Writing this on a Virgin Pendolino train, surrounded by tired commuters, it strikes me how new this whole idea of travel is. Our great-grandparents mostly stayed in one part of the world, and international travel was a big deal involving major costs and weeks or months at sea. Today we globe-hop with very little awareness of how novel our freedom is. In view of the global impact of burning all that aviation fuel, today’s freedom of cut-price air flights is probably fairly short-lived, and future generations will wonder how it was possible to fly across Europe for the price of a paperback book.
Of course, one of the problems with frenetic travel is that we don’t really go anywhere. One airport, one hotel room, is very much like another. I remember flying into Berlin for one meeting and feeling afterwards that I could have been in Stockport.
Sometimes we travel to see something of the world, to be entertained, informed, taken out of ourselves. Perhaps we are looking for something else too? You can tell by the way people talk about possible destinations that our travel choices in society reveal that we’re looking for some special place or experience.
The Old Testament provides us with a long list of foot-loose Israelites, people with itchy feet like Noah, Abraham, or Jacob. The letter to the Hebrews suggests that what they were really doing was “seeking a homeland;’ but they died without ever finding it, but never gave up seeking. Maybe that is true of all of us. Maybe at the heart of all our travelling is the dream of finding our true home.
Today there is even a sub-category of tourists who “collect” spiritual places and experiences, often zooming from one holy place to another in the hope, I suppose, that something rubs off. Which, of course, really is missing the point. People talk about ‘thin’ places in the world where it is easy to feel that God is very close, but although many of them are on the tourist track, there are probably quiet, empty places you treasure which are definitely not full of people and noise. Interestingly, places like that may be much closer to home – somewhere you walk the dog, meet a friend, or simply a corner of the garden where you sit quietly to find time – to meet yourself meeting God.
Try a holiday six steps from your back door. You may not have to travel very far at all this summer to find something completely refreshing.
John