Pilgrims on the Path
The weather has turned cooler here, although the dreaded rains people keep talking about have yet to begin. Autumn colors are beginning to show on the leaves, and the day’s sunlight is diminishing by minutes with each passing day.
In these last two months, we are learning how to be us, here, and discovering again how we are still very much us, here. If I’ve learned anything about myself after repeated moves, it’s that merely going to a new place is not likely to bring forth a new me.
Place can be a powerful lever to promote personal growth or change, but the difference is not in the what and where, but in the how and who. How one lives in a place, including how one treats the people of that place, is what can bring about genuine transformation. On this point, may I suggest Lisa Deam’s marvelous meditation on pilgrimage, 3000 Miles to Jesus? I reviewed it for the Englewood Review of Books years ago, and Deam explores this dynamic beautifully and succinctly.
We’ve learned that our household goods have arrived in country and will soon be delivered to our residence. So, like savoring the cool before the dreary rains, I’m savoring our current minimal footprint before the deluge of all that stuff, or in the parlance of global logistics: our “household effects” (HHE). The delivery of one’s HHE is, as my oldest put it recently, “basically ‘stressful Christmas,’ where you get all the stuff you already own, again.” She captures it perfectly!
Indeed, if there’s anything that lays bare one’s life, it’s one’s accumulated stuff. The windfall is stressful because it arrives like a torrential rain, a new twelve thousand pound jigsaw puzzle dumped out on the floor. Yet it is sweet because that stuff, after figuring out its new rightful place, helps make an assigned residence feel more like an actual home. And just like any actual home, it remains full of normal ambiguity: Did this [weird, worn out thing] spark joy when we packed it up in the US? I can’t remember! Does it spark joy now? I don’t know! Do I want or need to buy something new to replace it? Not really! Overwhelm and decision fatigue are real temptations for me, although perhaps there’s a new invitation here for me to open and explore. I guess it depends on how I receive it.
Today (17 Sept) is the feast day of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), a saint in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions, and one of 36 doctors of the Roman Catholic Church, acknowledged as an authentic teacher of theology, alongside figures like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. One of the so-called Rhenish mystics, Hildegard was a scientist, a composer, a theologian, and an abbess, a person of profound learning and spiritual insight, intellectually agile and practically wise, a bright light in dark times.
Many years ago, I traveled with one of my life’s dearest friends to visit key places in Hildegard’s life and legacy. That pilgrimage continues to nourish me, both in what it taught me about Hildegard’s life and times but also helping me to learn more about my own. It was on that pilgrimage that I learned the Latin word peregrinatio, and (obviously!) still savor its meaning. As Esther de Waal explores in her book The Celtic Way of Prayer, the concept of peregrinatio has more to do with an inner journeying out one’s love of God (what I’ve been calling here “the how”) than a physical journey to a particular place by way of a particular route (“the what and where”). It’s not that the what and where don’t matter at all; they do. But they must hold friendly hands with the how and who.
So, no matter where you and I find ourselves today, the paths on which we tread can become paths of pilgrimage, can be forms of peregrinatio, no matter how familiar the paths have become to us and no matter how ordinary or inconsequential they may feel. There are new invitations there, waiting for us to find, open, and respond, which, in the parlance of scripture, are known as God’s new mercies, delivered in envelopes of loving-kindness.
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Speaking of paths: I’ve got a new essay out at Duke Divinity’s Faith & Leadership newsletter: “Sweeping the Labyrinth.” I hope you’ll give it a read and share it with a friend.