My Pilgrimage through life – Part 1

My Pilgrimage through life – Part 1 – by P.K. Odendaal – April 2024

After traveling for decades to the Celestial City, a city very far from here, I have come to realize that I have to write about my journey to comfort weary pilgrims who have also chosen this journey to redemption, freedom, self-development, self-expression, exploration and exhilaration.

A pilgrimage on which I have been accompanied by the Greatest Of All Mentors, acting as my Lord, companion, friend and inspiration.

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I was partially inspired to embark on this pilgrimage some decades ago due to the inspiration I found from reading the book "The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan - a book everyone on planet Earth should read and which I might have read about ten time since. It is an allegory tale written as a dream while he was jailed for many years, because of preaching the gospel as a lay preacher without being indoctrinated first, something not allowed by the Catholic Church in those days. Even today, most churches indoctrinate their preachers before they may preach the gospel.

The story is of a man called Christian, and a few co-pilgrims, fleeing from the City of Destruction, meaning This World, to the Celestial City, meaning The Heaven, and encountering vicious physical enemies along the way, such as Mr. Morality and the Giant Despair, as a metaphor for spiritual enemies, on their journey. Some giving up and some persisting.

Bunyan paid a heavy price, being persecuted and imprisoned, for embarking on this journey, which seemed to him worthwhile and which proved to me to be exhilarating, profound, eventful and consoling in the extreme.

Why Bunyan was persecuted, confounds me. Why does one have to be indoctrinated to understand and explain a very simple gospel? Being able to read is quite enough! It is a very simple gospel, totally summed up in John 3:16 For God so loved the world ….

That is really all we need to know.

As a side note, I know that this excursion into some aspects of my pilgrimage, since I was young, will make up a few volumes, I having had the honour and opportunity to travel this road less traveled for seven decades and quite possibly for another few. Therefore, I will publish it as a series of articles as a preliminary work in progress on my blog.

Where and what is the Celestial City and how does one get there?

Who on Earth will travel to some distant country far away, without knowing where it, how to find it and what is to be found there. Columbus is a prime example, but many people I meet in everyday life are too, not realizing it?

This pilgrimage is a serious journey to a well known place of note, from which we never wish to return. It is real and surreal; practical and mystic, dangerous and rewarding, packed with faith and doubt, and packed with fear and bravado. It is the best excursion we can ever go on in our lives. It was and still is that for me – and it is getting more interesting and exciting by the day.

Do not ever look back or yearn to return to the City of Destruction; we do not have eyes in our backs.

This journey you might wish to take with me is not only of traveling, but also one rich in religious issues, spiritual experiences, history, war, peace and philosophy - sometimes plain and simple, and sometimes quite intricate and mysterious.

My readers are of a special kind or select group - people who are here on earth, like myself, to explore life inside out, or from within us to everything around us. Exploring God's plan for us and admiring His universe. Pushing the envelope of experience, knowledge and actions to unfathomable limits.

As they say: We are going for gold.

This excursion we are going on will be manifested in the form of my earthly pilgrimage with a bicycle ride on the French Camino from St. Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. A journey of 780 kilometers which I am undertaking to manifest my belief in God's love and suffering for me, and how I can use that to make my love and suffering Godlike.

Some special subjects, people and books I will elaborate on are:

·   The Spanish Inquisition – the killing spree in which the Catholic Church and its military arm, the Jesuits, killed two million Christians, Jews and non-believers.

·   Don Quixote – a book written in 1605 by Miguel de Cervantes, a Spaniard, of a fictional person on a quest of becoming a Knight Errant, meaning a wandering and roving person in search of adventures to exhibit military skill, prowess, and generosity towards other people, to save them from danger and evil, mostly ineptly – just like we often naively do while we wish to do good. Don Quixote is considered by literary historians to be one of the most important books of all time. The character of Quixote became an archetype, and the word quixotic, used to mean the impractical pursuit of idealistic goals.

·    Architecture of Religion – I love Cathedrals and especially choirs singing in Cathedrals. I can sit and watch that for ever.

·    Søren Kierkegaard – a Christian existentialist; yes there is something like that in contrast to the more usual atheistic existentialists like Franz Kafka and others.

·     And maybe something from Nietzsche and the dialectic of Hegel.

I will intersperse the sayings of some of these sages throughout this article series.

You can skip what does not interest you, but be assured that these subjects and people I wish to write about brings us nearer to the essence of life itself and the idea of and eternity.

In this Camino journey that I will be embarking on shortly, I will, in the first place, contemplate my Celestial Journey and converse with God. I will also contemplate who I am and how I fit into the Scheme of Things.

Maybe you can contemplate that too, with me.