Pilgrims and Tourists

"For the market is not only an institution of exchange. It is also a highly anti-traditional force, at least in advanced consumer societies. The stimulation of demand, for example, depends on a culture, even a cult, of the new, the product that improves on the past and renders it obsolete in an increasingly short space of time. It encourages a view of human life itself as a series of consumer choices rather than as a set of inherited ways of doing things.

One of the most fateful developments is the displacement of human identity. Our identity used to be something given by the history into which we are born. Now we conceive of it as something like a suit of clothes we can choose, wear for a while, and then discard in favor of the new season’s fashion-the move graphically illustrated by our change of terminology from “life” to “lifestyle,” with its suggestion that there is nothing of substance that defines who we are. In the process, religion itself is transformed from salvation to a branch of the leisure industry, and we are transformed, as one writer put it, “from pilgrim to tourist.”

--Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth.
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/speeches/morals.htm

Interesting that both Rabbi Sacks, a Jew, and Eugene Peterson, a Christian, should both be concerned that we are no longer pilgrims but tourists.

Make me more than just a Christian in my heart, in my heart;
Lord I want to be a pilgrim on the Way.
By the Way, In the Way,
Lord I want to be your pilgrim on the Way.

Lord I want to be a Christian, be your child, be your child
Lord I want to be a Christian: be your child.
In my heart, in my soul,
in my mind and body, Lord
be your child.

Lord please to give me your truth, in my mind, in my mind
Lord I want to have your truth in my mind.

Lord please give to me your goodness in my heart, in my heart,
Lord I want to have your goodness in my heart.

Lord please give to me your beauty in my soul, in my soul
Lord I want to have your beauty in my soul.

Lord please give my body strength,
give me strength give me strength
Lord please give my body strength to do your will.

Make me more than just a Christian in my heart, in my heart;
Lord I want to be your pilgrim on the Way.
By your Way, In your Way,
Lord I want to be your pilgrim on the Way.

(repeat, second time singing in first person plural)