Traveling

Throughout history human beings have moved by walking and by riding on donkeys, camels or horses. People have traveled on ships, steam engines, trains, buses, electric railways, streetcars, automobiles, airplanes, rockets and space capsules. Now we can travel in virtual reality. We can step into a simulator in a hotel in an exotic Pacific island and, without moving an inch, “experience the whole island” by “traveling” in an electronic helicopter. We can also surf on the information superhighway, “traveling” around the globe looking for new relationships, experiences and above all information. What does it all mean? What are its effects? How does traveling relate to the purpose of God? In what follows we are focusing on forms of travel rather than general mobility.

Kinds of Travelers

Emigrants. The first travelers, Adam and Eve, were emigrants. They were thrust out of the Garden of Eden to fill and take care of the earth. This awesome vocation was to have been undertaken as an unspoiled calling. But now, because of their revolt, it was forced upon them as a judgment. Yet there was grace in the judgment: the angel guarded the way back to the tree of life (Genesis 3:24), thus preventing their perpetuating their fallen state (and the fallen world they were crafting) forever. The way forward takes them through history, through the cross and resurrection of Christ, until they once again eat of the tree of life (Rev. 22:19). Adam and Eve started again, which is exactly what immigrants throughout history have done.

This is travel for renewal. Seeking political and religious freedom and the opportunity to make a good life for themselves, immigrants leave one place and journey to another, often enduring great hardships both in traveling and in pioneering. In this way my grandfather traveled in 1903 from England to Toronto with six children and twenty dollars to start a new life as a baker. It was not long before he had his own business—Stevens Bread and Cakes—which he could never have done in England.

Fugitives. But not all who leave do so willingly. Some people travel as fugitives escaping from justice or injustice and come to a new place as refugees cast upon the mercy and goodwill of those who already live there. Cain was the first fugitive, the prototype of all who must travel but have nowhere specific to go (Genesis 4:12-14), just anywhere except where they are. Fugitives travel for survival. Wanderers do not know where they are going, but they know they cannot stay where they are. They are not traveling to but from.

Nomads. These travel for sustenance and profit. Throughout history and even today nomadic clans and people groups move from place to place in search of better pasture or warmer places to winter. Gypsies make this a way of life, as do people in military service and pastors who work in denominational systems that routinely move their leaders before bonding can ever take place. In biblical times four special kinds of travelers were found: messengers (2 Samuel 2:5), merchants (1 Kings 5:11; Ezekiel 27:17), government officials (2 Samuel 10:2) and people on journeys for religious purposes (Luke 2:41-50; Dorsey, p. 891). The modern nomads are traveling salespeople, people in some of the arts, and high-tech engineers who move from place to place, often at the will of their corporation. This is entrepreneurial travel. But such mobility has its downside on families (for the downside, see Mobility). Some people upon retirement sell their home and purchase a recreational vehicle to see the country, thereby using their automobile as their home and becoming upper- and middle-class nomads.

Explorers. One form of nomadic travel is for discovery. Now common in the West is the quest to find oneself by going on safari. As far back as the Middle Ages young knights made a grand tour, much as young people do today, as a way of achieving self-definition through testing. Accompanied by a tutor and keeping a diary, such young knights went to school in the world and in the process discovered who they were themselves. Today the journey to Europe with nothing but a backpack is seen as the ideal “finishing school” for young adults emerging into the work world.

Tourists. The tourist, in contrast, travels for pleasure: to see new things, meet new people, experience new foods and different cultures, always with the intent of returning home. While the rich and privileged have always been able to do this, the opportunity is now available to millions of middle-class people. The invention of the DC3 plane reduced per-mile passenger costs, radically opening up air travel (and long-distance travel) to almost everyone in the Western world. Guided tours, some of them directed to the young or economy-minded traveler (traveling and living in a huge refurbished army vehicle), open up the world to the average person in the Western world, though not to the average person in the developing world. It is expected that by the turn of the twenty-first century $2.75 trillion will be spent by travelers taking at least one trip a year.

Touring is a privilege of the “haves” in this world. But tourism as a service industry has become a major industry, not only in rich Western countries such as Canada but in developing countries where tourism is one of the few remaining ways of gaining hard currency. Few people in such countries get to see the sights the tourists do—for example, wild animals in their natural habitat. It is sometimes argued that tourist dollars provide these countries with the wherewithal to conserve their natural resources, but the evidence seems to be on the other side. Tragically, entrepreneurial tourism has, by and large, had a devastating effect on the natural environment and indigenous cultures. Worse still is the exploitation of the people, the case of young prostitutes in Thailand being one of the most tragic examples. At the sight of a tourist car Maasi herdsmen robed in flaming red clothes run from the cattle they are herding to the tourists in order to be photographed for money. Most of the tourist money leaves the Third World. Few places on earth are now protected from the inquiring eyes and disposable cameras of tourists. But it is in the very nature of touring to want to go where there are few other tourists!

Pilgrim. If touring is a relatively modern invention, more common throughout history is the pilgrim, the traveler who has a religious site as a destination (whether Canterbury, Jerusalem or Mecca). Pilgrims travel for spiritual enrichment to discover the roots of their faith. Such pilgrimages to Jerusalem three times a year in Old Testament times were fundamental to the rhythms of faith, as attested by the psalms of pilgrimage (Psalm 120-134). These pilgrimages were communal and festive, accompanied by good food and just plain fun. Such travel was focused not primarily on the stimulation of going to new places but on going to places rich in spiritual tradition in order to go deeper with God and one another. In contrast to the tourist, who travels from the center of his or her world to an “other,” the pilgrim journeys to the center. This distinction may be overstated, however, since tourism has become in many ways the functional equivalent of the pilgrimage—to the tourist attractions that are especially admired and, in the case of the “serious” tourist, to find one’s own authentic center by participating vicariously in other lifestyles and cultures (Cohen, pp. 49, 55).

Missionary. Finally there is the missionary—a person away from home for Jesus, someone who crosses a cultural frontier for ministry. While all too often mission has been conceived as a one-way ministry (going there to give cross-cultural ministry), it is really a pilgrimage in which one discovers God and the gospel at a deeper level from the very people one is sent “to missionize.” The story of Jonah is a classic example. Jonah was missionized by God through the very people he was sent to missionize. Paul himself, the archetypical missionary, hammered out the gospel of justification by faith in the context of his Gentile mission. Paul was a thoroughbred traveler but definitely not a tourist. His great skills in traveling, epitomized in his taking charge of the sinking ship on which he was traveling (Acts 27:13-28:10), were subordinated to the higher purpose of being an ambassador of God to the people through preaching the gospel and building bridges between Jews and Gentiles in Christ through facilitating mutual ministry.

Ecumenical travel for fellowship. This ecumenical travel builds unity among the people of God. In the New Testament people traveled (1) to proclaim Jesus as Messiah, (2) to visit God’s people (Acts 15:36), (3) to bring news of what God had done elsewhere (Acts 14:27; Acts 15:4), (4) to bring a matter of dispute to church leaders and communicate their decision (Acts 15:2, 22) and (5) to carry relief in times of famine and tragedy (Acts 11:28-30; Orchard, p. 483). Always it is a two-way process. This Scripture witness provides an important model for Christians traveling today: establishing contact on the basis of common allegiance to Jesus Christ, listening before speaking, communicating their experiences of Christ and, where appropriate, putting questions to a local community’s understanding of itself (Orchard, pp. 496-97).

This extensive list of images, many that apply to even a single person at different times of life, indicate that traveling is both “in our blood” (for some more than others) and our calling. Whether we travel because our business, trade or profession demands it, because we love it or simply because we want to be “home for the holidays,” we need a theology of travel.

A Theology of Travel

The Bible witnesses to most of the ways of traveling mentioned above. Abraham was part of a great people migration out of Ur. But in Haran he became a pilgrim, an unusual one. He knew he had a destination and clung to it by faith, but he could not see it. He died, as Hebrews says, not seeing the heavenly city to which he traveled, tenting as he went (Hebrews 11:8-10). Some of the itinerant prophets, like Elijah and Elisha, were religious nomads, moving from place to place in response to the leading of the Spirit. It is a good thing they were not married!

Even Jesus, with no place to lay his head, was a traveler and did his theological education with his twelve disciples on the move, not unlike Paul’s traveling seminary with people he picked up along the way in his missionary journeys. The first Christians in Jerusalem were persecuted and thrust out as fugitives into the Jewish dispersion, but in God’s providence they became missionaries and planted churches everywhere they went. Aquila and Priscilla were fugitives from Rome in the time of Claudius, immigrants to Corinth and missionary travelers to Ephesus and back to Rome in preparation for Paul’s final visit, all the time paying their own way by making tents. Christians, then and throughout the ages, are people on the move. Examples abound of Christians joining great people movements and turning immigration into pilgrimage and mission, both for them and their traveling companions. The gospel spread in part throughout the world not only by intentional mission work but by those traveling for business. In a modern world with traditional mission work being constrained, international travelers have a unique opportunity to be ambassadors for Christ and should be commissioned to this by their local church.

Scripture takes up the theme of movement not only by describing individual saints in their travels but by considering the calling of the people as a whole. God’s people are always on the move, first from Ur to Haran, into the Promised Land, down to Egypt, into the wilderness, into the Promised Land once again, into exile in Babylon and finally back to Canaan to restore the kingdom. Christians also are a people on the move, on a journey through this world and this life with the new heaven and new earth as our final destination.

However, according to the New Testament description, which is not always faithfully represented in translations, Christians should not view themselves in this world as pilgrims (just passing through) but as resident aliens, setting down roots even if they have no permanent entitlement. The theological meaning of parish is a company of resident aliens, domiciled but without civic rights. The people of God exist in a rhythm of gathering (ekklēsia) and dispersion (diaspora) like the gathering (for renewal) and dispersion (for energizing) of the blood in the body. The weekly rhythm of the church is both ecclesial and diasporal. The earliest mention of the Christian faith is one of movement: “the Way” (Acts 9:2). So travel touches something fundamental to our spirituality.

When we travel, perhaps on a vacation, we leave the place where we normally experience the weekly cycle of work, service and rest for another place—a hotel room in a foreign country or a tent by a lake. This process is spiritually evocative. The same is true for pilgrimage, immigration and missionary travel. It provides a life experience of the theological truth that this world is not our final home, that we live an exilic existence looking toward our final homeland and that our security is not bound up with our temporal residence but in God and a “world without end.”

The Metaphor of Traveling

Not surprisingly, Scripture develops traveling as a metaphor of the spiritual life. What we do on the outside often evokes something on the inside. Jacob ran away from home and his brother’s murderous anger, but on the inside he was running away from himself and God. God wanted to bless him but could not do so until he admitted who he was, as symbolized in his enigmatic name, Heel-Grabber (the real meaning of Jacob). His whole journey to Haran and back again to Bethel, taking twenty years in all, was an exteriorization of what was going on inside. God threw up mirrors along the way (his father-in-law Laban, for example) and took him through a desperate reality therapy to stimulate the journey within. Not until Genesis 32 does Jacob say, “I am Jacob” and receive the blessing of God (Genesis 32:27-29). His outer journey mapped his inner journey. Most of us can trace the geography of our interior life around the place names of our life story, the people we met and experiences we had.

The psychological life is a journey through passages from infancy to late maturity with transitions and crises, from infantile dependence through adolescent differentiation and finally to adult interdependence. Emotionally we journey from needing to be controlled from without to becoming self-controlled, from uncontrolled impulses to being able to delay gratification, from needing to be loved to being able to give love. Because we are naturally out of sync with God and ourselves, this journey is one from lust to pure desire and from addiction to freedom. The spiritual life can be pictured as a journey from a self divided by sin to a unified personality, from fear to faith, from idolatry to worship, from being externally directed by laws and principles to being internally inspired (2 Cor. 3:7-18), from loving God for the benefits of doing so to loving God for God’s sake. In terms of equipping, the journey is from being sheep to becoming a shepherd, from being a consumer of ministry to being a minister. It is a powerful and evocative metaphor. One of the most edifying activities to do in a small group of a church is to have each person share his or her “journey.” It is one way of speaking of spiritual growth and a pattern that focuses not on “Are you there yet?” but on “What are you learning along the way?”

The Practice of Travel

Travel is not easy and is fraught with danger. In ancient times one exposed oneself to the risk of bandits, shipwreck and illness, and travelers were often not able to find an inn or home for hospitality. In modern times there are thieves, plane and car crashes, amoebas and sometimes “No Vacancy” signs on hotels. Guided tours take much of the stress out of traveling for pleasure, but they also reduce the adventure. A further hazard in some traveling is isolation. Business-people and sometimes even missionaries are separated from spouse, children, friends, church and neighbors. The temptations to moral and sexual infidelity on long journeys are substantial and need to be wisely faced, not only by communicating home but also staying where possible with Christian people. People who travel a lot (and are rarely at home) have fleeting relationships and rarely experience community. For some people travel is an addiction, and like all addictions it is socially isolating. People who use travel as an escape are well advised to “stay put” long enough to get in touch with themselves. Otherwise, like Jacob, they may be taken through a desperate discipline in life until they find their restless hearts at rest in God.

Tourists are particularly disadvantaged in respect to experiencing community, and they seldom see the real condition of the country or meet the people of the land, except the well-groomed waiters in first-class hotels. Here are some practical suggestions. First, do your own planning and read up on a country, rather than buying a packaged tour. Second, stay long enough in one place to meet the people, rather than having one-night stands in a country. Avoid Western hotels and stay where the people of the land stay. Third, be a respectful photographer, refraining from photographing any site the people regard as sacred. Fourth, drink in the experience, rather than videotaping it for future reference. Be there. Fifth, seek out God’s people. Be an ecumenical traveler. One way of doing this is to engage in short-term mission projects as an alternative to an expensive tour; this will edify both the people and ourselves. Best of all we get to work with and live with the people.

Cross-cultural travel, especially in countries where we cannot speak the language, is both threatening and a privileged opportunity to be met by God. Immersion in another culture is like having layers of skin removed, by which we feel more than we normally do and learn more. Tourism becomes pilgrimage. Such travel allows us, especially when we meet with God’s people, to know God better and deeper, since it is only “together with all the saints” (Ephes. 3:18) that we can know the height and depth of the love of God.

We were built for motion but not perpetual motion. God’s design is actually a rhythm of travel and rest, movement and place. Indeed, Jesus used that double metaphor to describe the next life as either a journey with many resting places or a many-roomed resting place (John 14:2). We do not know whether there will be journeying in the new heaven and the new earth. What we know is that the restlessness we feel in this life will find its perfect sabbath experience in the threefold harmony of God, humankind and creation in the new Jerusalem. Ever since Eden we have been moving. The black spirituals captured this with sublime dignity: “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger, traveling through this world of woe . . . my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.” When Christ touches our lives, we begin an eternal journey. He promises to be with us along the way, as we was with Jacob (Genesis 28:15) and to meet us when we finally cross the Jordan to the good land on the other side. So, in the end, God invites us in all the ways we travel—touring, immigrating, missionizing, visiting and even in escaping— to become pilgrims and to join all other pilgrims who long for “a better country—a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16). Then God will not be ashamed to be called “our God,” for he has prepared a city for us.

» See also: Backpacking

» See also: Commuting

» See also: Global Village

» See also: Hospitality

» See also: Immigration

» See also: Leisure

» See also: Mobility

» See also: Public Transportation

» See also: Vacations

References and Resources

C. Aroney-Sine, Survival of the Fittest: Keeping Yourself Healthy in Travel and Service Oversees (Monrovia, Calif.: MARC, 1994); E. Cohen, “Pilgrimage and Tourism: Convergence and Divergence,” in Sacred Journeys: The Anthology of Pilgrimage, ed. A. Morinis (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992) 47-61; D. A. Dorsey, “Travel,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988) 891-97; M. Feifer, Going Places: Tourism in History, from Imperial Rome to the Present (New York: Stein & Day, 1986); E. J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler (New York: BasicBooks, 1991); J. Murphy-O’Connor, “On the Road and on the Sea with St. Paul,” Bible Review 1, no. 2 (1985) 38-47; “Off the Beach: Eight Awesome Alternatives to Sun, Sand and Surf,” The Other Side 22, no. 2 (1980) 33-39; R. K. Orchard, “The Significance of Ecumenical Travel,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 15 (Summer 1978) 477-502; P. Rossman, “Tourism: An Issue for the Churches,” Christian Century 98 (21 January 1981) 54-59; W. Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991).

—R. Paul Stevens