Rebekah your posting is so beautiful and I don't think any of this is to do with anything you said, it's just a semantic debate, though I think through it people are expressing their fears of the "other" - fears that you not only overcome but totally over-ride welcoming the stranger into your hearth and home.
and what follows is not directed at you at all, this I wrote in response to Falcon's interesting posting about words and meanings...
but one of the strengths the English language is its flexibility (ambiguity?); any one word can contain a great colour chart of meanings. Which is why English is so good for poetry and less good for things requiring precise definitions like philosophy or science (which is where, apparently, German comes in handy). The English thesaurus is thick and lovely - the very breakdown of one word into all its myriad of different meanings and implications reads like poetry itself. Perhaps then Humpty, and Dylan Thomas (and indeed Lewis Carroll himself) are right then; words can mean what you will them to mean. Anyway, I digress.
The “drifter” debate is a bit like the “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” . What I'm thinking is that “drifter” is being used here in a pejorative sense - Jesus as far as we are concerned did have a purpose, and as far as the people who executed him were concerned he was too effective. But there must have been those who saw him pass with his band and labelled him "drifter" or "hippie" or "one of the great unwashed" “a drain on society” etc (or the 1st century equivalent). Similarly those we are ready to label "drifters" nowadays may well be entirely clear about their own purpose, they just make us nervous as they don't fit into our neat classifications in which we catagorize people according to their achievements. Jesus can't have seemed to have been much of an achiever by the time they nailed him up; his mates had deserted him, he'd been executed in the manner most humiliating for Jews and nothing he had done had been written down or recorded. And yet... well even if you don't happen to be a Christian you have to at least admit that he shifted the philosophical goal posts definitively.
so we have a case of one man's drifter is another man's paradigm (or Messiah).
If we live entirely in the present - and this is my Lenten exercise this year, a very interesting one it is too - then in a sense we too become drifters as we relinquish control; instead of anguishing over the future and needing to have plans set out to step neatly into, we wait to see what life throws in our path and welcome whatever it is (Rebekah does this with flair!).
And you’re right, being a Pilgrim is not the same as drifting: pilgrims
do have a definite goal. But is drifting then a state of mind or a physical manifestation – do we become a pilgrim because we are tired of drifting and do we stop being a drifter once our feet are directed on the path however nebulous our goal/
motive (what do the relics St James mean to most on the road?) If so, then drifters, once on the camino, will stop being drifters and become pilgrims, and as pilgrims aren't frightening (unlike drifeters) then no-one has anything to worry about.
...unless it is their "motive" to continue to drift... in which case their lives should be declared "art" and they should be award the Turner prize without further ado
