Keep Walking

By: The Rev. Christina Miller

For years, I have wanted to go on a pilgrimage to the Camino de Santiago. Some of you may have been on it. It is a path named after St James that runs through Portugal, Spain, and France. You can walk on it for days or months, depending on how far you want to go. Even though it never seems like the right time to go, and there are so many reasons not to take time out of my busy life for it, I finally decided to just go and am planning to join a group of pilgrims on the Camino this summer.

I love walking. When I walk far enough I notice something in me starts to shift. My mind starts processing information in a deeper way. My body starts feeling energized and my heart opens. When walking alone, I often come in and out of prayer. The movement of my body becomes a sort of walking meditation and I feel closer to God. For this period of time, I can take a break from my normal responsibilities and gain new perspective or just practice being present.

In our reading from Genesis this morning, Abram is on his own kind of pilgrimage that is both an inner and an outer journey, and he has been walking for a long time. He has already left his country and his kindred and his father’s house to follow God to the land that will be given to him. He has already received the promise that God will make his name great so that he may be a blessing to all the families of the earth.

And this wasn’t easy. Abram was 75 years old when he left his homeland, and while people lived longer in these biblical stories, this still meant uprooting from somewhere he had spent many years and was ancestrally rooted. It meant putting together a whole caravan of people and possessions in order to make the arduous trek through the desert. At the point when we meet him, Abram has already had some trials as well as blessings. He has already begun his journey and covered ground. Yet, he still remains childless.

In this particular moment Abram is asking God, “How am I supposed to fulfill my calling when you haven’t done your part and given me children?” It is a moment of pause in his journey. The kind of moment that comes about at night when everyone else has gone to sleep and there is only darkness and your own internal wondering. Behind his question I hear a man who is already far from home, quite possibly tired and afraid, asking, “Should I keep going?” The way forward is still so unclear, and it’s hard to say if any progress has been made.

I wonder if you have ever had a moment like this, or maybe you’re in one right now. Where you’ve started down a path with something in mind and it just didn’t work out the way you thought it would. Maybe there was something you were hoping for and held dear, a promise that wasn’t arriving. I wonder if you doubted if it was worth continuing and how you were able to move forward.

I imagine that my pilgrimage on the Camino will have moments like this. Moments when my feet have blisters or my back hurts. Mornings where I don’t want to get up and keep walking, but stay in bed and sleep. I wonder how I will keep going.

In one of my favorite poems, entitled Keep Walking, the Sufi poet Rumi writes:

“Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings. Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

The poem is saying, we won’t always see the way forward clearly, but we need to keep going anyway, even when we feel afraid. For Rumi, continuing forward isn’t just a physical movement, but also the process of going inward. Of making space to connect with what is alive in you and engaging with the beauty that is your life. Doing what your soul truly loves aligns you to what is holy and is itself an offering back to God. There are hundreds of ways to honor God through your soul’s most authentic expression. You just have to keep walking.

Abram has to keep walking, too. Not just the physical movement of getting to the land promised to him. Not pushing and striving, doing it on his own or forcing his will. But he has to keep moving inward and uncovering what is holy in him. He has to keep going forward in his life’s pilgrimage with God.

And so, God meets Abram in his moment of uncertainty, bringing him outside and telling him to look up at the expansive, dark night sky to see it punctured by the light of countless stars, like coordinates on a map laid out in the universe. God says “So shall your descendants be.” In some cosmic way, the promise given to Abram at the beginning of his journey is already complete, in God it is already a reality.

Abram sees and something inside of him shifts. His fear and doubt make way for faith, and he believes God. His eyes have been lifted up off of his worries and he is realigned to divinity. He can keep walking.

We are all on a pilgrimage, journeying through this life. This material world is not our final destination, because we belong to God and that which is unseen. As the Apostle Paul says in our reading this morning, “Our citizenship is in heaven.” As citizens of heaven, our pilgrimage is both outward and inward. We keep showing up for our lives—taking risks and being fully present to the places and people to whom God calls us. And we keep uncovering the beauty that is inside of us by doing what makes us come more fully alive. As we keep journeying with God our hearts can open, our perspectives can shift, and our very lives can become an offering to God. We just have to keep walking.