By Lisa Powell
SAU Theological Perspective
The Latin word “peregrinatio” forms a dominant metaphor throughout St. Augustine’s massive corpus, found in his doctrinal and his pastoral writings to describe the life of the Christian. The word, apparently, is notoriously difficult to translate and could mean journey, pilgrimage, or migration. For some the word indicates leaving behind one’s homeland in order to wander in love for God and does not designate a specific destination or an established route. For others, such as Augustine scholar Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, the word suggests that Christ is both the way, the route or the path of the pilgrimage, and the goal or final destination. Here Augustine may be drawing a subtle comparison between the way of Christ and the Roman roads of his day. Christ’s way is the royal road, not the road built by empire. Both interpretations suggest, however, that the Christian leaves behind a particular identity formed by particular social influences, and enters into an identity of movement toward something we do not arrive at in this life. Christians are “peregrini,” that is: “travelers, wanderers, resident aliens, foreigners, non-citizens” in this land (Stewart-Kroeker, Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation, 11). Augustine urged Christians of his day to adopt this approach to life in the world, recognizing that we are pilgrims on a journey in a foreign land.
This is also the story of Jesus and his people. This call to leave behind a previously presumed identity and receive an identity marked by migration is the call of God to Abram, before he becomes Abraham. This is the very beginning of the story of God’s covenant with the Hebrew people. In Genesis 12, God tells Abram to go from his country, his people, and his father’s household to the land God will show him, and God promises the childless Abram that God will make a great nation from him and that through Abram all the people of the world will be blessed. Certainly most readers know how the story goes.
Abraham and his wife Sarah eventually have Isaac, who has two sons, one of whom, Jacob, has 12 sons who become identified with the future 12 tribes of Israel. These descendants of Abraham and Sarah become known as the Hebrews. Some scholars of the languages of the Ancient Near East suspect this name for the people was pejorative, calling them dusty or dirty people. This name for God’s chosen people likely given them because they were landless.
They were a wandering people, dusty with the journey, and their frequent migration until they ended up enslaved in Egypt. And after their liberation they embarked again on a wandering journey through the desert. The term was likely used in the way other offensive slurs are used against people who are migrants and refugees, some of those slurs suggestive of the very journey itself. These are God’s covenant people, dusty, landless, and living in tents, and marked by their journey. Even their God did not have a stable home or dwelling. No temple. Only a moveable tent for God as well, known as the tabernacle. God was also one wandering in the desert.
In his book, “Race a Theological Account,” J. Kameron Carter makes much of the calling of Abram, of this original beginning for God’s chosen people — that they were called to leave behind their old allegiances and trust that God was creating something new, a different people whose identity exactly is this openness to God’s call.
Based upon Carter’s reading of the Abrahamic narrative, Jesus stands within a people whose identity, rooted in covenant, is not fixed, but exists in journey and not in arrival, and it is marked by openness. And of course, in Jesus, according to Christianity, that original promise to Abram that all people of the world will be blessed finds its meaning and fulfillment, as Jesus accepts all people from all places and tribes, races, cultures, nations, and sexes. We are “peregrini” as we leave behind former allegiances and join with this pilgrim community on a dusty path toward Christ. We are marked by baptism through which we become identified with Jesus and his journey from birth to death and resurrection. Lumen Genium describes the Church until the final consummation as a pilgrim, and until it is reunited fully with Christ, the Church “journeys in a foreign land” as if “in exile” (article 6). The Christian community is a people not bound to each other by familial relation, not by race, nationality, and so on, but we are identified and known by this movement, this migration. And we are each wandering without a home, a “foreigner,” a “migrant,” a “resident alien.”
(Lisa Powell is a professor of theology at St. Ambrose University in Davenport.)
