Arthur Blessitt, whose fervent efforts to convert hippies, freaks and junkies along Hollywood’s Sunset Strip were just the prelude to his decision to carry a 110-pound wooden cross from Los Angeles to New York—and then on, eventually traveling 43,340 miles through each country on the planet — he died on January 14. He was 84 years old.
The death of Mr. Blessitt was announced in a statement in the first person on his website. The statement did not specify where he died or the cause of death. He lived in the Denver area and his ministry was based in suburban Littleton, Colo.
A Southern Baptist preacher who ran a Christian cafe near a strip club, Mr. Blessitt began his journey on Christmas Day 1969, carrying his handmade 6-by-12-foot cross on his shoulder. He made adjustments along the way, replacing his sandals with boots and adding a 12-inch wheel to the base of his load; he later traded the heavy cross for a 42-pound version that he could split in two, making it easier to ship.
It took him six months to walk across the country. When he finished, he returned to Los Angeles, only to receive what he said was a command from Jesus to embark on a global journey.
“Go!” Jesus told him, he recounted on his website. “I want you to go all the way.”
His first trip abroad, in 1971, was to Northern Ireland; other parts of Europe, Africa, the Middle East and East Asia soon followed.
He was carrying a roll of stickers that read “Smile! Jesus loves you” which he handed out to curious passers-by. Not everyone was friendly: he was harassed by the police, mocked by malcontents, and had his cross stolen in—of all places—Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis once lived.
“Some people see me and shout, ‘You’re crazy!'” he said in a 2009 documentary.The Cross: The Story of Arthur Blessitt”, directed by Matthew Crouch. “I say, ‘It’s okay, at least I turned the right screw.'”
Mr. Blessitt kept meticulous notes abroad, detailing how long the soles of his boots lasted (about 500 miles) and how often he was arrested (24 times). He visited every continent, including Antarctica, as well as war zones, disaster areas and many other places where he could have been shot, beaten or arrested.
He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, faced angry baboons in Kenya and was nearly blown up by a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland – all while wearing his cross. It is included in the Guinness Book of Records for “the longest pilgrimage that lasts.”
It took him almost 40 years, but in 2008 he completed his quest to visit all the countries when he was allowed to enter the last one, North Korea. His “journey” there was largely symbolic: the authorities allowed him to carry his cross from the front door of his hotel to the street and back.
There was a Forrest Gump quality to Mr. Blessitt’s journey. Not only did he travel the country on foot; during his adventures he encountered a long list of historical figures – Yasir Arafat, Billy Graham, Bob Dylan – as well as people who tried to squeeze their own complicated agenda into what he insisted was a simple and innocent message.
“In the third world, people’s first thought when they see me is that I’m a holy man,” he told The Independent newspaper in 1999. “In America, however, some people think of the Ku Klux Klan, women often think that I’m an anti-abortion protester , other people that I am right-wing.”
His decades-long campaign made him a minor celebrity. Profiles have always focused on his combination of dogged persistence and gruesome approach to his task.
“You’d be amazed,” he told People magazine in 1978, “how much attention a man who carries a big wooden cross gets.”
Arthur Owen Blessitt was born Oct. 27, 1940, in Greenville, Miss., to Arthur ON Blessitt and Mary (Campbell) Blessitt, and grew up in rural northwest Louisiana, where his father ran a cotton farm.
He studied history at Mississippi College, a Christian institution in Clinton, Mississippi, but left in 1962 without a degree. He later studied at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (now Gateway Seminary), in Oakland, California, but also left before completing his degree.
He began as an itinerant preacher in the Mountain West, spending time in Montana and Nevada before settling in Los Angeles in 1967.
He found himself in the middle of the counterculture of the 1960s, but also encountered the early germs of what became the Jesus freak movement, mixing hippie styles and free Christian evangelism.
Mr. Blessitt began preaching in bars, clubs and concert halls, welcomed—or merely tolerated—according to the ethos of the era. He dressed the part, with long hair and sandals, and mixed his sermons with references to drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
“Like, if you want to get high, you don’t have to drop acid. Just pray and you’ll go all the way to heaven,” he wrote in “Life’s Greatest Trip” (1970), one of his many religious tracts. “You don’t have to take pills to get high. Just throw away Matej, Marko, Luka or Ivan.”
Mr. Blessitt married Sherry Simmons in 1963. They divorced in 1990. He married Denise Brown the same year.
She survived him, as did his children from his first marriage, Gina, Joy, Arthur Joel, Arthur Joshua, Arthur Joseph and Arthur Jerusalem; daughter from second marriage Sofija; his sister Victoria; 12 grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
With his flowing curls and giant cross, Mr. Blessitt has sometimes been mistaken for an impersonator of Jesus and even for the son of God himself, including once in Liberia when a village leader knelt before him.
“That’s the only time I thought about quitting,” he told The New York Times in 1997. “I put the cross on the tree and said, ‘Lord, I will never try to take your glory and present myself as a religious leader. ‘ And I heard Jesus whisper to me: ‘Don’t worry about it. Just keep going down the road.’”
