The Fourth Day of Christmas. The Path untrodden

A winter day on the streets of Berlin, 2022

I have always been drawn to the wording of the Holden prayer I discovered at Friday prayers at St Olaf College. “You send us on ventures … by paths as yet untrodden …”

I feel it is a suitable motto for our Christmas journey. Every year we journey again, searching for Christmas beyond the cultural happenings, and every year again it leads us onto a path untrodden.

Isn’t that how a pilgrimage should be? We walk the same road and yet it becomes a path untrodden. We might walk the same street from Christmas Day to Epiphany but still we experience it as a new path altogether.

And isn’t it also this way that invites us to reconcile our religious forms with the life we live? The forms offer us the road, but we are the ones who must fill it with life every year anew.

And thus, dear pilgrim, each of us will find themselves on a quite different journey, even though we all walk the same path. I am thinking about a fellow traveler who is burying her husband …