One of the very best things I’ve read in the past few years is a little seventy-five page book called “Only the Lover Sings” by Josef Pieper. My friend Joy Clarkson recommended it to me, and I have read and re-read it many times since.

The conversation from this little favorite is all about finding ways to “keep the feast in faith” in the midst of a whole world of ways we are tempted to reduce life to the cold mechanism of utilitarianism. The best things in life are, in a way, useless. Actually, the most important things in life – the things that define us as persons – transcend utility. We are not parts of a machine; we are members in a family, and our family has a story.

To live in a story means to have come from somewhere and to be going somewhere. But we live in a world that for the most part has been stripped of its story. When we are removed from the context of story we’re in a flailing free-fall. That’s a terrifying position, since it means we have no idea what our position really is. It’s to be lost in the wilderness, not only with no idea which direction leads to home, but to have despaired that there even is any such thing as home at all. At some point, once we’ve despaired of home’s reality, we stop looking for it. We stop even bothering to get there, and we collapse right where we are and we make do.

Pieper says that to give up on home, to exit the story, to despair, is to cease pilgrimage, and to cease pilgrimage is to forfeit our humanity because…

“Man ‘is’ insofar as he ‘becomes’ – not only in his physical reality… In his spiritual reality, too, man is constantly moving on – he is existentially ‘becoming’ ; he is ‘on the way’. For man, ‘to be’ means ‘to be on the way’ – he cannot be in any other form; man is intrinsically a pilgrim…”

To be human is to be a pilgrim on the way to God.

This is the first episode of a weekly podcast called “One Thousand Words”. In this place, I hope to collect stories, reflections, songs, and meditations that may serve as little feasts on the way of pilgrimage. Feasts to keep us on the pilgrim way toward home, toward Jesus.   

The air is full of swirling and contradicting stories. To hang on to the truth in that storm is hard, and it’s impossible to do all by yourself. Sometimes I need someone to tell me the story all over again when I’ve lost touch with what is true. And, if you’re anything like me, then you need to hear it too. Rich Mullins said, “The old, old story bears repeating, and the dear old truth gets dearer every day.”  

“One thousand words” is a podcast about faith-keeping together as we pilgrimage by sharing the stories of what we’ve glimpsed of God. My friends who’ve walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain tell me that, though you may take stretches of the pilgrimage alone, what makes the trek are the friends you walk with and the story you make together as fellow pilgrims. Hebrews eleven and twelve seem to suggest the same; the way of faith is a trail that has been blazed by Jesus himself, and many have finished the hike already. We have a cloud of saints who bear witness by their lives that the way of pilgrimage really is worth it – it really does lead to the same Joy that Jesus himself saw on the other side of the cross, and that the Author who began our story will bring the whole tale together beautifully in the end.

In the meantime, we give the gift our small, daily witness to one another as if to say, “rest here a moment and remember the joy set before us.”  

Again, Pieper in “Only the Lover Sings”, says that God’s gift of rest is very different from the world’s idea of rest. Rest is not just a time to veg-out in order to get back to work; rest is the place we protect for the purpose of beholding and contemplating the true, the good, and the beautiful. Rest, in Pieper’s sense, is where we deeply engage and actively turn ourselves toward God and ask him to meet us and give us living water for the journey. We don’t rest in order to get back to work, since our truest identity is not found in our ability to get stuff done. We work in order to protect time to gaze upon the face of God – to enter into his rest. And his rest is not inactivity, it is festivity; it is feasting.  

Another favorite author of mine is Henri Nouwen who wrote in a little book called “Out of Solitude” what I think is right in line with Pieper’s thoughts on rest. Nouwen points out the times Jesus took to be alone with his Father throughout his earthly ministry. Nouwen points out that Jesus’s public ministry flows from a hidden center of rest in his Father’s presence. That is the place Jesus understands himself and his ministry – a place of stillness. From that place of rest Jesus can move outward into his work, not needing the work to validate him, but working from the validation that was given by his Father in those times of stillness and rest. This is what happens at Jesus’s baptism. Jesus refuses to work his own baptism, and instead says it’s proper that he simply receive from his Father his true and empowering identity.   

My prayer is that this podcast might be a small, quiet corner in the world where for a few minutes a place of rest might be cultivated and protected. I hope this is a place to catch sight of the trail markers left by Jesus, to glimpse a glimmer of truth and its beauty, to be handed a little cup of water, and to find that the joy set before us is real, and that you do not walk toward it alone.