The ancient Jews regarded certain places as holy. After particularly vivid encounters with God, people piled rocks as memorials to be visited and revisited. Places were given names evocative of these encounters; after Jacob was injured wrestling with a mysterious man, he called the place “God’s Face” (Peniel), because he had “seen the face of God.”

Early Christians apparently avoided the idea of holy places, perhaps after the destruction of the holy city of Jerusalem, and in light of their awareness that they were seeking not a temporal city but an eternal one (Hebrews 13:14). By the fourth century though, devout Christians were setting off to visit “the holy lands.” Crusades were conducted to protect these bands of travelers and secure the places they toured, not to mention bring back mementos. More recently, four million people traveled to Rome for the funeral of Pope John Paul II. If you’re as quirky and curious as I am, right this minute you can watch webcams of pilgrims at Lourdes.

Of course there are pilgrimages in other traditions as well. People go to Graceland, the Ganges, and Mecca. I have visited my childhood homes, Wrigley Field, and the park bench where Melanie and I first kissed over twenty-five years ago. As you can imagine, much has been written on the sociology of pilgrimage. Literary classics such as Canterbury Tales (a groaner from my high school curriculum) and Pilgrim’s Progress (I re-read a kids’ version many times growing up) feature pilgrimage as a motif.

Now then: what does this have to do with following Jesus in hard places?

In every society, in every city, in every neighborhood, on every playground there is “inside the camp” and “outside the camp.” The contours of all human gatherings have their margins. When I first began to spend time in Bangkok slums, I observed this: destitute people build their homes out of discarded scraps, in unusable swampland where city sewage flows. Residents of these “crowded communities” are shunned and shamed by people with permanent homes and mailing addresses. As I spent more time, however, I further observed this: there are top dogs in any slum. They have the largest sheets of corrugated tin for roofs, and linoleum spread across their plywood floors. They resourcefully splice electricity in from the service mains, and lash TV antennas to bamboo poles. They collect “rent” from quadrants of the swamp and from boarders in precarious second-story rooms.

But make your way further back through the shacks—you’ll need a decent sense of balance on the single-file boards tacked atop posts driven into the muck—and you’ll come to the edge. I once stumbled upon a clan taking turns sleeping on a board lashed to a couple large rusty gas cans, so they wouldn’t sink. I gathered from their wild sunken eyes, starved frames, and needle-punctured arms that they were heroin addicts. “Do you want to cross the canal?” a man asked. “We can take you on our boat, cheap.” “How about my daughter?” To the little girl who was staring off at nothing in particular, I smiled and offered something to the effect of nice to meet you. “Do you like sex with girls?” the man implored. “Please, any price.”

It is at this far edge, the writer of Hebrews seems to suggest, that we may find God at home. “Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore.” Deeply steeped in the Jewish sense of holy places, this passage comes at the culmination of a treatise reframing the meaning of ancient rites of sanctification in the “holy of holies.” In an almost shocking way, the writer re-locates the holy not inside, but outside.

I am playing with Meister Eckhart’s language here, saying that God is at home on the far margins. If God is outside the gates, and we are to visit him there, surely it is not his permanent home. It bears no secure address. It has no tin roof or linoleum floor. If this is his home, it is under condemnation. He carries the disgrace of a squatter, a trespasser, under threat of eviction. In the words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel: “I was a stranger and you did not invite me in.”

Could it be that in Jesus, God himself is a sojourner, an alien, a pilgrim? If so, what is the shape of his pilgrimage? How does he move, and where does he rest? What does he seek, and what does he esteem holy? What sights does he rejoice to see?

I recently heard someone explain that following Jesus means putting away bad habits and making a good clean start in life. If so, whew. That’s safe. That’s familiar country for me, inside the holy city gates. Got my bad habits, but got ways to manage and disguise them too. That’s a fairly universal religious impulse, and more power to us all for trying.

But there is another impulse—the impulse to pilgrimage. To leave the familiar and find the Other, the Holy. To answer a call to follow, and risk where it leads.

For apprentices of Jesus, can it lead anywhere but outside the camp?

*Top image: "Christian Reading From His Book," John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Scott Dewey
manages/edits Geography of Grace
hung out for 3 years in Bangkok slums, and loves going back
lives in a 110-year-old house in Denver
thinks about fishing most of the time