Making A Pilgrimage Of Our Lives
In just two weeks, for the second year in a row, I will lead a group from the U.S. on a journey to lesser-known spiritual sites in Italy. It is a time to remove ourselves from our usual routine and alert our senses to what our new surroundings might be stirring inside of us. In short, it will be a pilgrimage.
“Always in a pilgrimage there is a change of mind and a change of heart,” the Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue has written. “We stand at a threshold/ looking back and looking ahead,” is how Joyce Rupp describes pilgrimage in her wonderful poem, Letting Go and Welcoming.
We need these times when we step outside of what feels familiar and safe. They help us to uncover new parts of ourselves or rediscover those parts that perhaps had become buried in the dust of ordinary duties and routine activities.
It is interesting that Dorothy Day called her columns for the Catholic Worker newspaper “On Pilgrimage.” Though Day traveled widely — across the U.S., to Europe and India — her inner journeys took place from the easy chair positioned near the window of her second-story room at Maryhouse in lower Manhattan where she could look out on a busy urban street.
Thomas Merton called the physical journeys we take “the symbolic acting out of an inner journey.” That interior pilgrimage likely begins unfolding long before we step onto that airplane, bus or train, or slip into the driver’s seat of our car and head out. That is the case for each person who will join me on this year’s two-week Benedictine Footprints contemplative and cultural pilgrigmage to Italy. All have decided to take this journey for a reason. All have felt an internal stirring.
I saw that stirring rise up and flourish in those who joined our pilgrimage last year. An 80-year-old woman discovered inner resources she didn’t think she had as she faced new experiences and challenges on our journey. Another found the means to confront a troubling diagnosis with renewed courage and hope. Still others on last year’s pilgrimage overcame their inherent shyness to bond with people they had never met before and have now become lasting friends.
What, then, is to stop us for making every day of our lives a pilgrimage? Truly nothing. In her essay The Necessity of Pilgrimage, writer Kathleen Tarr notes that to become a pilgrim is to abide by “a vow of wonder.”
Isn’t that a meaningful way to live each day — full of awe and wonder? It calls for listening more closely and carefully to what is happening both around us and inside of us. It means we can wake up every day on pilgrimage, like Dorothy Day, even amid our usual surroundings.
There is a wonderful legend about St. Brendan the Navigator, the Celtic saint who embarks in a boat with some fellow monks to find “The Island of the Saints” which he saw in a vision in a dream. They sail in circles, visiting many of the same spots again and again, but always seeing them from new perspectives. Ultimately, St. Brendan realizes that what he was searching for was always within him.
As Christine Valters Paintner puts it so beautifully in one of her essays, “He realizes he himself is the veil that hides the paradise he seeks.”
Christine points out something that is becoming increasing apparent to me: “We may physically only travel a few feet or miles, but the soul can move in astronomical measure.” First,though, we must have eyes that are alert and a heart open to seeing deeply into our familiar surroundsings. We must abide by a “vow of wonder.”
“We are all secrets,” Merton says in one of the beautiful journal passages he wrote as he was en route to Asia on a pilgrimage toward the end of his life. That secret, Merton adds, is a “divine design built right into our being.”
We get so distracted by our daily life that we often forget this. “Yet this is our true identity,” Merton says. This is what allows us to see in those we meet “the stranger who is Christ, our fellow pilgrim and traveler.” And isn’t that just we what need in our American society today — indeed, in the world today — a world too often lacking in both empathy and compassion?
We can be perpetually on pilgrimage wherever we find ourselves, every day of our lives. Can we start that inner journey today?
(To learn more about the annual Benedictice Footprints contemplative and cultural pilgrimage to lesser-known parts of Italy please contact judithvalente@judithvalente.com)
