Arthur Blessitt, whose fervent efforts to convert the hippies, freaks and addicts along Hollywood’s Sunset Strip were just a prelude to his decision to carry a 110-pound wooden cross from Los Angeles to New York City — and then to keep going, eventually traveling 43,340 miles through every country on the planet — died on Jan. 14. He was 84.
Mr. Blessitt’s death was announced in a first-person statement on his website. The statement did not say where he died or cite a cause of death. He had been living in the Denver area, and his ministry was based in the suburb of Littleton, Colo.
A Southern Baptist preacher who ran a Christian coffeehouse adjacent to a strip club, Mr. Blessitt started his journey on Christmas Day 1969, bearing his homemade 6-by-12-foot cross on his shoulder. He made adjustments along the way, swapping his sandals for boots and adding a 12-inch wheel to the base of his burden; he later swapped 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 was done, he returned to Los Angeles, only to receive — in his telling — orders from Jesus to take his journey global.
“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 carried a roll of stickers reading “Smile! Jesus Loves You,” which he handed out to curious passers-by. Not everyone was friendly: Police officers harassed him, malcontents jeered, and his cross was stolen in — of all places — Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis had once lived.
“Some people see me and shout, ‘You’re a nut!’” he said in the 2009 documentary “The Cross: The Arthur Blessitt Story,” directed by Matthew Crouch. “I say, ‘That’s all right, at least I’m screwed on the right bolt.”
Mr. Blessitt kept meticulous notes abroad, detailing how long his boot soles lasted (about 500 miles) and how often he was arrested (24 times). He visited every continent, including Antarctica, as well as war zones, disaster zones and many other places where he was liable to get shot at, beaten or arrested.
He climbed Mount Fuji in Japan, confronted angry baboons in Kenya and was nearly blown up by a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland — all while carrying his cross. He is listed in Guinness World Records for the “longest ongoing pilgrimage.”
It took him nearly 40 years, but in 2008 he completed his quest to visit every country when he was permitted to enter the last, North Korea. His “trek” there was largely symbolic: Authorities let him 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 journeying. Not only did he travel across 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 impress their own complicated agenda onto 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, though, some people think of the Ku Klux Klan, women often think I’m an anti-abortion protester, other people that I’m a right-winger.”
His decades-long campaign made him a minor celebrity. Profiles invariably zeroed in on his combination of dogged perseverance and an aw-shucks approach to his task.
“You’d be amazed,” he told People magazine in 1978, “how much attention a man carrying a big wooden cross gets.”
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, where his father managed a cotton farm.
He studied history at Mississippi College, a Christian institution in Clinton, Miss., but left in 1962 without a degree. He later studied at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (now Gateway Seminary), in Oakland, Calif., but also left before completing his degree.
He started as an itinerant preacher around the Mountain West, spending time in Montana and Nevada before settling in Los Angeles in 1967.
He found himself in the middle of the 1960s counterculture, but he also encountered the early sprouts of what became the Jesus freak movement, blending hippie stylings and freewheeling Christian evangelism.
Mr. Blessitt began preaching in bars, clubs and concert halls, welcome — or just tolerated — by the era’s anything-goes ethos. He dressed the part, with long hair and sandals, and he mingled 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 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 pop pills to get loaded. Just drop a little Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.”
Mr. Blessitt married Sherry Simmons in 1963. They divorced in 1990. That same year he married Denise Brown.
She survives him, as do his children from his first marriage, Gina, Joy, 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.
With his flowing locks and giant cross, Mr. Blessitt was sometimes mistaken for a Jesus impersonator, and even for the son of God himself, including once in Liberia, when a village leader knelt before him.
“It’s the only time I ever considered stopping,” he told The New York Times in 1997. “I lay the cross against a tree and said, ‘Lord, I will never try to take your glory and portray myself as a religious leader.’ And I heard Jesus whisper to me: ‘Don’t worry about it. Just keep going down the road.’”
