An implausible pilgrimage

A pilgrimage, thy say, takes you somewhere you’ve never been before.

A place out of the ordinary that helps you make sense of things.

A thin place where the barriers dissolve between earth and heaven…

So I suppose it is a bit strange, this pilgrimage to Caffe Nero in Edinburgh Airport…

A year ago we were in Iona, me and Queen Jesus,

In the Abbey, where I was trying to let her words flow through me

In that abbey, whose thick walls are indeed very thin

In the face of the gigantic forces outside

The wild energies of ocean and of sky.

And to be there was absolutely enough for the both of us.

Only out of that journey came a longer one round the USA

And with that a thirst for more.

Which is why I’m at this other thin place in Caffe Nero

Just before the barrier.

The place where you go through security

The gateway to another world.

Crowds and crowds of people walk anxiously past me

And I hope they do better than me, because I know

When I try to get away from it all

The thing I want to get away from most

Is always waiting for me at my destination.

And the security all the checks promise me is usually no security at all.

But perhaps for these people it will all be different

Perhaps the journey will open a new door in their hearts and their minds…

As for me, I marvel

Marvel at the way we all keep travelling

When we know that air travel is something that is destroying our world.

But I won’t judge. I’m planning a journey myself;

And I’m sitting in Caffe Nero

And Nero fiddled while Rome burned.

As we all are, I suspect, fiddling in anxious distraction,

In thrall as we are to the straight world.

The friend I’m waiting for, Glenna, is a wonderful person who was briefly my pastor,

And embodies all the best pastor qualities I’ve come to recognise from my tour of US churches:

Faith, hope and love, as recommended by Sant Paul,

That she and her wife express in a beautiful energy 

That surrounds the three of us as if with a force field,

Us a queer trinity resisting the current of straightness,

As we laugh and make plans for a new Queen Jesus journey.

And then they’re gone through the barriers and I’m sitting alone

And there’s two hot men chatting each other up in the table next door

I’m sure they fancy each other

And I wonder if they’ll find a place where they have sex,

Though I have to admit it seems a bit unlikely.

But I hope they do, and I hope they have pleasure,

And, as Queen Jesus says,

“Pleasure is holy. Pleasure is sacred…”

And maybe this apparently desolate cafe is a thin place after all,

And maybe the sacred really is closer than we imagine….