Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over unclean spirits. He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick–no food, no sack, no money in their belts. They were, however, to wear sandals but not a second tunic. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave. Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.” So they went off and preached repentance. The Twelve drove out many demons, and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” (Mark 6.-7-13)
Over the years, I have had the good fortune to meet a handful of Jesuits, a group that I have found to be irrepressibly honest, humble, and happy, as a result convincing me that they are on the right track. At some point, I learned about a part of the Jesuit training that really caught my attention. I am unsure of its proper title, having heard it referred to variously as the pilgrimage experiment, the one-month pilgrimage, or simply as the pilgrimage.
In its truest form, it requires a first-year novice who wants to become a Jesuit to make a month-long pilgrimage, although that skeletal description falls short of what is actually involved. More specifically, the novice is dropped off somewhere by his novice master and instructed to find his way to a destination, guided by God and bolstered by faith.
It is in many ways a wilderness experience. As part of the exercise, the young man takes little to no money and at most a backpack with a few pieces of clothing, these bare necessities–if they deserve to be called that–meant to deepen the person’s reliance on God’s care and providence. In true nomadic form, the person spends the next month on a path without creature comforts, without fail-safe guards in place, without certainties of any kind.
Often, the individual is dropped off at a bus station, given a one-way ticket somewhere, and told to fend for himself until he returns a month later. I have read that in recent years the practice has been watered-down some, at least in some places, requiring only a two-week trek, presumably because of concerns about the world in which we live. Just as likely, it may be an admission that modern-day persons simply aren’t equipped psychologically to deal with such hardships.
Regardless, Jesuits almost always remember the experience as one of the most important not only in their training, but in their lifetimes. They hold onto the experience as they would a hard-earned medallion, seeing in it the moment in which they truly came to know God in his goodness and in his generosity.
Incredible stories from the pilgrimages abound. One novice said that he slept outside for several nights during his journey, including his first night when he had no place to stay, admitting, “As I was sitting disappointed, reading and waiting for it to get dark, I saw on a wall of an industrial mall next door written in graffiti the words, “Trust God.” He confessed, “Staring at this I received new energy. It was the reassurance I needed.”
Other lessons were learned. Another novice, weeks on the road, truly looking like a homeless person, said he was sitting in church waiting for Mass one day and it was very noticeable how people were sitting away from him, at a safe distance. It was at that moment that he felt genuine regret for the many times that he had judged people by their outside appearance and realized how he also had shown similar suspicion and selfishness.
The pilgrimage is part of the instructions that the Jesuit founder Saint Ignatius of Loyola gave his followers, explaining in his “General Examen” that “the third experience is to spend another month in making a pilgrimage without money, but begging from door to door at times, for the love of God our Lord, in order to grow accustomed to discomfort in food and lodging. Thus too the candidate, through abandoning all the reliance which he could have in money or other created things, may with genuine faith and intense love place his reliance entirely in his Creator and Lord.”
If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say the inspiration for Ignatius’s instruction came from that section of Mark’s gospel that we hear today, a section that generally goes by the title of “the mission of the twelve.” As we see, it concerns the occasion when Jesus called together the twelve apostles and “sent them out two by two,” the word “apostle” coming from the Greek word for sending out.
Like the Jesuit experience, the apostles were instructed to carry little to nothing. Jesus says to the twelve, “Take nothing for the journey but a walking stick–no food, no sack, no money in their belts. They were, however, to wear sandals but not a second tunic.” Given the instructions that Jesus gives, it is clear that he is interested not only in the missionary work of the twelve, that is, preaching and healing, but also in the apostles growing in their trust in God.
Having next to nothing as the twelve make their way requires that they trust in God and in the goodness of others. The experience reinforces the bedrock belief that God will provide and that God will protect. (Interestingly, when Matthew and Luke tell the same story, they do not allow the walking staff or the sandals, in this way upping the ante, so to speak.)
In effect, the twelve are to replicate the same activity that they have witnessed Jesus doing up to now. Walking alongside him for however long they have, they have seen his concern for others and his focus on teaching. With that experience, they are to do the same, proving their mettle and showing that they have enough trust in God to take the next step into the unknown.
Obviously, the message is intended not only for the twelve, but for all subsequent followers who want to walk the way of Jesus. Here, it is important to emphasize that when Mark says Jesus instructed them to take nothing for “the journey” he actually says for “the way,” a clear reference to the identification of early Christians as “followers of the way,” the label Christian only coming later.
In the beginning, they were followers of the way, a reminder to us that we also are first and foremost people on a pilgrimage, sent by the Lord Jesus to tell others the good news and to bring healing to a world broken and bruised by sin of every sort. Like the twelve, we travel light as we make our way into the world, more interested in proclaiming the works of God than in amassing personal fame or fortune.
We walk in the freedom that comes from reliance on God and we walk with the fearlessness that has its origins in the trust of God. In so doing, we become living embodiments of the words that we preach with our mouths in the same way that Jesus lived the words that he spoke, his message found both in word and in works.
As I see it, this passage defines the essentials of our self-identity as followers of the Lord Jesus, an identity that is rooted in movement. We are always on the move, walking the way of Jesus. In other words, discipleship is not sedentary, made obvious by Jesus telling the twelve to take a walking stick and to wear sandals. If he wanted us to sit still, he would have told us to find a comfortable chair and to have a good ottoman for our feet.
So, if we were to do a quick check of our conformity to the ways of Jesus, we don’t need to look any further than these instructions that Jesus gave when he sent the twelve on their first missionary journey. It is all here in a nutshell. Get up. Go. Go light. When the journey gets long, lean on a walking stick. When the road gets rough, put on sandals. Drive out evil wherever you see it. Help the sick. Cure the ills of the world.
What else needs to be said? Really, not much. The essentials are found right there. And, of course, all of it built on the belief that God is always along for the trip. One Jesuit novice came to that same conclusion after his month-long pilgrimage. By the end of the trip, he said he had slept in 21 beds in 28 days and had not run into a single person whom he knew. For four weeks he was separated from family and friends.
And yet, as he said, “God was there. God had given me everything I had asked for and even some of the things I had forgotten to ask for. The final grace of my pilgrimage was the recognition that God has never been outdone in generosity.” It would seem, hearing his words, that his pilgrimage taught him exactly what Jesus was hoping to teach the twelve when he sent them out two by two.
Maybe we can’t commit ourselves to such an intense experience as the Jesuit novices do and maybe we don’t have to. But Jesus is asking us to commit to going into the world and doing good with each step that we take along the way. And when our fears would have us abandon the path or fall back on our customary securities, he asks us to put our trust in God who stays with us whatever the place we find ourselves.
If we can do that, then we have achieved the same end that the Jesuit pilgrimage has envisioned. And it is the same end that the Lord Jesus hoped to achieve when he sent the twelve on their way, instructing them not to clutter up their lives, but instead to stay focused on the important stuff, namely helping others, healing those who are sick, and hoping that they could bring a little more light into an all-too-dark world.
For people obsessed with carry-on luggage and a pile of credit cards, we may find the story of the missionary journey of the twelve a stark reminder that we have placed our trust in the wrong stuff, challenging us to get back to the basics of love, as Willie Nelson’s old song “Luckenbach, Texas” put it. Or, back to the basics of discipleship as Jesus laid it out.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 