So much has changed since we began our Lenten journey a little more than three (can it only be three?!) weeks ago. As we travel towards holy week, we’ve also entered the surreal landscape of COVID-19. For me, these circumstances have imbued the season of Lent – and its themes of prayer, self-reflection, self-denial, and alms-giving – with a renewed sense of urgency and necessity.
As businesses and schools close, global travel restrictions become progressively severe, and people around the world find themselves “sheltering in place” (see this post for an alternative term I find much more life-giving), my thoughts are increasingly drawn to the practice of pilgrimage. At first glance, it’s tempting to assume this response is a simple reaction to an unprecedented confinement of human movement. ‘I want a vacation, an adventure, an escape!’ If, however, we define it more simply and broadly, as Phyllis Tickle suggests, as a “wandering after God,” then the prospect of pilgrimage amid global pandemic becomes less far-fetched.*
Yet, how can the practice of pilgrimage be relevant when the only thing that seems to be moving right now is the coronavirus? Let us consider the kinds of movements pilgrims make: The quintessential pilgrimage is a challenging journey over a great distance toward a site of significance for the sake of transformation. Uncertainty, danger, vulnerability, and an awareness of one’s dependence on the generosity of others are inherent features of the endeavor. This is sounding more and more familiar…
One more obstacle – I didn’t choose this journey! Isn’t pilgrimage voluntary? Not according to Margaret Miles, who observes that pilgrimages in the Middle Ages could be assigned by a confessor as an act of penitence or ordered by a judge as recompense for a crime.† Although it can be something we willingly undertake, just as often pilgrimage is thrust upon us by death, divorce, the loss of a job or an important relationship, illness, injury, or, perhaps, a global pandemic. Suddenly, we are uprooted from one reality and deposited in unfamiliar territory. In Falling Upward, Richard Rohr writes
None of us go into our own spiritual maturity completely of our own accord… The familiar and habitual are so falsely reassuring and most of us make our homes there permanently. The new is always by definition unfamiliar and untested, so God, life, destiny, suffering, have to give us a push – usually a big one – or we will not go. ‡
In some ways, I feel uniquely equipped to enter this season of uncertainty, isolation, anxiety, and grief because I’ve had ample opportunity to get acquainted with these emotions in the last two years. As some of you know, in the spring of 2018, I resigned my full-time position as a professor and moved with my family from Mississippi to Virginia. Although I entered into this season willingly, I had no idea how untethered I would feel. I had no point of reference from which to orient my life, no easy identity to articulate my place and purpose in the world. As the months have turned into years, I’ve begun to realize that there is no “there” there. I am not sure when this particular season of my journey will end. Perhaps it won’t. But as I began to consider myself a “pilgrim-in-place,” it has somehow helped to ease my passage.
How might it be for you to consider this time as a season of pilgrimage? What would it be like to consider obstacles that arise in your path as opportunities to move differently? In what ways can we become better traveling companions to each other?
Poem
“For Those Who Have Far to Travel” by Jan Richardson
If you could see the journey whole, you might never undertake it, might never dare the first step that propels you from the place you have known toward the place you know not.
Call it one of the mercies of the road: that we see it only by stages as it opens before us, as it comes into our keeping, step by single step.
There is nothing for it but to go, and by our going take the vows the pilgrim takes:
to be faithful to the next step; to rely on more than the map; to heed the signposts of intuition and dream; to follow the star that only you will recognize;
to keep an open eye for the wonders that attend the path; to press on beyond distractions, beyond fatigue, beyond what would tempt you from the way.
There are vows that only you will know: the secret promises for your particular path and the new ones you will need to make when the road is revealed by turns you could not have foreseen.
Keep them, break them, make them again; each promise becomes part of the path, each choice creates the road that will take you to the place where at last you will kneel to offer the gift most needed – the gift that only you can give – before turning to go home by another way.
Practice
A pilgrimage often begins with an intention to embark on a sacred journey of spiritual significance. Is there an intention that might support your pilgrimage-in-place in this season? Consider developing a morning ritual and/or constructing a sacred space in your home to remind you of your intention. Throughout the day, notice moments when you experience a sense of discomfort or disorientation. How might they become occasions to discover your own unfolding transformation?
Prayer
Loving God, Your desire is for our wholeness and well being. We hold in tenderness and prayer the collective suffering of our world at this time. We grieve precious lives lost and vulnerable lives threatened. We ache for ourselves and our neighbors, standing before an uncertain future. We pray: may love, not fear, go viral. Inspire our leaders to discern and choose wisely, aligned with the common good. Help us to practice physical distancing and reveal to us new and creative ways to come together in spirit and in solidarity. Call us to profound trust in your faithful presence, You, the God who does not abandon. - from Jesuit Resource
*Tickle, Phyllis. 2010. “Foreword.” In Foster, Charles. The Sacred Journey: The Ancient Practices. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publisher.
†Miles, Margaret R. 2005. The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, p. 156.
‡ Rohr, Richard. 2011. Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.