The Sauntering Pilgrim

“More than at any other time in history,” Woody Allen said in a commencement address years ago, from a viewpoint that was typically his own, “mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Sometimes a choice between bad and worse may seem to be the only choice we have, but it’s not. There is another.

One young man at Holy Trinity has chosen to confirm his faith today as a member of the body of Christ. It’s a choice two young women at Good Shepherd are preparing to make later this year. They will each choose for themselves the faith someone chose for them at their baptisms.

But it’s important to note, although they are choosing to join a long line of disciples of Jesus, they are not choosing to conform their faith to that of their parents or anyone else. They are choosing to confirm their own faith, a faith unique to them – a faith that, in time, will blossom to make them the genuine, honest-to-God, gracefully eccentric and fully human persons God is creating them to be.

These young people remind us there’s another choice to be made. It’s not Woody Allen’s choice between bad and worse; it’s the life-giving choice between true, authentic life and anything less. They are not choosing between the alternatives life puts in front of them; they’re making a choice that creates new alternatives that will shape the future. They’re making choices that will remake who they are and recreate the world in which they live.

Confirmation is not a process of dressing up a new generation of disciples in the faith of any previous generation. Confirmation is a time when a new generation claims an original relationship with God that is authentic for their lives in their time. These young people are doing that, though it may take a while, perhaps even a lifetime, to see all the fruits of that choice.

Many Christians don’t really want to choose the Christian faith; they want only enough of it to feel good about themselves, secure about the future, and to be comfortable in the life they’re living. They don’t want a faith that makes for real peace, that disturbs the way they’ve been living. But Christian faith that is authentic, faith in the tradition of Jesus, disturbs the status quo to make room for God’s new creation. It convicts us of our old life before it converts us to a new one. It calls us to surrender our old self so we can put on a self in Christ.

If these young disciples have chosen well and wisely, the faith they confirm will change the way they live their lives, and it will change the world around them. You and I are going to watch to see if that happens, when it happens, and how it happens, and to encourage them as it does happen, even though we have no idea what their faith will look like, only that it will be different from ours, perhaps very different.

It’s been said that the briefest definition of religion is one word: interruption. When the journey we have been on is interrupted, when our plans come to naught, there is our opportunity to renew the life that binds us to the source and sustainer of life. Farmer, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry wrote, “It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Those of us in every generation who confirm our faith as members of the body of Christ have chosen to undertake our real work in life. We’ve chosen to start over on a journey that will bring us to abundant life, to life in all its fullness, to more and better life than we ever dreamed of. And every time any one of us affirms our faith in ways great or small, we recommit ourselves to that work, to that journey.

As Thomas Merton observed, we have no promise that we will see the road ahead of us nor that we will know in advance where it ends. And even though we believe we are following God’s will, we have no assurance that we are. But we also believe the desire to please God does in fact please God, we hope we have that desire in all we do, and we hope never to do anything apart from that desire. And we trust that in that desire, God remains always faithful, leading us in the right way, though we may know nothing of it.

That’s what confirmation is about, committing ourselves – or recommitting ourselves – to the journey of faith, the end of which we cannot see, and trusting that in such a journey God will provide inspiration to embrace the faithful and sometimes difficult work to which God calls us in this life. And though we may be baffled and impeded, not knowing what to do or which way to go, our lives themselves will become a song that echoes through the ages. ▪