Pilgrim
with mother at home, Aug 2007
I am a pilgrim. As a Ugandan whose parents were Rwandan (one Hutu, the other Tutsi), a philosopher whose dissertation was on a theologian, an African living in the United States, and a Catholic priest teaching in a Protestant seminary, I find myself at the intersection of many stories and identities. If these aspects of my biography have marked me with a kind of ‘identity crisis’ and a sense of homelessness, they have also led me to appreciate Christian life as a journey and the church as a community on pilgrimage toward God’s new creation. Accordingly, I find Paul’s reminder that in Christ the ‘diving wall has been broken’ (Eph. 2.14) so that we who used to be far apart are no longer strangers and aliens, but ‘fellow travelers’ (Eph.2.19) a good summary of what the Christian call to a new identity in Christ is about.
My life at various intersections already somehow places me on this restless journey. All I hope to do is to invite others to join me on this restless journey, and to discover the unexpected gifts of friendship, community and signs of new creation on the other side of our usual ‘tribal’ identities: Catholic – Protestant; West-Africa; Back-white; male-female.
I try to do this not only through my work work as priest and professor but also through different programatic initiatives: as co-director of the Duke Center for Reconciliation, including, specifically, the African Great Lakes Initiative; a leader of Duke Divinity School’s Pilgrimages of Pain and Hope; as founding member of Share the Blessings; and as and as founding director of a new center for mission and reconciliation in Uganda, Bethany House. The full effect of these various initiatives has been to confirm reconciliation as the goal of Christian life and pilgrimage as the central lens through which that journey is engaged, which is to say as the central paradigm for understanding Christian mission in the world.