[Dialogue] Spong Reflections

[KroegerD@aol.com]

June 1, 2005
Walking Coast to Coast in England 

When my wife first proposed it, I was sure she was kidding. She wasn't, so 
now some three years later, and I might add three years older, I find myself 
training, packing and preparing to embark on a 190-mile walk across northern 
England. We will begin at St. Bee's on the Irish Sea and, if all goes well, we'll 
finish 16 or 17 days later at Robin Hood's Bay on the North Sea. We will walk 
on our own, carrying the minimum of life's basic necessities in backpacks. 
Each night we will take refuge in one of the Bed and Breakfast establishments 
that adorn the English countryside. We plan to average between 10 and 15 miles a 
day. We will not stop for lunch but will survive on a couple of granola bars 
between breakfast and dinner. We will carry a day's supply of water each. We 
will be a party of three, as our daughter, whose military career makes her an 
excellent hiker and gives us both great security, is joining Christine and me. 
>From time to time we will also be joined by some of our English friends who 
will walk with us one or sometimes two days. It is a great way to keep up with 
special people. 
Why are we doing this? There are some days that even I wonder. However, 
hiking has been something both of us discovered that we enjoyed. On our journeys 
around the nation and the world as a lecturer, we have frequently added another 
day to a particular trip so that we could hike in some exquisite place like 
Arizona, Northern California, New Hampshire, Ontario and the Shenandoah Valley. 
We have hiked through the Wye Valley in England and up to Arthur's seat near 
Holyrood House in Edinburgh. Last year we expanded that practice by adding a 
week to hike the Milford Track in the South Island of New Zealand. On that 
occasion two other couples that are close friends from Mississippi and from 
Wellington joined us. 
The actual hiking time on the Milford Track was only four days as we 
navigated that exquisitely beautiful thirty-five mile trail. We stayed each night in 
quite spare but decent room in a hikers' hotel. Hot showers were available and 
comfortable beds. A generator that went off automatically each night at 10 
p.m., creating a vast and impenetrable darkness, provided electricity. That was 
not a problem for any of us, for each day's walk, some of which was over 
snow-covered mountain peaks and down the steep other side left most of us so 
exhausted that no one was even awake at 9:00 p.m. Each morning we registered our 
choice for the main course for dinner later that day, which was then helicoptered 
to our next campsite in time to be served hot and delicious to weary walkers. 
Despite the fact that there was no way to get off the track except by 
completing the walk or by being helicoptered back to civilization, we all kept pushing 
forward. It was an invigorating but thoroughly pleasant experience. 
The daily routine on that hike did not vary but the scenery did. We would 
rise near dawn each day to strong coffee and hot porridge, that I always called 
oatmeal until I married my English wife. Each of us made our own sandwich for 
lunch on the trail and loaded our backpacks with the few clothes and other 
necessities that we carried. Believe me, we kept those packs light. Two things 
made this hike especially pleasant; one was that this trail had "comfort 
stations" strategically located at specific distances. Second, we only needed to carry 
a small bottle of water because the lakes and streams of that part of New 
Zealand are filled with sparkling, clear and quite drinkable water. It may be the 
only major public place in the world where that is still true. No one was 
concerned with breaking records for time. Each of us walked at his or her own 
pace. 
Sometimes each of us actually walked alone, deep in our own thoughts. 
Sometimes we walked as a couple and sometimes we walked in the company of some of our 
friends. Part of the total pleasure of this particular walk was the anonymity 
we experienced. In our hiking clothes and unshaven faces, we drank in the joy 
of the absence of a demanding public. Our eyes constantly absorbed the 
pristine beauty of this garden spot in the South Pacific. England will be different 
for many reasons. It is, first of all, a much more heavily populated land. 
Secondly, while we will not be able to drink from the streams, we should be able 
to refill bottles regularly from local pubs. The first few days will be up and 
over the mountains of the beautiful Lake District of England, probably the 
most rugged walking of the entire journey. Then we hike through the Yorkshire 
Dales and Moors, the region that produced the Bronte, Anne, Charlotte and Emily 
as well as the classic Jane Eyre. It is a wild and magnificent landscape while 
still revealing gentle and green spaces. 
One sees the world quite differently when one gets out of one's own national 
frame of reference. Two distinct groups both of whom are immigrants, for 
example, populate New Zealand. The Pacific Island people called the Maoris arrived 
on these islands about a thousand or so years ago, the Europeans some 600 
years later. Many members of these two distinct heritages have intermarried over 
the years to produce a beautiful, new ethnicity. New Zealand sits relatively 
alone in the vast South Pacific. Australia is over a thousand miles away and 
looking south from this island nation, the next land mass is Antarctica. One also 
sees things walking that would never be seen in any other mode of 
transportation, which is the way our human ancestors saw the world for most of human 
history. That walk through New Zealand made me aware of the great privilege that I 
have had to be a citizen of the 20th and 21st centuries. My mother, who died 
at age 92, lived her entire life within fifty miles of the place of her birth. 
She flew on a plane less than five times in her entire life and never outside 
the United States. She viewed life, as did most people of her generation, 
from a very provincial perspective. That is less and less an option for our times 
and represents one of the great global tensions as nations are pulled between 
those who have experienced the world and those who are bound by the thought 
patterns of their region. 
It was the New Zealand walk that convinced us that we could do the journey 
across England. England is a more familiar part of the world for both of us. My 
wife was born and raised in that country and was an employee of the BBC when, 
as a 23 year old, she decided to take a trip around the world. She only got as 
far as New Jersey, for which I am grateful. She has gone back many times to 
see her family and friends. With my church being the American branch of the 
Church of England, my ecclesiastical career took me to England on numerous 
occasions. So did my writing career. I have battled in that country for the same 
issues that engaged me in America; equality for women; full acceptance for gay 
and lesbian people and the use of contemporary scholarship to reformulate the 
Christian faith for our time. None of those stances endeared me to the hierarchy 
of the Church of England, who seem to believe that unity is a far greater 
virtue than truth and because of that conviction waste away in quiet irrelevance. 
If it were not for an occasional royal funeral or wedding or even a 
coronation, the Church of England might not even be noticed. I have studied at the 
Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. I have taught perhaps six times 
at St. Deiniol's Library in Wales and have lectured at universities across 
Great Britain. The U.K. to me is like another home. So we will be walking in areas 
we both know well. 
England is also much more heavily populated than the South Island of New 
Zealand. We will have many fellow walkers along the path. On several occasions we 
will actually abandon the Bed and Breakfast establishments to stay with 
friends overnight. Our route will take us some thirty-six miles south of Hadrian's 
Wall, near the home of the poet Wordsworth and past the place where Peter 
Rabbit was created by Beatrix Potter.. 
Why are we doing this? There are lots of reasons not all of which I'm sure 
are conscious. Beyond simply enjoying the outdoors part of it is surely a 
challenge. I will be one week short of my 74th birthday when the walk is concluded 
and it will be nice to know that I can still do it. Another motivating piece is 
that this walk will be another shared experience that will bind me even more 
tightly to my incredible and wonderful wife. It will provide us both a chance 
to have long conversations with our daughter whose career in the military 
gives her a vastly different perspective on the world from our own. It will allow 
us to withdraw almost totally from the world for approximately three weeks and 
thus enable me to separate the wheat from the chaff in my life, enable me to 
let go transitory things while I meditate on eternal things. It will mean that 
if some crisis occurs in the world en route, I will not be able to address it 
in this column except in retrospect and thus I will be forced to the 
realization that the world can survive quite well without my commentary. It means that 
my experiences of worship and my lifetime discipline of study and prayer will 
be altered for that period of time. It means that I will inevitably gain a 
new perspective on the world, on myself and on the values to which I am 
committed. It is a kind of time out to see things in a new way. 
When my readers receive this column on their trusty computers, I will be 
somewhere in England. I won't be able to scan the newest release to see if any 
stray comma or misspelled word destroyed the perfection that I seek each week. 
Thank you for allowing me to share this adventure with you. 

-- John Shelby Spong
Note from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at bookstores 
everywhere and by clicking here! 
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Richard Moore from Melbourne, Australia, writes: 
In Melbourne, Australia, this very afternoon in a situation that REVERSES the 
Schiavo case, a husband will fight in court AGAINST any attempt by the 
authorities to turn off life support to his wife who is in a permanent vegetative 
state. He allegedly tried to murder her. At the moment he has been charged with 
ONLY attempted murder. If she dies, the charge will be upgraded to murder. 
However, I wonder if/when the fanatics and the Catholic Church will fight this 
case with as much energy as they did in the case of Terri Schiavo as it protects 
the allegedly guilty as a consequence. 
Dear Richard, 
Life is strange and human motivation is always complicated. I want the Church 
to be on the side of life. I define life, however, as being capable of 
entering meaningful relationships. I do not regard a breathing cadaver as alive. It 
gets more difficult when the choice of life for one person results in death 
for another so I think we should as a society learn to act so as to minimize the 
possibility that our choice will be reduced to that grim level. That, 
however, requires a much broader view of the world and a willingness to compromise on 
many issues than I tend to find among the loud voices of the so called 
'pro-life' movement. 
--John Shelby Spong