Action After Pilgrimage

Today is St. Aiden's Day. Three months ago tomorrow, our group arrived on Lindisfarne. It seems like a good time to share this reflection on action.

The sense of ultimacy generated by a good pilgrimage can draw us into the joy of feeling really alive back home in our own communities. Such a completed journey serves as an invitation to a greater awareness of our own spiritual unfolding, and we continue onward with fresh views of God’s presence and provision. 

To some extent. 

For a while.

But then what?

There are some paths to pursue from there, paths illuminated by the radiance of those pilgrimage experiences. 

To get started, we need not be in a hurry to let our pilgrimage go. Medieval pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, or St. David’s would have taken a more sustained effort than ours, and that effort would have shaped pilgrims in ways that profoundly affected the whole person. Those journeys were a matter of months, not weeks, and we would do well to adopt a similar pace in processing ours if we are truly to be transformed by it.  

As we take that time, we can consider our personal individual paths first. Many pilgrims carry specific questions on their journeys, and those questions can lead to new practices, as well as to the enrichment of familiar practices, back home. If being pilgrims has stirred our creativity, that newness and enrichment might also guide us in making something new. Further, the clarified perspective that sometimes comes with pilgrimage can open us to the discernment, calling, and courage we need for whatever our next steps might be. 

Beyond ourselves, we have opportunities to keep the discussions of pilgrim days going. Many times, such journeys provide new topics and new partners with whom to consider them. In choosing to continue those conversations, we foster a greater fullness in relationships both old and new. But if that feels like too much, we can at least connect with our fellow pilgrims sometimes in passing over shared memories of moving experiences that are now common points of reference. 

As our view broadens over the weeks and months, we should look for our understandings of our time away to shift and settle. The things that impressed us most while we were traveling might turn out not to be so significant, and we might even be amazed to discover that our least favorite aspects were carrying the most important messages for us.

Past all of this, we will go through times when it seems like the inspiration of our pilgrimage has run out and our worlds have become inundated by the humdrum. I believe those are the very moments we most need to stay true to the fruits of Spirit that were so sweet on our journey and to adopt an outlook that sees all of life as a pilgrimage. 

Thoughts After Pilgrimage

To go on pilgrimage is to engage a vision of God. It is a mystical striving to see ourselves traveling from/to/for/with/about the transcendent. 

But what do we make of such experiences once we return to our everyday lives?

As a journey takes time, pilgrimage invites us to consider various modes for processing time. Pilgrimage is a sustained engagement with sacred time, but it is not the only way of functioning in that mode. Regular participation in corporate worship is the most familiar way, and in our sabbaths, we pause something of our mundane concerns and return to the metanarrative of our tradition. Retreat is another way of infusing our perception of time with a sense of sacredness and is often defined by an intentional quieting to listen for "the heartbeat of God." Pilgrimage is distinct from worship and retreat as it typically incorporates physical travel to move us spiritually. 

As we do that traveling with others, we become mindful of the uniqueness of each pilgrim receiving the divine through their own spirituality and history. We understand our shared journey in ways distinct to our own conditioning while our understandings of ourselves are challenged by traveling together.

As we return from pilgrimage, we have many stories to tell, and we go through a process with those stories that is as old as inspiration itself. We are fortunate to have lived the very context of the stories. We were present for all the details, and pilgrimage provides the added benefit of being able to compare our memories with those of fellow pilgrims. Beyond those rich resources of first-hand knowledge, we provide interpretation as we tell our stories. We know what was most meaningful to us and we continue to track that meaning as it develops in our spirits. Finally, we have opportunities to apply that meaningfulness. As we pursue those opportunities, we find ourselves following the dictum of Father Gildas of Caldey Abbey: "What matters most is what we individually make" of the ways God has come to us. 

What forms might that making take in the weeks and months following a pilgrimage? 

Sensitive consideration is needed to answer this question. This is due in no small part to the reality that the thin places visited on such a journey are famously "homes for pilgrims" meaning people of a pilgrim orientation find a welcoming freshness in them. Not everyone resonates with this phenomenon, and its great purity can seem impossibly far from our everyday lives. So it is that our usual settings are the places most in need of the perspectives of pilgrims. 

Perhaps our best hope going forward is to patiently seek a gentle integration of the gifts of those wonderful times wherever we find ourselves. To do so, we might need to navigate undercurrents of disappointment or even despair. Maybe we have failed to follow through on possibilities of a new way of life we glimpsed on pilgrimage, but the effects of our journey are still within us. Such holy stirrings survive whether we nourish or neglect them, and often, it simply takes more time than we imagine to discover all that these urgings might become.