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The article which follows will appear with photographs in the next issue of Anglican World but we believe it might be useful to editors preparing Lent/Easter papers and have therefore sent it out early.
Taking the cross from Sudan to Ireland
Marc Nikkel serves the Episcopal Church in the Province of the Sudan as a joint appointment of the Church Mission Society and the Episcopal Church USA. After a recent journey away from his work in Sudan to Ireland he reflects on his own pilgrimage and the similarities between the scholar pilgrims of Celtic Ireland and of modern Sudan.
A pilgrim from a distant land travels toward his home... One who has tasted the honey of eternity knows the pilgrim will only find his home above. Here he is restless from morn to night, ever longing for his home...
adapted from an old German hymn.
Throughout my travels I've toted, not without difficulty, a 55-inch coffin shaped wooden box containing some 15 Sudanese crosses. Entrusted to me by friends and colleagues during my last sojourn in Bor, each long (two or three and a half feet) hand-held cross provides an evocative touch stone with those who've fashioned them. How I've enjoyed seeing folk in America and Britain pass them round, smell and caress them, pondering their origins as I told their stories. Each conveys a narrative of faith and survival in the war zone, of continuity amidst displacement and famine, carried in processions, exorcisms, and through flights from gunfire and cattle raids. Some are rough and rugged, others quite refined. Crafted of various woods or metals, some decorated with ivory, cow horn, or brass bullet castings (one topped with the head of a rocket-propelled grenade), they reflect the traumatic, sometimes exhilarating, processes of culture change now underway. They declare tangibly, as women and men must in this era, that, amidst displacement and death, God is present among his people. These crosses have also helped me to remain inwardly rooted during months of transience, often tempted by the lure of affluence and apparent stability.
Pilgrim churches
In Ireland it seemed I'd brought this new generation of crosses to meet their forebears in the ancient High Crosses of the Celtic Church. How moved I was to kneel before the stone Scripture crosses, some seven yards high, standing as they have for a 1,000 years and more. From those worn images carved in relief, I'd try to decipher, and then to contemplate, the progression of Bible stories, all rising to their crescendo; there, at the heart of each immense, circled cross is portrayed the Crucifixion or, alternately, Christ the reigning King, at the fulcrum of eternity. In the cross heaven and hearth are interwoven round our compassionate, self-offering God.
In numerous ways I found the stories of crosses and their makers, present and past, Sudanese and Celtic, mingling across the centuries. In Ireland the crosses were the immovable centre point for trekking, sailing pilgrims, ever searching for "the place of their resurrection." In Sudan they are portable shrines of desperate uprooted peoples longing for a homeland, immediate, tangible, and eternal. In the crosses they fashioned these great peoples, European and African, confirm the good of their existence, their loves and longing for continuity, while reaching toward eternity. These first luminous reflections on the Cross of Christ by newly Christian peoples have much to teach us who are too often satisfied with the appearances of wealth and paucity of meaning.
I've learned how Celtic saints crossed seas and ventured through alien territory establishing monastic centres of prayer and learning at such sites as Kells, Glendalaugh, Monasterboice, Ion and Lindisfarne. Sadly, there'll be no stones remaining for future generations to ponder our life at Panyagor and Yomchir in Upper Nile, nor will our purpose-built structures of wood and grass endure much beyond a year (recent flooding has swamped them), Nonetheless, with our determined student-evangelists traversing far distances by food and in canoe through contested regions, carrying few provisions but their crosses, our efforts to build worshipping-learning communities in virgin territory cannot be dissimilar.
Tasting the honey of eternity
As I've reflected on the early pilgrims whose journeys the stone crosses punctuated I've thought as well of my own forebears. The quote from the hymn above were once scrawled in German and tucked into the casket of my great grandfather: "Pilgrim in a foreign land, wandering from his home...". In the 1870s Benjamin Nikke immigrated to America from a colony near Dnieper River in the Ukraine. Plying his skills as a farmer he homesteaded in the state of Kansas, but soon ventured further west to Colorado, only to return to Kansas. A refugee, as our Mennonite ancestors have been time and again over 400 years, he vested his life in "looking for his home." Only recently have I realised that, just as far as my great grandfather traveled westward, so far have I 'returned' eastward. Tracing the longitude due South from Benjamin's starting point near the Dnieper I come to Bor, on the Nile River in Southern Sudan, the heartland of my present work. It appears, from recent years, that I continue his pilgrimage. East to West, West to East, but now embracing a Southern route. Here, with the displaced and the refugees, kin of our kin, our passage continues, "tasting the honey of eternity" and together "longing for our home."