From Tourist to Pilgrim

This is it!! We are awake and today is the day!! We'll drink our coffee and then finish packing, get those last minute chores done, and catch a ride to the airport with our friend Karen. Can you tell I'm excited?
But, I've been thinking how this trip to Italy seems so different from our typical vacations.  Usually, on a vacation we head to the beach and the plan is to relax - eat seafood, read books, sit in the sun, listen to the waves, fish a little, golf a few rounds and watch the sunset. (There is also usually some shopping thrown in there somewhere.) It doesn't take a lot of preparation. We just load the car and take off. But, this trip is different. We've been seriously planning for weeks. We have studied travel books until we can recite the key sites from memory. We have visited with friends who have traveled to Italy and listened to advice, looked at pictures, and learned the ropes. We have searched and researched. And, I think we are ready. Ready to experience Italy, it's history and art and culture and cathedrals and countryside and cuisine. We are not just vacationers, we are about to be tourists. And, this brings me back to one of my favorite authors, Eugene Peterson, and his fabulous little book, A Long Obedience. Peterson suggests that too often in our faith walk we have "adopted the mindset of a tourist and only want the high points." We spend our time looking "for a religious experience" but we seem to have "little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue."
Hm mm. I have to contemplate that.
Peterson wants us - in our faith walk - to be "pilgrims...people who spend our lives going someplace..." and "disciples...people who spend our lives apprenticed to our master, Jesus Christ."  Not tourists. 
Well - we are definitely about to be tourists for the next 17 days. But, as a tourist in one of the most fascinating and historical places in the world - I hope to learn a few things about being a pilgrim. I want to walk in the footsteps of Paul and visit the ancient forum in Rome and imagine what it meant to be a disciple. I want to re-trace the steps of Francesco of Assisi and imagine what it meant to take a vow of poverty. And I want to stand in the places where Catherine of Sienna and Copernicus and Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo walked and learned and confronted and created and suffered and changed the world. I want to learn what it means to become a pilgrim. And - I also want to do a little shopping along the way! Arrivederci!!