I'm a late adopter. Maybe it's a natural caution due to personality; I don't know. But I came to theology late in life. I've been a Christian for all my adult life, and some of my pre-adult life too, but the thirst for theological understanding started brewing in my 40s. Despite the fact that I'd been listening to sermons for over thirty years, there were woefully large holes in my understanding of the Bible and of the things, as a Christian, I was supposed to believe.

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The past few years have set me on a course; one which I suppose will never end. 

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Now, a little chapel in a French village has inspired me to start writing down the things I am learning and thinking. If it inspires anyone else to learn and think, then I am happy. If not, then it helps me to process my own meandering thoughts, and no-one gets hurt!

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With my family, I've recently returned from a holiday in France (a holiday like no other as we were in the summer of 2020, the first summer of Covid-19). In Miramont-Sensacq in southern Aquitaine, we stayed in a house directly opposite the little church pictured above.

The church of Saint Martin is situated on the Santiago way (or the Chemin de Saint Jacques as they call it there), and pilgrims would pass our door daily. They still had 1000km to go at this point, and I felt for them with their huge backpacks in the sweltering southern French summer. 

It holds no appeal for me, this walking for weeks with a shrine to a saint the consolation at the end of it, but it made me realise that I too am on a pilgimage of sorts. (Pilgrims will tell you that the purpose of their journey to Santiago di Compostella is not to see the final resting place of St James; rather people make the journey for all sorts of reasons: spiritual, physical and emotional.) My journey is towards theological understanding and has as its hopeful destination right worship (or at least 'righter' worship!).

"You worship what you do not know", said Jesus to the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4. I don't want that to be said of me. Theology (when done right) leads to doxology, and this 'talk about God' which presses in with questions and head-scratching confusion at times, leads to the open space of wonder and worship of the one true God; at least it should and often it does.

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So as I walk this way, maybe some of you will join me on this pilgrimage and we can share the journey as well as the wonder of the destination. 

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