Sermon preached at the Festival Eucharist in the National Pilgrimage to the Shrine of St Edward the Confessor
'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.’
The Reverend Dr James Hawkey Canon Theologian and Almoner
Saturday, 18th October 2025 at 11.15 AM
‘The Way of a Pilgrim’ is a Russian text discovered on Mount Athos in the mid-19th century. It is a series of tales about a pilgrim’s journey, which became extremely popular in Orthodox circles and beyond over the next 100 years. It relays a complex but beautiful picture of largely rural life in pre-revolution Russia, and is suffused with spiritual wisdom. Some of it feels from another world. The focus of the story is the development of prayer. It begins with the pilgrim hearing a reading from St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians whilst he is in Church, in which the apostle exhorts his listeners to ‘pray without ceasing.’ The pilgrim is intrigued and gripped by this possibility, and initially begins to ask those around him whether such prayer might truly be possible. His quest has begun, and the rest of the story tells of his wanderings all over Russia whilst praying the Jesus Prayer. With the aid of a spiritual guide whom he meets on his journey, this simple prayer, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner’ enters into his heart, as he prays it thousands of times a day. This rhythm – ultimately as natural to the pilgrim as his breathing – establishes a kind of prayer-without-ceasing. As the pilgrim hears on his journey, some of the Fathers of the Church refer to this Jesus Prayer as an abbreviation of the Gospel. There is an undeniable romance in this writing; a beautiful sense of prayer as consolation and delight,
‘The prayer of the heart consoled me to such a degree that I considered myself the happiest man on earth and I wondered whether the beatific vision could bring any greater consolation. Not only was I experiencing deep interior joy but I sensed a oneness with all of God's creation; people, animals, trees, and plants all seemed to have the name of Jesus Christ imprinted upon them. At times I felt such freedom of movement that it seemed I had no body which walked but I was delightfully carried through the air; at other times I descended within myself, I clearly saw all my organs and was astonished at the wisdom of the composition of the human body; at still other times I felt as happy as a king and with all these consolations I had a great desire to die and be poured out in praise and thanksgiving at the feet of Christ in the world of the spirit.’
And yet, the story of the pilgrim and his journey is full of moments that bring the reader crashing down to earth: muggings, sudden death, conversations with soldiers around the Crimean War. There is real movement here, and real life; a kind of counterpoint to the prayer that is going on all around, whilst the pilgrim learns the inexhaustible nature of God’s life, and his participation in that life. The pilgrim’s initially intended destiny may be Jerusalem, but in fact he finds the true goal of his pilgrimage deep in his heart. Without this journey of encounter and context, he might never have learned what it is to pray without ceasing, and about how such prayer can be the shaped context of the Christian life. But in order to allow that, the tale teaches us, we have to make a decision to orientate our lives in a certain direction,
‘The fact is [the pilgrim writes] that we are alienated from ourselves and have little desire really to know ourselves; we run in order to avoid meeting ourselves and we exchange truths for trinkets when we say, "I would like to have time for prayer and the spiritual life but the cares and difficulties of this life demand all my time and energies."’
A pilgrimage day encourages us to refocus those energies. I remember one very perceptive retreat director once saying to me, that when we make a retreat, we encounter two realities: God and ourselves. The problem, he said, is not encountering God!! We accumulate so much ‘stuff’ on our journey through life, that encountering our true selves when we stop can pull us up sharp. And yet, it is our true selves whom God desires, and it is only in our true selves that we can and will encounter Christ. Today we encounter ourselves and our destiny in the light of God’s love, drawn by the witness of St Edward. The focus of our pilgrimage today is not a beautiful shrine church, no matter how wonderful and inspiring this great building is; rather we are drawn to the slowly decaying bones of a great witness to Christ. You may have seen one of those rather extraordinary late medieval tombs which have a figure of the deceased dressed as they were in life on top, and a skeleton beneath. One famous inscription reads, ‘What you are I once was, what I am, you shall be.’ Christian pilgrimage is at least in part a memento mori, a sense that the focus of our Christian journey is, in fact, our death. Today is a day when we can befriend our creaturely reality, and learn a just a little bit better how not to be afraid of it. Here, sanctity can get into our bones. The mystery of prayer-without-ceasing is that the fragile pilgrim joins her or his prayer with a great symphony of prayer which is ongoing, all the time, in the lives of the saints, as they worship Christ in all eternity. Today, we pilgrims are free to be human, created, complex, contradictory humans, frail, and in need of forgiveness, yet drawn by the indestructible love which we see and receive in Jesus, and which suffuses the lives of those who give themselves to him. Through our prayer, we, too, are touched by that holiness.
Coming to a holy place like this, spending time on holy ground, can help us pay attention to our roots. On a day like today, we can recommit to how we spend our time outside this holy place, how we live the lessons we learn here. Lessons about prayer. Lessons about forgiveness. Lessons about generosity, hospitality, and holiness. Towards the end of his book, ‘Why go to Church?’, Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe answers that question quite straightforwardly: ‘In order to be sent out again!’ During the middle ages, pilgrims would often return from Jerusalem with phials of earth from the Holy City, a sense of ‘bringing the holy land home.’ The prayer we learn here today has implications for our whole life, and for all circumstances. It allows sanctity to get into our bones. We can bring this holy land of God’s promise and presence into our everyday lives through prayer, knowing that as we do so, we participate in that prayer-without-ceasing, which is the worship of the whole Church both on earth and in heaven.
Prayer doesn’t need to be complicated, or to be a burden. But it is helpful to establish a rhythm, even a rhythm which might eventually become as natural as breathing. Prayer can be taken into any situation, any place, in any context. And sometimes it’s good just to have a few simple lines which can become second nature. The Jesus Prayer might be one of those, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.’ That prayer is a kind of ‘holy land’, if you like, that you can take home with you, as your Christian pilgrimage continues and deepens in your heart. Treasure that holy land, treasure the pilgrimage of daily prayer, even prayer-without-ceasing.