Arthur Blessitt, whose fervent efforts to transform the hippies, freaks and addicts alongside Hollywood’s Sundown Strip have been only a prelude to his choice to hold a 110-pound wood cross from Los Angeles to New York Metropolis — after which to maintain going, ultimately touring 43,340 miles by means of each nation on the planet — died on Jan. 14. He was 84.
Mr. Blessitt’s dying was introduced in a first-person assertion on his web site. The assertion didn’t say the place he died or cite a reason behind dying. He had been dwelling within the Denver space, and his ministry was based mostly within the suburb of Littleton, Colo.
A Southern Baptist preacher who ran a Christian coffeehouse adjoining to a strip membership, Mr. Blessitt began his journey on Christmas Day 1969, bearing his do-it-yourself 6-by-12-foot cross on his shoulder. He made changes alongside the best way, swapping his sandals for boots and including a 12-inch wheel to the bottom of his burden; he later swapped the heavy cross for a 42-pound model that he might break up in two, making it simpler to ship.
It took him six months to stroll throughout the nation. When he was completed, he returned to Los Angeles, solely to obtain — in his telling — orders from Jesus to take his journey world.
“Go!” Jesus advised him, he recounted on his web site. “I would like you to go all the best way.”
His first journey overseas, in 1971, was to Northern Eire; different components of Europe, Africa, the Center East and East Asia quickly adopted.
He carried a roll of stickers studying “Smile! Jesus Loves You,” which he handed out to curious passers-by. Not everybody was pleasant: Cops harassed him, malcontents jeered, and his cross was stolen in — of all locations — Assisi, Italy, the place St. Francis had as soon as lived.
“Some individuals see me and shout, ‘You’re a nut!’” he mentioned within the 2009 documentary “The Cross: The Arthur Blessitt Story,” directed by Matthew Crouch. “I say, ‘That’s all proper, at the very least I’m screwed on the correct bolt.’”
Mr. Blessitt saved meticulous notes overseas, detailing how lengthy his boot soles lasted (about 500 miles) and the way typically he was arrested (24 instances). He visited each continent, together with Antarctica, in addition to struggle zones, catastrophe zones and plenty of different locations the place he was liable to get shot at, overwhelmed or arrested.
He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, confronted offended baboons in Kenya and was almost blown up by a terrorist bomb in Northern Eire — all whereas carrying his cross. He’s listed in Guinness World Data for the “longest ongoing pilgrimage.”
It took him almost 40 years, however in 2008 he accomplished his quest to go to each nation when he was permitted to enter the final, North Korea. His “trek” there was largely symbolic: Authorities let him carry his cross from the entrance door of his lodge to the road and again.
There was a Forrest Gump high quality to Mr. Blessitt’s journeying. Not solely did he journey throughout nation on foot; throughout his adventures he encountered an extended record of historic figures — Yasir Arafat, Billy Graham, Bob Dylan — in addition to individuals who tried to impress their very own difficult agenda onto what he insisted was a easy and harmless message.
“Within the third world, individuals’s first thought after they see me is that I’m a holy man,” he advised The Impartial newspaper in 1999. “In America, although, some individuals consider the Ku Klux Klan, ladies typically assume I’m an anti-abortion protester, different those that I’m a right-winger.”
His decades-long marketing campaign made him a minor superstar. Profiles invariably zeroed in on his mixture of dogged perseverance and an aw-shucks method to his activity.
“You’d be amazed,” he advised Individuals journal in 1978, “how a lot consideration a person carrying an enormous wood cross will get.”
Arthur Owen Blessitt was born on Oct. 27, 1940, in Greenville, Miss., to Arthur O.N. Blessitt and Mary (Campbell) Blessitt, and raised in rural northwest Louisiana, the place his father managed a cotton farm.
He studied historical past at Mississippi Faculty, a Christian establishment in Clinton, Miss., however left in 1962 with no diploma. He later studied at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (now Gateway Seminary), in Oakland, Calif., but in addition left earlier than finishing his diploma.
He began as an itinerant preacher across the Mountain West, spending time in Montana and Nevada earlier than settling in Los Angeles in 1967.
He discovered himself in the course of the Sixties counterculture, however he additionally encountered the early sprouts of what grew to become the Jesus freak motion, mixing hippie stylings and freewheeling Christian evangelism.
Mr. Blessitt started preaching in bars, golf equipment and live performance halls, welcome — or simply tolerated — by the period’s anything-goes ethos. He dressed the half, with lengthy hair and sandals, and he mingled his sermons with references to medicine and rock ’n’ roll.
“Like, if you wish to get excessive, you don’t must drop acid. Simply pray and also you go all the best way to Heaven,” he wrote in “Life’s Biggest Journey” (1970), one among his many non secular tracts. “You don’t must pop drugs to get loaded. Simply drop just a little Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.”
Mr. Blessitt married Sherry Simmons in 1963. They divorced in 1990. That very same yr he married Denise Brown.
She survives him, as do his kids from his first marriage, Gina, Pleasure, Arthur Joel, Arthur Joshua, Arthur Joseph and Arthur Jerusalem; a daughter from his second marriage, Sophia; his sister, Victoria; 12 grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Together with his flowing locks and big cross, Mr. Blessitt was typically mistaken for a Jesus impersonator, and even for the son of God himself, together with as soon as in Liberia, when a village chief knelt earlier than him.
“It’s the one time I ever thought-about stopping,” he advised The New York Occasions in 1997. “I lay the cross towards a tree and mentioned, ‘Lord, I’ll by no means attempt to take your glory and painting myself as a non secular chief.’ And I heard Jesus whisper to me: ‘Don’t fear about it. Simply maintain happening the highway.’”
