Pilgrimage: A Yearning For Home
Photo by Gabriela Palai: https://www.pexels.com/photo/back-view-of-a-person-walking-on-a-forest-path-397096/
The banging and clanging hammered unabated for forty minutes. I was cocooned in a tight, bright tube, admonished to not scratch or twitch. This experience is known to some of you. It is called an MRI.
Where does the mind and spirit venture when the body is held captive? To that last sermon heard? (If only I could remember it.) No. I memory walked on Iona, a tiny island in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland; a windswept, ocean-lashed place where God met me while on pilgrimage. This inward remembrance of an outward journey rescued my sanity in that MRI straitjacket.
Pilgrimage is an ancient spiritual practice described simply by Ian Bradley as, “departing from daily life on a journey in search of spiritual well-being. It involves leaving home, making a journey, arriving at a destination that usually has some religious significance, and then returning home.”
There are many places in the United Kingdom and Ireland that draw pilgrims – Iona in Scotland, the Holy Island (Lindisfarne) in England, Bardsey Island in Wales, and Glendalough in Ireland. The most well-known Christian pilgrimage is on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. All major faith groups have their own unique places of pilgrimage.
While I still can, I am drawn to these spaces wild and windy, to holy sites the Early Christian Celts called “thin” places. These places are described as where there is only a thin veil between this world and the next, the finite and infinite, the physical and spiritual realms.
Why go on pilgrimage? It is a God-inspired yearning that draws my steps. Psalms 84:5 says,
“Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.”
I go because I love to travel, to walk on the edge and to feel wind howl through me so that, as Scottish poet Kenneth Steven writes, “The wind on Iona blows the old out of me so that the new may come in.” God is present with me in these places. I am renewed.
Scott Brennan writes from the Holy Island, “Pilgrimage is not escapism.” Pilgrimage does however, invite me to lay aside my daily routines and responsibilities. If I allow it, pilgrimage gives me space to reflect on my real life. The door is open to honesty and vulnerability and to risk. The journey itself is a risk. To be open to God revealing hidden things is a risk. Peter Greig in Lectio 365 states, “This is the heart of pilgrimage: a journey into the unknown with God, in search of God.”
Pilgrimage opens the door to attentiveness to the deeper things. This attention is life-altering. As poet Mary Oliver writes in one of her poems, when we are attentive we are:
like a wanderer who has come home at last
and kneels in peace, done with all unnecessary things:
every motion; even words.
Coming home at last. That’s it really. Being on Iona felt like home to my spirit and to my body. Yet, I could not stay. The challenge is to bring this deeper, less cluttered, more attentive self back home and to be present in the MRI’s of my daily life.
Going on pilgrimage engenders good questions as I return home: What ballast in my body, mind, and spirit can I release today? Can I be even more attentive to each moment of this day? Today, how do I seek those places of resurrection and renewal?
Ray Simpson’s writes in his book A Pilgrim Way, “pilgrimage is about leaving some things behind and picking others up, not in order to run away from life but to be present to it… when all is laid at God’s feet, something happens, the present becomes Presence and we are captured by love.”
I go on pilgrimage to be captured by love. Coming home I allow myself to be captured by the grandchildren clamoring for noticing, by the rising at dawn for the first sip of coffee with a companion, for the quiet sitting in the Prayer Hut without a phone, and even for accepting diminishing physical and mental abilities. Finally, I come home into the reality of God’s love for me all the days of my life, and into eternity.
Do you yearn for this?