It is one of the ancient pilgrimage routes in Wales. The trail begins in Bangor and winds 50 miles along the coast of the Irish Sea to the end of the Llyn Peninsula. Water, food, and shelter are available at numerous churches that dot the coast.

In the tradition of Celtic Christianity, pilgrims are persons who undertake spiritual journeys. The physical effort of walking invites reflection on the spiritual life. During a pilgrimage, the inner and outer journeys converge.

St. Hywyn’s Church sits on the beach at the tip of the peninsula in the village of Aberdaron. Here, pilgrims rest. They walk the beach, hunt for brine shrimp in the tide pools, and wait. They wait for the weather to clear for the dangerous sea crossing to Bardsley Island.

Bardsley Island is the destination of the pilgrimage. A 4th century legend says that twenty thousand saints are buried on this island. It is a thin place where the veil between heaven and earth is transparent. It is a place of resurrection.

On the pilgrim’s map, the route is shown on the left side coming along the northwest coast from Bangor to Bardsley. Just as Welsh pilgrims follow ancient pathways like these trails, there are maps that we can consult as we seek a life of thin places, where the veil between us and God is the sheerest.

As spiritual people, we experience different stages of faith as we go through life. They are like successive holy places on a spiral path that goes around a mountain repeatedly as it goes up the mountain. We keep reconsidering some of the same issues over and over, but each time they arise we see them somewhat differently. Our path keeps leading us into slightly new territory, and we keep getting a wider view.

James W. Fowler, professor emeritus from Emory University, describes these movements of faith. He describes not what a person believes, but how a person shapes belief. The movements are not about the content of faith. Rather, they describe the process of formation in faith. These descriptions can help us to see why different people need different kinds of spiritual nurture.

Movement from one pattern to another is often fueled by crisis. When the answers provided by one way of thinking no longer satisfy, the pilgrim is pushed into new places that offer more complexity, more flexibility, new discoveries.

Last Sunday, I describe the formation of faith in infancy and young childhood. That message is on the St. Luke’s web site.

Today, we meet the storytellers, a movement of faith that develops about the age of six. Though some of its characteristics are transformed with the changes of adolescence, many of its strengths are experienced into adulthood.

This is the age in which the sagas of the superheroes have power.

Superman, born on a planet which has long since died, is raised by adoptive parents on the Kent farm in Kansas. The young boy, Kal-El, is renamed Clark Kent, and though he grows up among humans, he is not one of them. Under Earth’s yellow sun, he can do things humans can only dream of. In this episode, Jor-El, his father, tells Clark, who he is.

Lois Lane asks, “Why are you here?” Superman says, “I’m here to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.”

One of the characteristics that distinguish school age children from preschoolers is the emergence of the idea of FAIRNESS. The preschool child has no basis for distinguishing right from wrong other than the authority of parents. What is wrong is what displeases the parent, like spilling milk, hitting your sister, or breaking things. The more damage you do, the greater the wrong, whether you do it on purpose or not.

In this new pattern of faith, a sense of fairness comes into play. You get what you deserve (or you ought to) from parents, from others, and from God. But that’s not an abstract principle. It is a concrete way to bring order into the world, to know what to expect, and to insure fair treatment. If there’s a piece of cake to be divided between two children, you’d better have a plan for making the action a fair one, like saying, “Mary, you divide the cake and Joe will get first choice.”

We get our love of STORY-TELLING in this season of life. Stories for the pre-schooler provide avenues for the expression of feelings and the formation of images. The stories of older children, who can now separate the real from the unreal, give meaning to experience. We are concrete thinkers in this time of life. Our stories are taken literally. The actors in religious stories have the features of people, including God, who may be described as an old man with a flowing white beard.

Indeed, at this age, we are much more likely to think of God with human features than when we were younger. The reason for this is the newly-found ability to accept the perspective of others. In other words, we can think of what God might be like as distinct from ourselves.

The stories we tell in this season of life are not yet abstract reflections about ourselves, or God, or the world. If the flow of life is compared to a stream, we describe the flow from the middle of the stream. But we are not yet capable of stepping out of the stream and reflecting on the stories about the “flow of life” and the meaning of it. Interpretation of story requires the capacity to make abstractions, and that ability awaits the coming of adolescence.

The characteristics of this pattern of faith help to explain why simple stories about good and evil are so popular at this age and often throughout life. In my own childhood, I look forward to the Saturday morning Westerns. The good guys always win out in the end, and evil receives its due. This is as close to absolute truth as I come at that time.

Soap operas and Nick at Night nostalgia capture the attention of so many Americans because much of this stage remains in all of us.

LAW and GRACE are two of the most useful terms we have for describing how God acts toward us. In this stage of formation, law stories have the greater appeal. In such stories, God is likely to appear as our judge and we are the condemned. The super-heroes, like Abraham, Moses, and David, are good when they obey, but feel God’s wrath when they stray. This is the stage of life in which legalism is born.

The book of Job is a classic story of a man who struggles against a view of the world that says that the righteous prosper and the evil suffer – that we all get what we deserve.

The limitations of this stage are those of a theology of law. It can result in a pervasive sense of badness and in efforts at “make things right”. Caught within the story, we find no way to understand its meaning other than in a literal way.

To present God’s good news as trustable promise is a challenge for teachers and parents. Some stories in the Bible are likely to be difficult because they seem so patently unfair. In the Parable of the Vineyard, all the workers receive the same pay, even through some work longer than others. Jesus is teaching about GRACE that embraces all people, no matter what. Grace is hard to fathom, because it doesn’t exist in the categories of fair and unfair.

If the last time you hear the stories of faith is in your childhood with its superheroes, legalistic lenses, and fear of punishment, your spiritual journey will be well served to re-visit the stories with the interpretive skills of adulthood.

Likewise, if this is your first time in a faith community, your journey will be well served to read the stories, to understand how the biblical story continues to shape our lives season after season.

The Disciple Bible Study classes this fall will be transforming for you.

We gather week after week in order to create a holy place that can become thin. May this community be a way station for pilgrims on the journey.

When our way is weary
 we will look to you, our Providence,
 to come with strengthening angels.

When our frames are hungry
 we will look to you, our Providence,
 to come with food for our hearts.

(From Celtic Prayers for Life Today, Ray Simpson)