On a Middle Class Pilgrimage

Cavanaugh’s counterproposal is that we try to recover a different set of ideal types, types indigenous to Christian faith, the “pilgrim” and the “monk.”  The pilgrim is a transnational identity that understands itself as fundamentally penitential and kenotic. If the tourist wants to find the authentic but experience it at a certain safe distance, the pilgrim travels on foot, in humility, with a certain degree of risk.  The tourist seeks to escape the empty center of middle  class life to a “more authentic” fringe; the pilgrim journeys from the periphery of brokenness and fragmentation to an encounter with God the Wholly Other at the Center.

The pilgrim is complemented, not contradicted by, the monk, which is the ideal type of stability in a local community.  If pilgrimage is all about humility and dependence on the hospitality of local communities, then there must be local communities to welcome them.  The Rule of Benedict requires its adherents to stay put, to discover their identity in the local places and faces around them, but it also commands that these local communities welcome the stranger, the alien, and the foreigner.

If we middle-class Americans want to hear a little something special from Pope Francis, perhaps we should anticipate a challenge as well as a blessing. The call of the gospel is radical, and it shakes us to our foundations. But such a radical shaking is always in service of finding a new point of stability and rest.  We need not wait for Francis to tell us that we middle-class Americans need continual conversion to Christ.  Perhaps we will discover that the conversion leads to certain “strategic withdrawals,” as Rod Dreher has so often signaled.  Perhaps we middle-class Americans need to withdraw a bit from identifying ourselves primarily as “middle-class Americans” and seek to discover again the freedom that comes from the role of the pilgrim and the monk.

You might also want to take a look at Kevin’s guest post on how St. Bonaventure helps us see Laudato Si’ differently.

Time permitting, I will shortly publish an interview with Charles C. Camosy, author of the recently published Beyond the Abortion Wars. Abortion, of course, is a problem that afflicts the poor disproportionately.

While you’re at it: Drop a penny or two into my gas money fund through the PayPal button on the right side of my homepage. Much obliged.