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Observing the Sabbath is saving my life now. For the first time in my life, I can rest without leaving home. With sundown on the Sabbath, I stop seeing the dust balls, the bills, and the laundry. They are still there, but they lose their power over me. One day each week I live as if all my work were done. I live as if the kingdom has come, and when I do the kingdom comes, for one day at least. Now, when I know the Sabbath is near, I can feel the anticipation bubbling up inside of me. Sabbath is no longer a good idea or even a spiritual discipline for me. It is my regular date with the Divine Presence that enlivens both body and soul.

Barbara Brown Taylor Leaving Church

Over the years I have had many homes. We were on the move before I was able to walk, thanks to my peripatetic mother. I must have caught the bug, for I simply carried on, as jobs and personal circumstances moved me around the country; my church affiliations have changed too – though not quite so often – sometimes along with my address. And yet I have longed for contentment, envied those whose lives enabled them simply to stay put and watch the seasons change, and the years bring the patterns of history across a settled landscape.

Michelle Van Loon, in her moving and often profound book Born to Wander: Recovering the Value of our Pilgrim Identity, quotes Søren Kierkegaard:

Faith expressly signifies the deep, strong, blessed restlessness that drives the believer so that he cannot settle down at rest in this world, and therefore the person who has settled down completely at rest has also ceased to be a believer, because a believer cannot sit still as one sits with a pilgrim’s staff in one’s hand – a believer travels forward.

Pilgrimage, though, is more than moving on. Van Loon (ibid.) distinguishes three “parallel, sometimes overlapping streams” of pilgrimage in Scripture:

• Moral pilgrimage focuses on everyday obedience to God.
• Physical pilgrimage emphasises a bodily journey to a holy site in order to seek God.
• Interior pilgrimage describes the pursuit of communion with God through prayer, solitude and contemplation.

Restlessness, as Michelle Van Loon points out, is potentially a powerful compass. As she reminds us, St Augustine of Hippo wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” My own restlessness has been an odd alternation between my own self-will and (often misplaced) longings, and God’s calling me back on to the path to “communion with [him] through prayer…” Again and again I come back to Proverbs 20:24: “All our steps are ordered by the Lord; how then can we understand our own ways?”

But how can we know that we are on the right path? Gradually, I am coming to the conclusion that we cannot. When God called Abram, he merely said, we are told, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you” (Gen 12:1) “The land I will show you…” Not the land I have shown you, the land to which I have given you directions and a grid reference. “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him…” (v. 4) And Abram wandered around all over the place, from adventure to misadventure, not knowing the way; but in the end he came to the place where God could say to him, “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northwards and southwards and eastwards and westwards…” (Gen 13:14) and Abram saw the land to which he had been called.

We cannot know the way; but our steps are indeed ordered by the Lord, if we love him, and will only draw near to him in prayer. He simply says, as he always does, “Go”, or even “What is that to you? Follow me!” (John 21:21)

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