Mary has arrived in London! Yeah! So, my walking days have ended. As I mentioned in one of my earliest posts, I had a hunch that this walk would be different. It has been. As I try to put words to that difference, I’ll return to my simple statements about pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is a person moving toward a destination.

I often ask about the omission. Abram responds to the word “Go.” Yet that simplified response probably hides other traits he had to grow into. A persistence to “carry-on” to a new land. While on Mt Sinai for forty days and nights receiving a job to-do and wisdom for living, Moses is awed by the Big One’s “back side.” Yet, he must have been determined to survive on little to eat; he must have been awed by sunrises and sunsets from that Negev Desert peak. The Ancient Writer allows us to know the pilgrims climbing the final steps with joy and praise. Yet, those steps were preceded by thousands upon thousands of other steps where different words were spoken.

There are so many who have persisted. In a Tintagel Methodist Church, I meet Jenny and two friends who walked sections of the South West Coast Path. They completed the path in eleven years! Persistence!

As I walk the South West Coast Path, my basic desire to walk necessitates a required persistence. Obviously, I persist through all sorts of weather. Talking with a local Cornish couple, the man says “We enjoyed the week and a half of nice summer weather this year. The rain and the cool temperatures have come early.”  Or obviously, I persist whether I feel like walking or not. I might linger over the second cup of coffee; I might dawdle packing my pack. Yet, I have to take the first step; I have to “stay-the-course.”

Interestingly, I have to persist through the beauty. As I hope some of my photos have shown, the South West Coast Path leads one through regions of incredible beauty. I look ahead with rocky coves and sandy bays for fifteen miles. I look to my right to the sea. It’s like visiting a Sherwin-Williams store, looking at the small sample color cards, and seeing a hundred different shades of blue and gray. So many colors.  I look behind me. I decide that I need to stop and enjoy it again. Yet, if I stop too long my calf muscles tighten and my ankles lose their looseness. I have to walk through the beauty; I have to “stay-the-course.”

When I walk into a parish church, I try to read the plaques. I’m struck not so much by the plaques for the local lord or admiral, but by the plaque to the long-serving choir director, organist, chorister, church warden. Year after year. Step after step to the church. Over and over again. Persistence. Tenacious persistence.

In that persistence, the person desires to be true to some other task or responsibility. My hunch is that in not seeking happiness primarily, they find a happiness, a sense of fulfillment, a sense of joy. I know while walking, persisting in that step after step, I can be visited by that same sense of joy. A rather paradoxical truth. Finding joy while consumed with simply “carrying-on.”