Presbyterian pastor and author looks for growth and inspiration through travel
The Rev. Douglas Brouwer was a recent guest on ‘A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast’
LOUISVILLE — A Presbyterian pastor for nearly 45 years, the Rev. Douglas Brouwer has a long history of serving churches in both the United States and Europe. His experiences, which include leading pilgrimages and study tours, and his new book, “The Traveler’s Path: Finding Spiritual Growth and Inspiration Through Travel,” were on display during an episode of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” which dropped last week. Listen to Brouwer’s enlightening 47-minute conversation with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe here.
“I think with some coaching and encouragement, people could have larger experiences when they travel than they do,” Brouwer said, citing his own youthful experience as an example. “The first time I saw the Grand Canyon at age 10, I was in awe, overwhelmed at the sight of the Grand Canyon. I wish I could say I learned wonder and awe in church, but I learned it outdoors.”
He encourages travelers to “get off the bus” and “engage in the cultures they visit” by “listening to their stories, understanding their culture and being willing to be changed by the encounters that they have.” In the book, he includes a chapter on language learning. “The last church I served was in a country that required me, for my work permit, to learn the local language,” he said. “I discovered in language learning I was able to encounter a culture different from my own in a very deep way. That’s the beginning of what I take to be the possibility of travel.”
Travel “can be exhausting, and the planning can be overwhelming,” Brouwer said. “But if you aim for something in the travel, that’s a good beginning.” The first time he led a group of church people to Israel-Palestine, travelers got to know Palestinian Christians who lived there — “so well, in fact, they have been guests in my home just as we had been guests in theirs,” he said. “We listened to their stories and realized there isn’t just one story or two stories — there are many sides to this particular story. … I am who I am today because of these personal encounters.”
Americans tend to stay together when they’re abroad, Brouwer said. “I’ve noticed this with missionary families, and this happens with the military. People stationed abroad tend never to leave the base,” he said. “We need to push ourselves to get out there and make a new friend — a friend from another culture.”
“My sense is, when we’re uneasy or off-balance, in a position where we need help from a stranger, it’s then that we’re learning from other cultures.”
The first week Brouwer owned a car in Europe, he picked up two traffic tickets when “I didn’t see the camera taking photos of my license plate as I sped by,” he told Catoe and Doong. “But being in a learning situation — getting an expensive traffic ticket — made me learn something about the culture I was in.” It can be the same when we need medical attention while overseas. “When you get sick far from home and use the medical services of another country, you learn a great deal about what that culture is all about.”
He said he read once that Americans are like peaches. “On the surface, we seem easy to get to know. We’re very friendly. But then there’s a hard core that’s impenetrable.” The European people Brouwer experienced “were more like coconuts. On the surface, they’re very difficult to get to know. But underneath, they’re the warmest, most generous people I’ve ever met.”
“To hear I’m a peach has been a difficult learning experience,” he said. “Am I really that impenetrable on the inside? But that’s how other cultures perceive us.”
Brouwer is from the Midwest. “Midwestern nice is who we are. We try not to ruffle any feathers,” he said. But when he was an interim pastor in The Hague in the Netherlands, he learned that “Dutch directness is legendary.” After receiving his first haircut there, “people at church said, ‘Why did you get your hair cut so short?’ A Midwesterner would never say that, but my Dutch friends felt free to say, ‘boy, that was a mistake.’ … It’s disconcerting at the beginning to get that directness, but as time goes on, it can be a rich learning experience.”
While writing and speaking about travel, Brouwer sometimes finds himself advocating for more localized travel, citing Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America” and especially Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”
“She never ventured more than two miles from her home in Virginia,” Brouwer said, “and yet she discovered the whole world because she kept her eyes open.”
Some of the people we get to know through our travels don’t share our views, of course. A church Brouwer was serving as an interim pastor in Europe was searching for an associate pastor. The search committee decided it would exclude female candidates.
“I thought, that means my daughter, a Presbyterian pastor, wouldn’t be welcome here. What am I doing with people like this? So yes, encountering Christians from around the world turned out to be difficult at times,” he said. “Then I discovered other wonderful qualities about them, and I tried to focus on them. Maybe the same goes for their view of me.”
Asked to describe the book, Brouwer said it’s a work that includes not only vacation travel, but pilgrimages, mission trips and study tours he’s led. “The conclusion I come to is I think a lot of the travel we do is spiritually motivated,” he said. “I encourage the reader to think about the spiritual motivation behind the travel that we do. It’s about becoming far more mindful in our travels than we often are.”
New editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous episodes here.
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