My friends and fellow pilgrims!
Welcome to Creatio’s Substack, Letters from the Trail. In past years, this has been a simple email list, irregularly published, but often to great enjoyment on the part of our supporters. It helped give a sense of what the missionaries were up to all year, and from our end, gave us a place to share a few of the wonderful things God does on each pilgrimage. Now, we’re relaunching it here on Substack.
Our hope is to be more regular contributors to the many conversations going on in the Catholic and secular world. Not that we intend to comment on happenings in the news — that would be terrible — no, far from becoming a “resounding gong or a clanging symbol1” (we’d prefer not to receive a letter from St Paul) our hope is to give the gifts and understanding God has given us, to you. Together let us set out on the pilgrims’ path towards our heavenly home.
Pilgrimage is a school of many things. For us leading Creatio experiences, it is primarily one of conversion. Each step along a journey basic and human enough to be lived on your two feet, rather than in a car or plane, can be a step of our own conversion and the conversion of the world if seen with the eyes of faith.
Most of us don’t have eyes of faith. Childlike eyes, wonder-full and wide as they are and so essential to the Christian life, get obscured and clouded by so many things in the world until we can hardly see at all. We often do not have anything even remotely like Christianity’s natural worldview. We are moderns through and through, materialists to the bone, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call most of us recovering nominalists either, at best. What I mean by that is if you’re like me, your default worldview is probably one in which man is simultaneously a meaningless piece of dust and the conqueror of nature, the world is just made up of inert, meaningless stuff, and the only meaning that can exist is what we make up ourselves. That is not the worldview of a Catholic. It is the worldview of a confused, directionless, narcissistic culture. It is a worldview that ought to be stripped off and thrown out, so God can give us something new.
How do I actually see like a Christian then? It’s hard, to say the least, but not impossible. The way Creatio found, or rather, the way on which Creatio has been lead, is that of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage as a new way of seeing. You set out on the road, with nothing by your own two legs and few possesions, and make your way to God’s house. What marked the high points of Christendom more than liturgy, temporal success, or converting the nations? Pilgrimage. Europe had thousands of shrines receiving even more pilgrims every year. It’s what Christians do when they see the world as a true gift, the saints as real persons of real holiness, and the earth itself as a place where God walked. He walked, so you ought to as well. Your faith must be incarnate as the Word become incarnate, or it is not Christianity. Christ spent His earthly life, and especially those three years of public ministry, in a continuous liturgical2 pilgrimage around, up to, and down from Jerusalem, a specific place where His Father had chosen to dwell among His people. This is exactly what we have been called to do. We walk to Chimayó, Santiago, Auriesville, Monte Cassino, and other shrines and churches because God has visited His people there, and I, a body and a soul, need to walk, even run, to the Lord’s house. It is what we were made to do, it is what He has done with us, and for us here at Creatio, what we have been explicitly called to do with you.
And we “will go in to the altar of God: to God who has arrayed my youth with joy3” and say with St Peter, dumbfounded and filled with awe on the mountaintop, “Lord, it is good for us to be here.4”
Once again, I welcome you on this journey with us, here, via Letters from the Trail. It’s going to be a good one. Buen Camino, my friends. I’ll see you out there.
in statu viae,
Ryan, Creatio Program Manager
1 Corinthians 13:1
Pslam 43:4
Matthew 17:4
As the hip peregrinos say: “Good Way!” 😎