Chapter 03: Why Pilgrimage?
“For in their hearts doth nature stir them so, then people long on pilgrimage to go. And palmers to be seeking foreign strands, to distant shrines renowned in sundry lands. ”
Canterbury Cathedral
Looking back over my journey the past ten years I have been astounded at the growth and immense learning I have experienced. Ten years in graduate studies in two different programs has stretched my brain, my tenacity and my critical thinking in ways I never imagined possible. Working in five different organizations in five different roles during this period has also enlarged my imagination as to what energizes me, what kind of work and work cultures connect to my core values in a meaningful way and what I am willing to leave behind.
That is a lot of change and transition.
But I have not become who I am today without those experiences, those challenges and heart aches, each one woven with together with threads of joy, curiosity, courage and resilience.
I originally planned on narrowing the scope of my research and writing on the actual ten years of my Seminary experience. I wanted to observe and reflect intentionally on the content of my courses, the learning I experienced and those spaces and people who shaped me during that time. You see, when I set out to start this journey I was desperately looking for answers to help heal the shattered pieces inside of me and to make a pathway forward that would be large enough to hold my evolving faith.
But those ten years did not make sense unless I examined the length and breadth of my life - they needed some context. So I enlarged the scope of my thinking and started considering the idea of a pilgrimage back through the markers of my life that brought me to the place I was at now.
Fourteenth century mystic Walter Hilton encourages us to keep going when things get difficult and the pathway of the seeker is unclear. “If you keep on this way, I promise you will not be slain but come to the place that you desire.” (1)
And so I was curious about pilgrimage as a metaphor, a way of being and also as a spiritual practice, a way of doing. I had some notion of what I believed a pilgrimage was…a physical movement of one’s body with some prior intentionality whereby the participant travelled to a location to accomplish some inner spiritual goal.
How was a pilgrimage different from a journey?
Did the everyday events and expereinces of one’s life history constitute a pilgrimage?
Was it always tied to a place?
Where there any special requirements?
To answer these questions, I needed to find more information.
Wandering the loop in Pt. Roberts (2019) I came across this bike in the woods. How utterly perfect.
“Your incremental shuffle along the road is an incremental edging forward of kingdom borders—it’s a restoration of broken things and a making of new things.” (2)