Jesus was a great traveler. He was always moving from one place to another, and he called other people to move, too, from where they were to somewhere else. Put down your nets and follow me. Let the dead bury the dead. Follow me.
The gospels are organized around the journey Jesus made from Galilee to Jerusalem. It’s only about as far as Corvallis is from Portland, but that’s a long way when you have to walk every step, as they did, from village to village, and of course in a deeper sense it was much further than that. It was a journey from bondage to freedom, from death to life, and to make that journey you have to be open, you have to be humble, you have to be willing to trust, and to endure hardship, and to not know where you are most of the time. You have to be willing to admit that you haven’t yet arrived, that you don’t have all the answers, that there’s something ahead greater than whatever you thought before.
You have to repent: metanoia, to change your mind. To move. To risk. And a lot of people in the gospels won’t take that risk, the Pharisees most of all. They’re stuck. They think the place they are is the only place there is. The old has passed away, Jesus says–behold, I give you something new. But you have to get in a boat and cross to the other side to see it, you have to get up off the couch, you have to get up out of bed on Sunday morning and drive down to church, and stand and kneel, and then get up out of the pew and journey forward to the front to receive the Eucharist, to receive the Body of Christ.
In Dante’s Inferno, Satan is at the bottom of hell, and he’s stuck in ice. He can’t move. He’s a mindless animal, and he can’t move. Everyone in the Paradiso is dancing. Is flying.
All her life Connie was a great traveler. She went everywhere even into her eighties, from Asia to Europe and all over the country, but she was a traveler in this deeper sense, too, always on the way, always making this interior move, and it wasn’t out of restlessness. It was out of enjoyment and curiosity and delight, and even more out of openness, out of humility. There was a quiet calm about her, and a graciousness, but she always wanted to know more, and she wasn’t bothered by uncertainty, and she didn’t think she was in control of everything. “In this quest to find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty,” Pope Francis says.
If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by some margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is proof that God is not with him. God is always a surprise. You never know where and how you will find him.
This was Connie. Quietly. Graciously. God was with her.
And it’s not that she was wandering either, was just roaming around. Everyone says that the journey is more important than the destination but that’s not true at all. As Christians we believe that we are part of a story, and that story has a beginning and a middle and an end, and now Connie has finally arrived where she was going. She has laid down her burden, though in God we are always being swept up, into love, into beauty–the whole universe is moving towards Christ and into Christ.
One of the ways that Connie traveled was as an artist, in her paintings and her art. She was very talented, and one of my treasured possessions is a small painting of hers. There’s this kind of indistinct field of dark red, and against it at the top there’s a faint white outline of a dome, with a cross or a star above it to the right. It’s a church, and at the bottom of it, spilling out of that red background, there is what looks like a river of white falling over a ledge.
It’s a really striking image, and I think it’s an image of someplace she had been, and I think it’s an image of a place inside her, in her heart, and I think it’s the place where she is now, the place all those other places were just glimpses of. It was the Eucharist she was always traveling towards, it was Christ, and now she has risen up and come forward and entered into it fully, she has received and been received, and all her journeying is at an end, and all her journeying is only beginning, is only opening up, is only moving towards a still greater beauty we can’t possibly imagine.