What a wayfarer might first glimpse of the Pilsdon Community in Dorset, England. Photo by Nicole Uzans.
Travel tales. The Bible is full of them. It’s full of stories about people who wandered in the desert, who fled their houses or were cast out. There are stories of people who went empty-handed into cities and towns, whose first question on arriving anywhere might have been, “Where can I stay?” and who maybe never stayed anywhere long enough to really belong. People like Mary and Joseph, Jonah, or Andrew, Simon, and James, who dropped their nets and left the shore to walk with Jesus when he invited them.
These travellers are people caught in the circumstances of their lives and times, compelled to wander way out beyond where they are comfortable to places where the only certainty is that God will abide with them. That kind of travel takes a lot of nerve and a lot of faith, though like any spiritual practice, what is needed to do it well is strengthened mostly by doing it.
I’m not sure when I began travelling. Growing up, my family took plenty of road trips and moved around a certain amount. Some of those early moves were difficult, but I suppose I got used to it. When I was sixteen, I took a summer job in northern Ontario and to hear my mother talk about it, she’d say that was when she realized I was someone who needed to get out there and roam around on my own. I guess I looked pretty happy with a pack on my back and “home” somewhere behind me.
Some years later, I went backpacking in Europe, mostly travelling alone and mostly wondering what on earth I was doing. I brushed up against lots of history and culture, but if you’ve really travelled, you know that mostly what you encounter out there is yourself. Always adapting and reorienting can be a little destabilizing, or at least it was for me. After a couple of months of moving through places where everyone else had settled jobs and homes and routines, I was ready to get off the road.
But when I got back to Canada, I took a job at a backpackers’ hostel and it was there that travel and ministry started to come together for me. Every day I welcomed people travelling for every imaginable reason. There were tourists and international students, people kicked out of their apartments, and people in town for family reunions.
I sat at the reception desk and heard stories from around the world. Always I was amazed at how travellers found connection with one another. I started to see the hostel as a constantly shifting community, with some of us pretty tight because we worked together over months or years, and some of us immediately folded in, then released as travel landed us here one day and elsewhere the next. Every day, people would meet and go exploring together, or go out looking for food. Out of very mixed company, some truly astonishing alliances were made.
For me, that was kind of like being in church. I can say that because the church I was a part of in Ottawa, St. John the Evangelist, is somewhat notorious for its diversity. It’s a downtown church that gathers people from every social pocket into common worship. I went there as a young student steeped in a school environment, initially because I wanted to be around people who were not like me. Where were the grandmothers and families and street people and activists? St. John’s had them all, and being part of that community opened up invitations to all sorts of dinner parties, justice campaigns, parades, and prayer meetings.
So there I was, part of several vibrant communities in the city, with a sense of motion and movement all around me. Through St. John’s I was waking up to the rich history and traditions of Christianity, becoming steeped in scripture and prayer, and thinking seriously about what this meant for living my life. Through my job, I was practising hospitality every day and moving with the flow of what I might call “unintentional community.” I was happy, but starting to get restless. Then a postcard came in the mail.
There are few moments in my life when Jesus has met me at the shore and said, “Drop what you’re doing.” That was one of them. The postcard was sent from the first person I’d met at St. John’s and it showed the inside of the church at the Pilsdon Community in southern England. On the back, my friend had written, “This would be a wonderful place to spend some time if you’re ever in the UK.”
Within a few months, I’d packed up my Ottawa life, sold my furniture, and arrived at Pilsdon with two bags and the clothes I stood in. What I found was a humble community offering prayer, work, and welcome—a contemporary interpretation of monasticism being lived out by a core of questing Christians and a steady stream of guests seeking some release from personal struggles. Though some stay for years, Pilsdon is a place of pilgrimage, with members and guests staying “for as long as it takes” to absorb a radically different way of living with one another and with oneself. Everyone shares in the work of growing and preparing food on this small farm, then shares in the open table meals each day. It’s a rhythm that’s been going for 50 years.
I was a stranger to the country and to life on a mixed farm, but so quickly, it was like I’d always been there. In many ways, Pilsdon is as stable as the seasons. Planting, harvesting, birthing, slaughter, picnic lunches, or tea by the fireside—what we did had everything to do with when we did it. And every day followed a pattern of prayers—wonderfully contemplative psalms and readings—which in turn followed the liturgical seasons. Our stability as a community was in accord with terrestrial and cosmic rhythms.
But there was much about Pilsdon that was unpredictable and even chaotic. It was a place that welcomed people from every margin of society into one community, so every day promised some excitement—and no shortage of struggle and pain. For one thing, there was no telling who would be next to arrive. The same day might see a drunken wayfarer looking for an overnight and an unannounced visit from the bishop of Manchester. Each would be welcomed with a cup of tea, though the wayfarer would then be asked to go elsewhere to sober up and the bishop might be treated to a tour of the pigsty.
I think if you lived at Pilsdon enough years you really would see it all: burnt soup and broken windows, runaway cows, family reunions, blazing rows, covert love affairs, depression defeated, and drug habits picked up again, life getting worse and life getting better, all in your own household.
I learned at Pilsdon that “welcome” is ongoing. I don’t just mean that there will always be new people coming through the door, but that the space we make for one another can always expand—and that it has to, because God’s work in our lives is always unfolding. Who we know ourselves to be today and who we know our neighbour to be, and who we know ourselves as a community to be today is always just a part of the full reality. I certainly felt myself welcomed and unfolding at Pilsdon. Being there was like dwelling in the presence of God and I was willing to stay.
Yes, I was willing, but the British Home Office was not, and though I and the community did everything we could to keep me in the country, my willingness kept getting detoured by red tape. Last winter, while our request for a work permit worked its way through the Home Office, I waited—first in Canada, then in Boston, where I got involved with another, very different community.
When finally a solution was found and I could go back to Pilsdon, my heart had shifted. In Boston I made some connections that left me with big questions about where I was called to be next. All summer I wrestled with those questions and ultimately discerned that I need to be on this side of the ocean now. That’s as much as I know. What I’m supposed to be doing here, who I’m supposed to be with, and how I’m supposed to talk about any of this is hidden from sight right now.
I can sympathize with poor Jonah. Like him, I’ve had moments of hearing God clearly. Like him, I’ve sometimes had major disagreements with what I’ve heard. And now, when my thoughts and my plans don’t seem to be getting me quite “there,” I can sympathize with Jonah in the belly of the fish, so dependent on God to carry me safely and spit me up somewhere that I can hear the call more clearly.
Is this ministry? This living out of a meandering traveller’s tale? It might be. As Christians, our ministry is recognized in baptism, the going underwater, where we can neither breathe nor see nor hear clearly, so that we can emerge cleansed and ready to be as God knows us to be. In the church we receive baptism only once, but I wonder if that one time sets the pattern for our whole ministry, where we continually move in and out of clarity, and with every emergence we are reminded that God is with us all the time. All the time.
