The Pilgrim House is an experimental community for progressive wanderers, people who have been burned by the institutional church and their focus on properties, profits, and partisan politics. It’s a laboratory exploring faith and ritual in a progressive, liberative, and sacramental way.
We are a community, bound by our love for each other and our shared desire for a better world.
We are inspired by Jesus, a homeless middle-eastern mystic who lived in the first century in Roman-occupied Palestine. He was a mamzer, an outcast because of his questionable paternity. He spent his days with people like John the Baptist with whom he explored mysticism and a search for the sacred outside the religious center. He gathered a community around him as a nomadic sage as he taught that the way of Rome – and every empire – is distorted and evil. He proclaimed that God dwelt among the meek, the marginalized, the fringes. He provoked religious and political leaders who, conspiring together, unlawfully executed him as a traitor to Rome.
We are part of the movement that arose after his death. Though Christianity soon became aligned with empire during the Roman reigns of Constantine and Theodosius, we follow the path of Christianity that holds to Jesus’ anti-empire message and embodiment. We are pilgrims with no allegiance to any empire or land, but only to the boundless and boundary-less commonwealth of peace.
Some of us hold faith in a divine being, the one whom Jesus called “Father.” For some of us the divine is relational. For others the divine is transcendent and other. For others the divine is a concept and a mystery. And some of us hold that there is no divine being beyond us at all. Some of us are particularists in our theology; others are generalists. What remains constant is that all our spiritualities, theologies, and faiths are constantly evolving even as we hold to the radical teaching of love we embrace from Jesus. We seek to discover that which is sacred in each other.
Our liturgy – the ritual work we do together – is influenced by the historic liturgies of Christianity. We share stories from the ancient Christian and Hebrew scriptures because they are long-cherished documents showing us the faith-evolution of people that helped form the Jesus mythology. These texts are enchanted; that is, they sing sacred beauty to us. We use language from the historic liturgy, modified for our own context, that is drawn from the expansive nature of the Christian movement. We encircle the table and feast on bread, wine, cheese, and fruit and stand in solidarity with all marginalized people just as Jesus shared simple meals from the earth with those on the outside. We expect that when we gather the sacred presence – what some of us call the Holy Spirit – binds us to each other.
Some of us choose to be baptized, an ancient ritual practice in which individuals pledge their lives and work to widening the circle of love and peace, and in which the community pledges to support and encourage them. Some of us are given Holy Orders, an ancient calling in which individuals pledge their lives to leadership and service to the Christian movement unto death. All of us are affirmed in our humanity, given the dignity and worth we deserve as dearly loved persons.
For some of us, this is our primary faith community. For others it is a supplement. For other still it is a peripheral experience. We welcome all who are disillusioned with empire, drawn to the ancient Jesus message against the powerful and for the meek, to join us whenever we gather.
The Pilgrim House 