It’s a long way from Chester to Lichfield. Seventy-six miles, according to Google maps, and a little longer if you are walking. Which is what I was doing, in May, the first pilgrim on a new English long distance trail, stretching from the shrine of St Werburgh to the shrine of St Chad.
I’d planned carefully, booking bed-and-breakfasts, making contacts with parishes, packing light, and hauling out my well-worn boots. The first two days were wonderful: morning prayer and a blessing for my journey at Chester Cathedral, a long morning following the canal, an afternoon crossing fields and visiting the church where my 6th-generation ancestors were baptized, married and buried, a cup of tea with a vicar and Eucharist in a market-town church where more of my ancestors had lived and worshiped.
But on day three came the blisters. Not just on my heels, predicable for a long-distance hiker, but on the soles of my feet. Thirteen miles in, I could barely walk. And I had a decision to make: hobble on my way to my night’s lodging, and risk having to abandon the rest of the pilgrimage, or find alternative transport and maybe be able to pick up the trail the next day.
I thought about the pilgrimage I had hoped and prayed to make. I thought about my medieval forebears, and how grateful they would have been if the driver of a passing cart had offered them a ride. And as I turned from the canal down into a housing estate, following the trail, I saw an elderly man getting into his car. “Excuse me, would you mind giving me a ride to the church in Trentham?” (a mile or so, and I guessed the nearest bus stop).
The man was gracious, and drove me to the church, and I caught a bus on to my night’s stopping place, all the while feeling as if I were somehow disappointing God if I didn’t walk every step of the way.But then it dawned on me. I don’t have to earn my way to salvation. God probably doesn’t care whether I walk every step of that pilgrimage, or catch a bus the whole way, What God cares about - and knows - is my heart.
Ever since the time of Christ, the church has debated about the relative value of faith and works. We are justified by faith alone, said Paul, through the grace of God. Faith without works is dead, said James. The grace of God on the one hand; our actions on the other. Somehow, it is both that are essential.
Late afternoon of day five of my pilgrimage - walking again - I finally saw the triple spires of Lichfield Cathedral. At evensong, I was welcomed alongside pilgrims from parishes across the UK, and our diocese was prayed for. And I knew the grace of God, in a long and sometimes painful walk; in an elderly man willing to give a hiker a ride, and a public bus; in a cup of tea, and bread and wine.
