Booknotes

". . . in whom we live and move and have our being" (Morning Prayer, Rite I). What would it mean to believe this collect to be true? What would it mean to believe that were we to "settle at the farthest reaches of the sea" (Psalm 139), God would be there? How would it be to "seek and serve Christ in all persons?" as our baptismal rite demands? (p. 305, BCP) Do we believe there is Christ in all persons, or that God precedes and follows us everywhere? Is our faith really that portable? And that "whether we live or die, we are the Lord's?" (Romans, 14:8) These are the thoughts of a San Francisco Bay Area parish priest cum Episcopal school chaplain turned "pastoral companion" this year to the Native village congregations of Interior Alaska. Entry into this culturally alien landscape intimidates me, honestly, and gives rise to a profound re-consideration of who are my neighbors, and what it will mean to love them as myself. For as much as anything, a new ministry among a new (to me) people asks the question: How do I love myself, and does this loving translate; i.e. is there a universal language of love (and do I know it sufficiently well), or do I first have to learn the new (to me) language of the people amongst whom I now live before I can love in a way understood as loving?

Looking back over my reading of this year, I can see that these questions were percolating in my heart (if not in my conscious mind! ) for longer than I realized before sitting down to write these comments. From this year's reading I would like to offer up some titles and comments which proved particularly salutary and/or challenging, to me anyway, in my preparation for a change in ministry which has proven to be an interior and external adventure of the soul and body.

As you might imagine, I have read numerous books this year by and about the Athabascan Indian people of Interior Alaska, and about cross-cultural ministry in general. I will touch upon several of these below. Important to me, also, however, were books about individuals' lives in relation to Nature, and records of pilgrimage; the first because of how deeply important that concept is to Alaskan Native theology, and the second because it was a saving concept-that physical travel as pilgrim wonderfully orients the soul. There is also, in much of this reading, at least for me, a sense of adventure, of the out-of-doors, in an old-fashioned sense of the word-that we enlarge ourselves by engaging things larger than ourselves-whether we "win" or "lose."

The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton by Thomas Merton by Thomas Merton, et al. (W.W. Norton and Co., 1988) I read on my first return to Alaska two years ago-a book about traveling, to travel by. In Asian Journal, Merton is personal and personable; he muses not only about what he sees, but about what he feels, about where he has been and particularly about where he is going-to Alaska in reconnaissance of a new hermitage site, and to Asia where he will address a conference of Roman Catholic nuns and lay workers. "I am going home, to a home where I have never been in this body . . . where I have never been with these suitcases...." That this is the last diary of Merton, and that in its closing appendix we learn the manner of his death, gives the book a pathos for any who have drunk from his well of wisdom. In particular, this book suggests Merton having an adventure of his own-that having journeyed through a synthesis of Roman Catholic teaching he now looks out from the edge toward the world's religious truths, and considers in these pages how Tibetan Buddhism and its tradition of monks, nuns, and rimpoches parallels his own tradition and could enlighten the Western experience of the search for God.

"The journey itself requires courage and determination.... Strength and encouragement may come from new friendships with traveling companions, and from an increasing sense of closeness to God as the journey progresses. The end of the journey can herald a new beginning as, refreshed and renewed, the pilgrim returns to the pattern of everyday life." Martin Robinson has done us all a profound service in his Sacred Places, Pilgrim Paths: An Anthology of Pilgrimage (HarperCollins, 1997), not only for his consolidation of pilgrim experiences across time, but for this most enlightening window into the life and times of the centuries through which he takes us. Interestingly enough, Robinson's anthology contradicts its own introduction by a thorough proof that for many, pilgrimage is about a change in mentality, and that this change denies a return to a pattern of everyday life, but becomes a pattern for a new way of life. Once on the road, the road becomes the Way. The "way of the road," to coin a phrase, becomes the way of Life. Of particular pleasure is not only the breadth of sources but the length of passages Robinson chooses to include. In so doing, the sense of place and peculiar piety of the writer are more evident. We are broken thereby also, of any naive sense of pilgrimage as captive to any one time or religious tradition, but in fact as "an idea much older than Christianity. . . where the meaning of existence, of the seemingly arbitrary nature of many current happenings, will become clear; where there is justice, peace, love."