Eade’s Bedes
June 2009
If April showers bring May flowers,
What do May flowers bring?
Answer: Pilgrims!
So here in Southern California, we don’t have many April showers. Our May flowers tend to be transplants and artificially watered. But we are still supposed to be pilgrims.
Pilgrims are those who journey to a sacred place for spiritual discipline, tribute, and, it is hoped, enlightenment. In our modern world we have expanded the meaning to be a psychological or imaginary journey as well as a physical ones. Inner journeys can have as much or more value than outer ones.
We have just marked the Pentecost in which the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles and drove them in the streets and cities of the world to call all to follow Jesus. The first Sunday of June this year marks the discernment of the Godhead as the Trinity. The belief in the Risen Christ caused countless million, now even billions to change, to move from what we were to what we are to become.
Life for a believer should be seen as a pilgrimage, a journey from our raw state toward what God means for us to be. Pilgrimage is difficult, challenging, and sacrificial. Each time we choose God, we turn from something that is not God.
It is also sacramental: The ordinariness of our lives can be touched by the eternal. Our joys may be seen as that “all good gifts around us are come heaven above.” Our pains and sorrows can become moments when we can realize that this life is temporary, but God will never lose us.
To Be a Pilgrim
By John Bunyan
A Song from "The Pilgrim's Progress"
Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather.
There's no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent,
To be a pilgrim.
Whoso beset him round
With dismal stories
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He'll with a giant fight,
But he will have a right
To be a pilgrim.
Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend,
Can daunt his spirit:
He knows, he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies fly away,
He'll fear not what men say,
He'll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.
