and deeper questions presented by the author.
In the forward, Phyllis Tickle writes,
Each one of you who reads this book will find at least one thing you totally disagree with and a whole handful of those you want to question. Please do so. Otherwise, none of it is pilgrimage.
And with that, I set off on a new kind of pilgrimage, through the pages of a beautiful book. My copy is underlined and written-in, soft from all the page-turning. I came away from the reading with a new understanding of pilgrimage—what it is, what it most definitely isn’t, and the deep desire to let my nomad heart fly, to be a pilgrim for Christ every single day that I breathe.
I hope the book blesses you the way it did me. Thank you Charles Foster and Thomas Nelson, and thank you BookSneeze for the free copy!
