I regularly fume as I am caught in the chain of red lights that mark my rides down long “thruways” in the city. Why can’t we get them timed, so that we can sweep along seamless “green waves” (as transit folk call them) of travel? What is the point of AI if it can’t produce something useful for drivers? I looked it all up and discovered that even AI is stymied by the complex political forces that govern traffic rules in American cities: jurisdictions, budgets, neighborhoods, surveillance. Left-wingers are worried about bikes and pedestrians. Right-wingers—me, apparently—want automotive smooth sailing.
But smooth sailing is not what we get, either on the roads or in life. Winds come and go, sometimes blowing in the wrong direction; tides pull this way and that. Obviously, things can get worse: gales, storms, shipwrecks even. The Old English poem “The Seafarer” is a riveting if depressing account of sailing, which often ends (I paraphrase) with men who lie “deprived of joy, robbed by the sea, death-marked on the wave.”
One can try to find something encouraging amid the perilous possibilities. Consider the twentieth-century adage that “life is a journey and not a destination.” Often associated with Emerson, the phrase fits with an expansive American hope for things to go on merrily while we take in the sights. In fact, this bit of New World wisdom was first articulated by the Methodist theologian (and onetime president of Northwestern University) Lynn Hough in a 1920 “Sunday School Lesson” column he wrote for the Christian Advocate. Whatever Hough meant (I’ll get back to that), those who repeat the phrase seem to feel that destinations are for the anxious, the narrow, the prudently prudish; for clergy and religious rigorists. Instead: Open your arms! Life is a journey! There are lots of interesting things to see along the way—peoples, places, experiences. That was one of the big ideals of my youthful culture in Berkeley in the 1960s. “Chill out! Enjoy!”
One can also frame all the journeying in an ethically serious way: Life is about uncovering, inculcating, and practicing virtue. Heraclitus’s universe of constant movement was transfigured in antiquity by philosophies of virtuous movement, with each day ordered by goodness in some form. Just such a life is “happy,” in Aristotle’s terms. Travel ought to have a character, hard-won perhaps, of integrity and excellence about it.
Christians have tended to take this moral view of the bumpy, high-traffic road. Yet homo viator, the pilgrim life of the “traveling” human alluded to in the Psalms (119:19) and Hebrews (11:13), and robustly taken up by Augustine, has an emotionally complex register. Yes, our mortal existence is framed as journey, and its value is given in the ways by which we traverse the varied landscape of life, shaped by virtues such as patience and generosity. The bumps and delays along the way are indeed opportunities to live well, to respond in faith, hope, and love, to be good. In this way, the road is at once a school, a marketplace, a theater, even a formative (if movable) home. Even so, the Christian school of pilgrimage alsotaught that the world in which we move is God’s, and hence sixties Berkeley jouissance has something right about it as well. Everything we encounter gleams with the grace of divine artistry. Each step provides the opportunity of thanks and praise. God’s creatures elicit my love and gratitude.
But Christians are not Aristotelians—let alone hippies—precisely because this world of virtue and delight is God’s, and our God in an act of supreme self-offering took flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is “the way,” literally “the roadway,” the hodos (John 14:6; Acts 9:2). Call him a “journey” if you like. But the road has a destination—heaven, the Father, God himself. The road has a singular shape and purpose, the Via Crucis, the “Way of the Cross.” If you would come after me, deny yourself, take up your cross every day, and follow me (Luke 9:23). Delight has a dusky hue here; virtue is always assaulted and subject to dissolution; the journey is not only perilous, but also in some way deadly, like the Saxon mariner’s.
Augustine’s central notion of peregrinatio, the “pilgrimage” of Christian mortal existence, always ends up, in his own description, as one long concatenation of misery, as his celebrated accounts of disease, famine, war, human rapacity, and malice in The City of God make clear. And the worst part is that the virtues of the journey are themselves, for many, evanescent. Most of us die fearful and embittered rather than steadfast and hopeful. “Perseverance,” then, becomes the necessary and final quality of journeying for Augustine. Even today’s urban commuter might have a sense of this, vaguely dreaming of a “city” yet to come, where the depleting toil of travel is no more.
The Christian pilgrimage is complicated. Dante begins his tour of hell nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, “midway through the journey of our life,” smack in the midst of confusion. Beauty, horror, thanks, anger, virtue, lostness: This is what we face, and all for the sake, not of the journey itself, but of the vision of God, life with and of God. To call this Christian journey the Via Crucis—since the cross here is God’s—is to fuse in some odd fashion the journey with the goal, the presence of God somehow spanning it all. Why not? “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord (Rev. 1:8), and presumably all the letters in between (for he was, is, and is to come). But enjoying his presence is a hard sensibility to adopt as we make our struggling way.
In a 1935 sermon at his new Confessing Church seminary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke to his young students about Revelation 14. The whole text, he explains, presents the unveiling of the truth, of “what is the case” in the world. “Babylon is fallen,” proclaims an angel (14:8). Though Bonhoeffer studiously refuses to identify the fallen city with this or that regime, he is adamant that her defeat isalready accomplished: She is “condemned” already, even now “she cannot endure before God.” But he properly notes, at some length, how Babylon is still seducing, poisoning, and destroying, and how the Beast is still recruiting, corrupting, and tyrannizing. Bonhoeffer therefore appeals to the Augustinian gift of perseverance, though in an intensely straitened fashion: Pray to endure in faith unto death, for only death will reveal the certainty of Babylon’s defeat, the death that puts us before the face of God. He quotes Revelation 14:13: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth.” Then he ends his sermon: “Lord, teach thy church to die, through thy Gospel.” The concluding prayer is much like Bonhoeffer’s celebrated phrase from The Cost of Discipleship: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Not “simply” to die, since all of us do this—sooner or just a little less soon—but to die with the Messiah, with Jesus, the incarnate Son of God. While this may have its journey-like pattern, it is most starkly something else: an encounter and an embrace.
I may have been unfair to Hough. When he wrote that “life is a journey and not a destination,” he was reflecting on 1 Peter, in which he tried to place Peter’s description of Christians as persecuted “strangers and pilgrims” in relation to the suffering of Christ (2:11). Perhaps I was unfair to Emerson, too, a man deeply acquainted with grief, whose attitudes were in truth much darker than some suppose. Still, Hough wants his listeners to find all this journeying exciting, an “adventure” of “growth,” he says. The Christian life enjoys a “perpetual charm” of “discovery.” The sailing may not be smooth, he intimates, but it’s wonderfully delightful all the same. We have a God, after all, who journeys with us. A friend.
To which I would say: When it comes to this journey, yes, God is present. But how? Accompanying us? Sharing the road that even AI cannot repair? This is to get everything in the wrong order, and to shackle us to the finally shallow hopes of my youth, where journeying, wandering, letting things happen (often in a cannabis-misted forest) led us to the fizzled termination of our dreams. God does not go with us; we go with God. For in so doing are opened to us the revelations of truth, the unraveling of misery, the peace of creation, the fall of Babylon. As with the Eucharist, this life is a place, a realm, not a journey. We come to it along a way, perhaps—but pressed to our knees.
