Last week my wife recalled that my older brother had been interested in The Walk to Mary this May, and that I should remind him now so that he would have time to set up his schedule and find a good flight. Frankly, I don’t think he’ll come, but you never know. I sent a notice out to him as well as to my other siblings, not because I thought that they would come, but because my older brother’s e-mail had rejected my first message, and in this way I would assure that someone would get through to him on their own computers. I did add a little humor at the end, saying : “You guys could come too, although I suppose such a suggestion will cause nothing but peals of laughter.” Which I figured was true. At first I was right. My younger brother wrote: “Laughter, no! Horror! Why the hell would anyone put themselves through that?”
My response was, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to preach!”, and then I proceeded to, well, preach. First I went into an explanation of the Walk. I wrote about it last May, but here is a quick summary: In 1859, a Belgian Immigrant woman, Adele, was told by a vision of Mary to build a chapel (and school) in Champion, Wisconsin, which is near the south shore of Green Bay at the base of the Door Peninsula. It is nothing but farm country now, but back then was still a wilderness of forest and wolves and bears. Twelve years later, the Peshtigo fire occurred, a massive blaze fed by tinder- dry conditions and heaps of dead slash left everywhere from logging. It burned thousands of square miles and killed over 2500 people (it began the night before the infamous Chicago fire, which stole all the headlines). The embers leaped across Green Bay and ignited the Champion side in such a fury that people had nowhere to go to escape the flames and heat. In desperation, hundreds went to the Champion chapel. The fire raged all around them, but left the five acres surrounding the chapel untouched, saving all within the confines.
It was that miracle, along with three earlier visions Sister Adele had of Mary, which brought Rome to proclaim the chapel in Champion, now called Our Lady of Good Help, a consecrated Marian site, the only one in the USA. Now, a twenty-one mile Walk to Mary, starting in the city of Green Bay, happens every first Saturday of May. The pilgrimage is a growing phenomenon, with 3,000 walkers participating two years ago, and 5,000 last year. People from all over the country, and now the world, participate, and it is to this Walk that I was inviting my older brother, and about which my younger brother made such a hilarious reply.
Oddly in hindsight, I never questioned the validity of a penance walk for the spirit, but my brother has a good point – why the hell do such a thing to yourself? Not only is it painful and potentially boring (it was not for us), but you don’t even get paid for it. In fact, it has something like a $25 participation fee, and if you stay in a hotel the night before, and maybe the night after as we had done, the bills really mount up. And why? Yes, at this location something happened a long time ago which seemed abnormal, but there could be a logical explanation for it, and we can certainly question the visions of Adele. But even if everything happened as the Church now claims, why suffer through this walk, of for that matter, why suffer for anything voluntarily?
There was a movie made a few years ago by Emilio Estevez, a fictional tale about an elderly father who walks the Camino de Santiago in Spain to finish what his son had started but died by falling off a cliff in the fog. The father was doing it as a sacrificial act for his son, and we see him grow in grace along the way. We understand the process very well, but how exactly does that work? Where is the logic to this? How can walking in place of a son already dead and gone somehow lend grace to both the son and the father?
Yet we all understand it. Says Allen Hunt, “Love is best expressed in sacrifice,” and that is the sentiment I got from my younger brother in a much more serious email a few days after the first. To paraphrase, says he: “Most of what I did in my life was for myself. I also tried to give the love I felt out to others, but I didn’t do that good a job. The only thing that I can say that I am really proud of is helping to raise my children.” We know why he feels good about that: for love, he sacrificed. That is, for one of the few times in his life (he is speaking for most of us here) he did something not for himself, but for others, which is the noblest definition of sacrifice – and of love.
There is more. In “Hebrews” of the New Testament, Paul (or whoever – the authorship is in question) writes of Jesus, “He has no need, as did the high priests, to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of his people; he did that once and for all when he offered up himself” (Hebrews 7:27). Here, sacrifice by the priests is offered not for love, but out of guilt, as a naughty child would humble himself before his parents. This tells us that sacrifice is done out of fear as well as out of love. The sacrifice made by the ancient Israelites was, from an objective perspective, an outward sign of an inward acknowledgement that the priests and their people had sinned – and by this acknowledgement, they hoped that God would not punish them. This is where we get the meaning of the term “scapegoat:” that we externalize our sins, or our naughtiness in the eyes of the elders, and put them into something else, to send it off as a burnt offering or simply off into the wilderness.
Of course, this (sin and fear) is not the case for Christ, who is blameless. In his death, he satisfies the Law of Moses by the ultimate sacrifice for sins – not his own sins, but purely for those of his people – all with the sacrificial love of a parent. The old law, based on fear, is fulfilled out of extreme love by the same source: God. God fulfills his own commandments, strict codes meant to civilize a barbarous people, by his own suffering, done out of, and to create, love.
We are shown here that love is the ultimate meaning, then, for sacrifice, something missed by the ancients in their immaturity. Although we have matured since then, we are still young. Thus we still suffer internally from our own sins, whether Jesus has forgiven them or not; we still fear as children do, intuitively (I believe even atheists feel a need to suffer for their sins, whatever words they might have for them). Surely, then, the walk is also to expiate, to relieve the burden of sin and to gain favor.
But there is still love. There is the love found by the communion with others doing a noble thing, a love- fest with clothes and without drugs. There is also the love that comes only with the gift (and sometimes curse) of free will. The Walk to Mary is not compulsory, as Church might be. Rather, it is an act that is painful and perhaps somewhat expensive that is done for Her. It is an act of sacrifice done freely out of gratefulness for Our Lady. Some go to be healed, or for help in curing their child of addiction, or whatever, but for most, there is a sense of joy in the sacrifice, as one would often (but not always, as we are human) have for doing something for our child. Or our mother. A mother who has nothing, absolutely nothing on her mind but our eternal happiness.
And so it is like this: we walk out of our own free will for community, for penance, and most of all, for love. It is like shoveling our mother’s driveway, or staying through our kid’s soccer game, or with him in sickness. However, it is never simple. In The Walk, we are walking for our mother, but we still have that primitive fear of God. Jesus tells us again and again to not have fear, but there is also that bit about the wailing and gnashing of teeth of sinners. Fear and love are opposites. Yet with God, one – love - underlies the other. This is more than psychology: it encompasses the truth of our ignorance as well as the mystery of suffering. Just as the ancients could not quite fathom the love in the sacrificial law, so we cannot fully understand the love that may come through fear; just as we also cannot understand the salvation that comes from pure suffering, as with Jesus on the cross. All connected, all so close, but so subtle…
We walk, then, for expiation, for divine favors, for community, for a challenge, but all, in the end – somehow – for love. We walk, that is, as the father on El Camino de Santiago did - because it is right. Even if we do not understand it, we do it because it is right.
Last week my wife recalled that my older brother had been interested in The Walk to Mary this May, and that I should remind him now so that he would have time to set up his schedule and find a good flight. Frankly, I don’t think he’ll come, but you never know. I sent a notice out to him as well as to my other siblings, not because I thought that they would come, but because my older brother’s e-mail had rejected my first message, and in this way I would assure that someone would get through to him on their own computers. I did add a little humor at the end, saying : “You guys could come too, although I suppose such a suggestion will cause nothing but peals of laughter.” Which I figured was true. At first I was right. My younger brother wrote: “Laughter, no! Horror! Why the hell would anyone put themselves through that?”
My response was, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to preach!”, and then I proceeded to, well, preach. First I went into an explanation of the Walk. I wrote about it last May, but here is a quick summary: In 1859, a Belgian Immigrant woman, Adele, was told by a vision of Mary to build a chapel (and school) in Champion, Wisconsin, which is near the south shore of Green Bay at the base of the Door Peninsula. It is nothing but farm country now, but back then was still a wilderness of forest and wolves and bears. Twelve years later, the Peshtigo fire occurred, a massive blaze fed by tinder- dry conditions and heaps of dead slash left everywhere from logging. It burned thousands of square miles and killed over 2500 people (it began the night before the infamous Chicago fire, which stole all the headlines). The embers leaped across Green Bay and ignited the Champion side in such a fury that people had nowhere to go to escape the flames and heat. In desperation, hundreds went to the Champion chapel. The fire raged all around them, but left the five acres surrounding the chapel untouched, saving all within the confines.
It was that miracle, along with three earlier visions Sister Adele had of Mary, which brought Rome to proclaim the chapel in Champion, now called Our Lady of Good Help, a consecrated Marian site, the only one in the USA. Now, a twenty-one mile Walk to Mary, starting in the city of Green Bay, happens every first Saturday of May. The pilgrimage is a growing phenomenon, with 3,000 walkers participating two years ago, and 5,000 last year. People from all over the country, and now the world, participate, and it is to this Walk that I was inviting my older brother, and about which my younger brother made such a hilarious reply.
Oddly in hindsight, I never questioned the validity of a penance walk for the spirit, but my brother has a good point – why the hell do such a thing to yourself? Not only is it painful and potentially boring (it was not for us), but you don’t even get paid for it. In fact, it has something like a $25 participation fee, and if you stay in a hotel the night before, and maybe the night after as we had done, the bills really mount up. And why? Yes, at this location something happened a long time ago which seemed abnormal, but there could be a logical explanation for it, and we can certainly question the visions of Adele. But even if everything happened as the Church now claims, why suffer through this walk, of for that matter, why suffer for anything voluntarily?
There was a movie made a few years ago by Emilio Estevez, a fictional tale about an elderly father who walks the Camino de Santiago in Spain to finish what his son had started but died by falling off a cliff in the fog. The father was doing it as a sacrificial act for his son, and we see him grow in grace along the way. We understand the process very well, but how exactly does that work? Where is the logic to this? How can walking in place of a son already dead and gone somehow lend grace to both the son and the father?
Yet we all understand it. Says Allen Hunt, “Love is best expressed in sacrifice,” and that is the sentiment I got from my younger brother in a much more serious email a few days after the first. To paraphrase, says he: “Most of what I did in my life was for myself. I also tried to give the love I felt out to others, but I didn’t do that good a job. The only thing that I can say that I am really proud of is helping to raise my children.” We know why he feels good about that: for love, he sacrificed. That is, for one of the few times in his life (he is speaking for most of us here) he did something not for himself, but for others, which is the noblest definition of sacrifice – and of love.
There is more. In “Hebrews” of the New Testament, Paul (or whoever – the authorship is in question) writes of Jesus, “He has no need, as did the high priests, to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of his people; he did that once and for all when he offered up himself” (Hebrews 7:27). Here, sacrifice by the priests is offered not for love, but out of guilt, as a naughty child would humble himself before his parents. This tells us that sacrifice is done out of fear as well as out of love. The sacrifice made by the ancient Israelites was, from an objective perspective, an outward sign of an inward acknowledgement that the priests and their people had sinned – and by this acknowledgement, they hoped that God would not punish them. This is where we get the meaning of the term “scapegoat:” that we externalize our sins, or our naughtiness in the eyes of the elders, and put them into something else, to send it off as a burnt offering or simply off into the wilderness.
Of course, this (sin and fear) is not the case for Christ, who is blameless. In his death, he satisfies the Law of Moses by the ultimate sacrifice for sins – not his own sins, but purely for those of his people – all with the sacrificial love of a parent. The old law, based on fear, is fulfilled out of extreme love by the same source: God. God fulfills his own commandments, strict codes meant to civilize a barbarous people, by his own suffering, done out of, and to create, love.
We are shown here that love is the ultimate meaning, then, for sacrifice, something missed by the ancients in their immaturity. Although we have matured since then, we are still young. Thus we still suffer internally from our own sins, whether Jesus has forgiven them or not; we still fear as children do, intuitively (I believe even atheists feel a need to suffer for their sins, whatever words they might have for them). Surely, then, the walk is also to expiate, to relieve the burden of sin and to gain favor.
But there is still love. There is the love found by the communion with others doing a noble thing, a love- fest with clothes and without drugs. There is also the love that comes only with the gift (and sometimes curse) of free will. The Walk to Mary is not compulsory, as Church might be. Rather, it is an act that is painful and perhaps somewhat expensive that is done for Her. It is an act of sacrifice done freely out of gratefulness for Our Lady. Some go to be healed, or for help in curing their child of addiction, or whatever, but for most, there is a sense of joy in the sacrifice, as one would often (but not always, as we are human) have for doing something for our child. Or our mother. A mother who has nothing, absolutely nothing on her mind but our eternal happiness.
And so it is like this: we walk out of our own free will for community, for penance, and most of all, for love. It is like shoveling our mother’s driveway, or staying through our kid’s soccer game, or with him in sickness. However, it is never simple. In The Walk, we are walking for our mother, but we still have that primitive fear of God. Jesus tells us again and again to not have fear, but there is also that bit about the wailing and gnashing of teeth of sinners. Fear and love are opposites. Yet with God, one – love - underlies the other. This is more than psychology: it encompasses the truth of our ignorance as well as the mystery of suffering. Just as the ancients could not quite fathom the love in the sacrificial law, so we cannot fully understand the love that may come through fear; just as we also cannot understand the salvation that comes from pure suffering, as with Jesus on the cross. All connected, all so close, but so subtle…
We walk, then, for expiation, for divine favors, for community, for a challenge, but all, in the end – somehow – for love. We walk, that is, as the father on El Camino de Santiago did - because it is right. Even if we do not understand it, we do it because it is right.
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