I walk before the Lord of the living (Psalm 116:9)
They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship,
to the breaking of bread and the prayers (Acts 2:42)
Father Abraham, Scripture says, "journeyed on my stages" (Genesis 12:9). Don't we all? Faith is a pilgrimage from start to finish, rooted inevitably for each of us in where we have come from and who we are as persons winging our way to "a land we know not where."
Every stage along the way is marked by our humanity-the good in us God's image and the bad in us our sin. Soren Kierkegaard wrote a whole book about Stages on Life's Way, in a new edition of which (Princeton University Press, 1988), Howard and Edna Hong write:
No writer can totally expunge his experience from his writing, but, as Paul Sponheim observes, it would be an error to regard Stages 'as an exercise in biography' or autobiography. Just as a creative writer transmits whatever leaden elements of experience enter into his imaginative work, the assiduous hunter after autobiographical data tends to reverse the process from gold to lead. A better approach is given by Emanuel Hirsch, who points out that Stages is the work of one who. out of his suffering and thought. seeks to guide a reader to a personal understanding of penitence and faith (p. xv, underline mine).
Through all the stages of my life, from infancy on through childhood, the teenage years, college and seminary training, marriage and family, pastoral work, and journalistic engagement, it is clear to me looking both backward and forward that what has mattered most and still does is not the detail of my life but its essence at every stage along the way. What personal experiences of penitence and faith have marked that pilgrimage? Where has God been in my life through the years, and where is he now urging me on?
Gathered by history--my own as well as the whole story of God's people--I want also to be gathering others like you, that together, out of our roots and life experience, we may move forward thoughtfully and purposefully, in penitence and faith, under the wings of God's Spirit.
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