13] A Pilgrimage from Suffering to Solidarity: Walking the Path of Contemplative Practices
Gerdenio Manuel, SJ, and Martha E. Stortz
This final contribution serves as a kind of paradigm case in two ways. First, it treats a specific form of stress, suffering, and it addresses three common characteristics of people facing loss: denial, isolation, and the need for control. Second, it reaches deep within a particular tradition, Christianity, for practices that address these characteristics: lamenta- tion, intercession, and pilgrimage. While some of the practices in this book fall into the category of “calming” practices (Centering Prayer, mantram repetition, the Eight-Point Program), these practices are “expressive,” more like the “energizing” practices discussed in Amy Wachholz’s contribution. These practices handle negative emotions, which have an important place in psychic and spiritual health for indi- viduals and communities.
Indeed, these practices have not just an inner dimension but a social dimension. Advocacy emerges as the outer dimension of lamentation, as those who mourn give voice to the sufferings of others. Accompani- ment stands as the outer dimension of intercession, a focused solidarity with the suffering of another person or community. Finally, immersion, the ability to simply be present for and with others without judgment or distance, remedy or analysis, comes as the outer dimension of pil- grimage. In their inner and outer dimensions, these practices offer a powerful example of what Ignatius Loyola called “contemplation in action.”
INTRODUCTION
The loss of a partner, the death of a child, an unexpected diagnosis, a job terminated, the devastating breakup, the experience of margin- alization: suddenly and irrevocably the landscape of the familiar alters. People find themselves lost in the terrain of suffering. They seek solace; yet, denial, isolation, and need for control block the path.
Suffering fragments the soul, whether the soul of a person, a rela- tionship, or a people. What was once integral implodes, and the pieces scatter from a center that no longer holds. Philosopher Simone Weil (1977) identified physical, social, and spiritual dimensions of suffering: physical pain, social degradation, and distress of the soul.1 Coping with suffering requires “re-membering,” literally, forging these scat- tered fragments into a new whole.
Contemplative practices point the way, for the journey from suffering to solidarity is a spiritual one. They reveal a path from denial to accep- tance, from isolation to communion; and finally, from the need to con- trol to surrender. Contemplation aims at union with God, “a long loving look at what is real.”2 Suffering makes God seem distant, remote, even cruel. Suffering blocks union with God, and the psalmist shouts in despair: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). Those words were also on the lips of Jesus, who is for Christians the human face of God (Mark 15:34). Through Jesus’s life and death, God experienced the full range of human suffering. Through incarnation
God comes into the midst of human suffering.
This contribution examines concrete contemplative practices that invite encounter with the suffering God. Lamentation encourages people to claim suffering, rather than cutting it out with the razor of denial. Intercession opens victims to those around them, who then become fellow travelers. Finally, pilgrimage places people on a path where the journey supplants the destination, pointing to the mystery of a suffering God.
Too often contemplative practices are prescribed as the remedy for individual suffering. We argue that they also point to solidarity with others. We met people whose hard-won compassion opened them to the suffering of others. These practices have then an outer as well as an inner dimension, creating solidarity even as they console. Speaking out for those whom affliction has silenced, advocacy becomes the outer dimension of lamentation. A focused solidarity with the suffering of others, accompaniment stands as the outer dimension of intercession. Finally, in its diffuse availability to the suffering of the world, immersion is the outer dimension of pilgrimage.
In their inner and outer dimensions, these contemplative practices connect personal suffering to communal and global realities. They knit together the personal and the social, offering a powerful example of what Ignatius Loyola (1556) called “contemplation in action.”3 In so doing, they carve a path from being a victim to becoming a survivor to acting for change in the world. This volume’s title captures the impulse to solidarity: Contemplative Practices in Action.
We bring to this project our own experience of suffering, and we remain marked by the suffering of loved ones. As teachers and ministers, we have witnessed the suffering of near and distant neighbors. Finally, as citizens of the world, we have witnessed the genocides of Serbia and Croatia, Darfur and Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia, the prisons of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Tehran’s Evin. We see the daily insult of poverty and disease. Suffering people seek the solace contem- plative practices offer; they are aroused to action by the solidarity contemplative practices invite.
At the outset, we identify three concrete contemplative practices: lamentation, which moves people from denial to assent; intercession, which points from isolation toward communion; and pilgrimage, which liberates people from the need to control to surrender. In each section, we begin with experience, then examine the specific practice, concluding with its outer dimension. In this we hope to highlight the difference contemplative practices make, not simply for the one suf- fering, but for a broken world.
LAMENTATION: FROM DENIAL TO ASSENT TO ADVOCACY
In its inability to acknowledge what is real, denial is a first protest against suffering. Denial wants the world to be what it was before. Buttressed by excuses, fortified by fantasy, driven by dissociation, and quick to blame, denial takes work. Finally, it wears people out and wears them down.4
Moving out of denial takes work as well. Four stages capture the movement:
1. “This isn’t happening!”
He was shocked. He had always known his wife drank a lot, some- times to excess—but she was not an alcoholic! All she drank was wine and occasionally a little too much. He made excuses for her;
he believed her own excuses, telling himself she was just “coming down with something.” When the children were younger and their mom was moody and lethargic, they believed him too. Now they were older. He felt under siege, on one hand from his wife’s anger, on the other from their children’s exasperation with them both. He talked to her about drinking, and he believed her repeated prom- ises to cut back.
Then, one day when their mother was not home, the children confronted him.
They showed him all of her secret stashes of alcohol—including hard liquor. He felt tricked; he needed to talk. He had needed to talk for years.
This man faces multiple losses: the loss of a fantasy, a partner, his children’s respect, confidence in his own judgment. If he is ready to talk, he is ready to move out of denial. That means leaving behind a pattern of behavior characteristic of denial: making excuses and living a fantasy.
2. “This isn’t happening to me!”
For years he prided himself on not needing doctors. Regular exercise kept him lean. He looked good; he felt good; he convinced himself he was invincible. He had experienced some discomfort after eating for years but never believed it to be anything an antacid tablet could not relieve. Gradually, he lost his usual energy. When night sweats broke out, his wife marched him to the doctor, who had ordered preliminary tests for colon cancer, the disease that claimed his father. Now the doctor walked into the examining room looking worried: “Let’s just hope we can stop it from progressing to the other organs.”
This man felt he could be an exception, denying medical data that he had actually known, but somehow did not think applied to him. He ignored family pressure to be tested regularly; he had even ignored his own body’s complaints. Moving out of denial means leaving behind an ingrained pattern of behavior: dissociation from information, from family, even from his own body.
3. “This is happening—let’s find out who’s to blame!”
When President Clinton read Philip Gourevitch’s expose´ on the Rwandan genocide, he angrily forwarded a marked copy to national
security advisor Sandy Berger. “Is what he’s saying true?” “How did this happen?” “I want to get to the bottom of this!” When news of mass slaughter first surfaced, Clinton had shown no interest. Once the story hit the media, however, he resorted to an excuse the German people used after the Holocaust: “How come we didn’t know what was going on?” It was the same move President George
W. Bush would make a decade later on Darfur.5
Rwanda was set on the administration’s back burner until the pot boiled over. When the situation became too blatant to ignore, some- one else was at fault. The fact that Clinton responded to Gourevitch’s article so passionately indicates a readiness to acknowledge the slaughter, but an unwillingness to take responsibility. To do so, though, he has to abandon another pattern of behavior associated with denial: the need to blame someone else.
4. “I can embrace this.”
In the immediate aftermath of her stroke, the woman woke every morning thinking it had all just been a bad dream. When she opened her eyes, she was in an unfamiliar room. Nurses helped her into a chair for breakfast. “A stroke paralyzed my left side,” she repeated. As she improved, she recovered a sense of agency, and her mantra changed: “I’m using the purple tie-dyed cane my grand- daughter gave me.” She hobbled out of the skilled-nursing facility on her purple cane. Months later, she returned to the facility to thank her caregivers—and give them her cane: “Someone else may need it more than I do.”
Denial is not reserved for addiction or willful ignorance. It is also used by people who have found their lives altered by forces beyond their control. Ambushed by her own circulatory system, this woman fantasizes the stroke was just a “bad dream.” When she opens her eyes each morning, she can no longer maintain that fiction. Initially, she sees herself as a victim. Her early response represents a rudimentary lament: “A stroke paralyzed me.” She narrates her story as a victim of circumstance. Repetition forces her to listen. Gradually she claims her loss, asserting agency. She becomes a survivor: “I use a cane.” As she heals, she becomes an advocate: she donates the cane to some- one else. This woman has embraced her loss. She not only has let her loss “bless her,” she ensures that her loss will bless someone else.6
This woman’s story captures the clinical distinction between passive suffering and active coping. Suffering is something that happens to people, bearing down on them like a train with failed brakes. People who suffer refer to themselves in accusative case: “The stroke weakened me.” Active coping is different. Picking up the pieces of loss, coping uses nominative case: “I use a cane to get my balance.” Coping takes charge of suffering.7 Beyond coping is advocacy: this woman gave her cane to someone else.
DEALING WITH DENIAL: THE PRACTICE OF LAMENTATION
The practice of lamentation moves people from suffering to assent to advocacy. Lamentation invites people to speak the unspeakable. As they put words around their suffering, they begin to cope, claiming an agency that has been trampled by silence. In finding a language for their suffering, they give voice to others, who find words to express their own afflictions. Lamentation gives public voice to pain, and in so doing it creates a space of resistance, even hope.
The psalms of the Hebrew Bible stand as classic expressions of per- sonal and social loss. Almost a third are psalms of lament, signaling to worshipers that “authentic worship” emerges only when people bring their deepest pain and most flagrant examples of injustice before God. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures wants people to wail. Loss should not be left outside the synagogue: it belongs inside public worship. Otherwise, worship remains “a shallow affair.”8
These laments address God directly, demanding response. The language is that of command. Over and over again, the psalmist orders God to “Listen up!” “Hear my prayer!” “Hearken to me!” (Psalms 5:1; 55:2–3; 86:1). At other times, the psalmist begs for compassion: “Have mercy on me!” (51:3; 56:2; 57:2). When God seems distant or remote, the psalmist wails even louder: “Don’t rebuke me in your anger!” (6:2). “Don’t be silent!” (109:1). The psalms of lament offer evidence that people suffering get to protest—long and loudly.
In these lamentations, the agency of the one suffering shifts fluidly between being a victim and being a survivor, between accusative and nominative cases. Lament itself invites a kind of agency. People still suffer—but they get to protest. That protest takes on a fourfold form. First, lamentation invites people to name the particularity of their suffer- ing: “All your waves and your billows have gone over me” (Psalm 42:7). This graphic image carries the pain of suffering. Second, lament projects the very real presence of an enemy: “Many bulls encircle me ...
they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion” (Psalm 22:12–13). Lamentation invites vivid descriptions of danger. Third, the psalmist wrestles with depression: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint” (Psalm 22:14). Often, to calm an inquiet soul, the psalmist calls happier times to mind: “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept, when we remem- bered Zion” (Psalm 137:1). Finally, the presence of God is as real as the presence of the enemy. Psalms begin in direct address, boldly addressing God as “You.” In spite of everything, there is someone listen- ing. Indeed, lament reinforces the sense that all suffering happens within the divine embrace. Lament joins with praise as part of a system of respi- ration that lives in God. Lament invites people into the divine mystery. St. Augustine observes: “If your love is without ceasing, you are crying out always; if you always cry out, you are always desiring; and if you desire, you are calling to mind your eternal rest in the Lord If the
desire is there, then the groaning is there as well. Even if people fail to hear it, it never ceases to sound in the hearing of God.”9
A survivor of 9/11 made it out of the collapsing towers alive, but many of his colleagues did not. He made a habit of heading to the ocean and yelling into the crashing surf: “How could you do this to us?” The practice consoled him. In the midst of aching loss, there was someone to yell at, someone listening. The psalms of lament tell us that the practice is deeply traditioned.
Having given voice to longing and despair, the survivor leaves words that someone else can use. Jesus reportedly died with the psalmist’s lament on his lips: “My God, my God, why have you for- saken me!” (Mark 15:34). He could find no language to express his own pain, so he borrowed the words of Psalm 22. Someone else had been in that place, and their words became his.
The practice of lamentation invites people out of denial, urging them to voice their pains and express their loss in all its awful particu- larity. Lament leaves a language for others to draw upon, as they search for words that speak the unspeakable. Finally, advocacy is speaking for others, who may not have words of their own.
INTERCESSION: FROM ISOLATION TO COMMUNITY TO ACCOMPANIMENT
Suffering grinds people down. It is hard to experience anything but pain; it is hard for others to share that experience. The contemplative
practice of intercession invites people to ask for what they need, for themselves and for others. It follows from the practice of lamentation: having found a voice in lament, intercession encourages people to use it. The outer dimension of intercession is accompaniment, which incarnates its prayer.
1. Noli tangere! Don’t touch!
In the weeks after her husband died, the woman remembered grocery shopping at 5 a.m. She was awake anyway—but that was not the only reason. The truth was she could not stand to see anyone she knew. Their expressions of sympathy felt like body blows. When she had to go out later in the day, she wore sunglasses. In time, she noticed people giving her a wide berth: they nodded, but did not approach. That did not feel right either. She hated being alone.
From ancient times lepers were banished to the outskirts of villages and towns. In the Hawaiian chain, Molokai became an island leper colony. Anyone who had the disease was sent there with a one-way ticket. Suffering isolates people. They lose friends on top of every- thing else. While some can stand with them, others drop off the radar screen entirely. “It’s as if this were contagious,” the woman above observed. “If they get too close, they’ll lose their partners too.” The people she thought would be there couldn’t—and people she hadn’t even thought of turned up in their place.
People experiencing loss also isolate themselves, like the woman in this story. They exasperate friends who are able to be there. One of the woman’s friends—it was not one of her “best” friends either— finally got so frustrated, she phoned the house and simply started talk- ing to the answering machine: “I’m going to talk until you pick up the phone. I’m worried about you. We all are. We can’t figure out how to help. You have to tell us what you need.” Only then did the woman answer. Often people experiencing loss create what they most fear: isolation. Suffering imposes isolation; it takes a lot of determination on all sides to break through to connection.
2. Ask for what you need.
The adult children watched their parents diminish with growing concern. They still lived in the family home. But when the parents became too scattered to drive, the kids took away the car keys. Eventually, they even had to forbid their father to walk to the market, because he could not get across the street before the light changed.
When a crisis forced the children to deal with their mother’s gath- ering dementia, they had to find a nursing home that would accept Alzheimer’s patients. After intensive networking, interviews—and prayer, a bed opened in a nearby facility. “This is a godsend!” the eldest son exclaimed.
Crisis often clarifies need. Before their mother left a burner on all day, her six adult children had seven different opinions about what should happen. Then suddenly they knew what they needed. Finding the right facility took a lot of legwork, but for this particular family, it also took prayer. They asked for God’s help, confident that the Creator of the uni- verse would also be interested in finding the right place for their mother. After all, they had been raised in a tradition that taught them to “Ask, and it will be given you” (Matthew 7:7). They believed that God hears prayer. That did not mean getting what they had wanted all the time, but it did mean living in relationship with a God who responded, not always on demand, but in mysterious, even inscrutable ways.
3. It is important simply to ask.
The delegation from Santa Clara University had lunch at a tiny res- taurant in the highlands of Guatemala. The only other customers were a group of dirty, sweaty people who ate quickly and left in flatbed trucks with blue tarps lashed over the tops. Later that afternoon, they visited a village that was the site of a mass grave. As the villagers told the stories of the civil war, one of them mentioned that a team of forensic scientists had been there that morning, exhuming bodies for identifi- cation. The group quickly realized they had dined alongside the scien- tists earlier that day. Stunned, a delegate asked: “What do you need?” There was a ready answer, and they heard it through the translator: “Pray for us. Go back to your own country and tell our stories.”
Often what is needed is not as concrete as a care facility, a job, or a peace treaty. What comfort could this delegation offer a village ravaged by war? The villagers asked simply for their presence, their ability to be with them in their suffering. They asked for their voice, telling the delegates to share their stories. Finally, they asked for accompaniment in their struggle. Members of the delegation took accompaniment seriously, remembering the villagers’ stories in their presentations and their prayers back in El Norte. “Those people are still with me,” said a woman, “even after all these years.” Interces- sion reminded her that people depended on her to bear their pain.
She carried those people—and they carried her. When suffering pushes people beyond the limits of human effort, there is nothing to do but be with people in their suffering.
BREAKING THROUGH ISOLATION TO CONNECTION: THE PRACTICE OF INTERCESSION
The practice of intercessory prayer opens people to connection with God, to their own needs, and to the needs of others. It frees people to be present to the mystery of divine compassion, and it frees them to be compassionate with one another. In its dimensions of address, praise, and petition, intercession leads necessarily to accompaniment.
Intercession begins in address; petitioners name the mystery to
whom they pray. As the chapters in this volume show, religious tradi- tions exercise great care in naming the one to whom they pray, because address simultaneously identifies both the speaker and the one spoken to. Historically, Jews refused to utter the name of God aloud, writing it as the unpronounceable YHWH. Human speech was inadequate. Muslims recognize the limits of language differently. According to a Sufi proverb, there are a hundred names of God. Humans know 99; only the camel knows the hundredth. The camel’s knowledge preserves a space of unknowing. Mosques often display the names of God in gold-lettered calligraphy around the dome, so that believers literally can stand in the presence of the many names of Allah. Christians gather in the name of a Triune God. During the course of a worship service, that name is spoken over and over again. Often it is a signal for believers to cross themselves, as if to inscribe that name on their bodies. Repetition of the name recognizes that there are a lot of other gods out there, each eager to stake its claim. Like a licked stamp waiting for an envelope, the human heart stands ready to adhere to all manner of unlikely gods. This first part of inter- cessory prayer reminds believers of the reality that claims them.
Naming God simultaneously identifies the speaker. Addressing God
as “Father or Mother” identifies the speaker as “child.” Addressing God as “Creator” states the creature’s derivative status. Addressing God as “Shepherd” claims the role of sheep, the chief characteristic of which is dithering. Whatever the name, intercession begins with address, and that address places the one praying in a certain posture before the mystery. Intercession invites connection.
After address comes praise, and praise both remembers and gives thanks. Praise flows naturally from address, for each of the names tele- graphs a story. For example, “Creator” plays back to the story of creation; “Deliverer” remembers Exodus; “Father” or “Mother” recalls Jesus’s unique and familiar way of addressing a sometimes dis- tant God. Praise fleshes out the connection that naming identifies, reminding us to whom we pray and recalling a history of relationship. Praise not only recounts the past; it minds believers toward a shared future. Like a magnet dragged through a pile of filings, praise orients them, turning toward connection. Parents train their children to “mind” them, so they do not have to watch the child’s every move. In time, children internalize parental instruction. They learn to act in any given situation as their parents might expect. They have been “minded.” The apostle Paul calls on this natural pattern, as he urges the community at Philippi to “mind” Christ: “be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. .. .
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:2, 5). Praise places people in the posture of “minding” the God to whom they pray.
Address and praise ground petition, for petition presumes the con- nection that address and petition create. Petition may be the hardest part of intercession. In part, a culture that values independence stum- bles over suffering. But in part, wants always get confused with needs. Actress Judi Dench recalls a holiday in Spain, where she sighted a pair of expensive shoes. She wanted those shoes with all the yearning of a 15-year-old girl. Her father suggested they consider the purchase over lunch. At a seafood buffet, shrimp caught her eye, and she wound up ordering the most expensive item on the menu. At the end of the meal, her father observed: “You’ve just eaten your shoes.” Wants take people everywhere, now to shoes, now to shrimp. What do we really need?
A woman whose partner was dying confided: “I don’t know what to ask for.” As she sorted wants and needs, she realized she could always ask for prayer. Like the villagers, she knew she was surrounded by people who would carry her. All she had to do was let them. She discovered a prayer for such situations: “Behold and bless.” It was the prayer she finally offered for her dying partner; it was the prayer people offered for her.
Intercession works to connect. It first establishes a connection with a God “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). In connecting to this God, people find themselves drawn into the whole of creation. The member of the Santa Clara delegation put it
well: “They are still with me.” Intercession bears one another’s burdens, accompanying people in their suffering.
I am that child
with a round face and dirty
who on every corner bothers you with his “can you spare a quarter?”
I am that child with the dirty face certainly unwanted that from far away contemplates coaches,
where other children emit laughter and jump up and down considerably.. . .
I am that repulsive child that improvises a bed out of an old cardboard box and waits,
certain that you will accompany me.10
PILGRIMAGE: FROM CONTROL TO SURRENDER TO IMMERSION
Suffering means loss, whether of one’s abilities, one’s relationships, one’s homeland, one’s sense of security. Whatever the tragedy, loss introduces the element of contingency. Nothing can be taken for granted; everything could change in a moment. Finally, all loss is a loss of control that defies competence and remedy, diplomacy and persuasion. The responses to sudden helplessness range from paralysis to manipulation to resignation.
1. “We admitted we were powerless.”
He sat glumly in the meeting, listening intermittently to the speaker’s story. He did not want to be here, and the precipitating events were a blur. Then, words his wife shouted last night in the midst of a lot of yelling floated to the surface: “You’re out of control!” She’d threatened to leave if he did not come, and now he was part of a whole new family: the family of Alcoholics. That’s how everyone introduced themselves. As the meeting closed, everyone read the 12 Steps, and the first step echoed his wife’s words: “We admitted we were powerless.”
If he sticks it out, this man will learn a valuable lesson: he is not in control. For years, alcohol controlled his life, and his resulting behav- ior has controlled his family. If he stops drinking, they have all got to
change. His addiction was a center of gravity for the whole family; no one can imagine what recovery looks like. But no one will get there without taking a first step.
2. From grief to?
She lost her husband of 25 years just 25 months ago, she thought ruefully. Despite the age difference, they had been a great match, sharing professional interests like business, personal hobbies like golf and hiking. Now he was gone. Initially, she had been devastated, losing weight even as she lost herself in work. Now she just felt an aching loneliness, grief in a different key. People were beginning to “set her up” with people or opportunity or even travel. She turned everything aside that felt like going backward. She knew that after 25 months people expected some kind of plan of where she was going. She had none. All she knew was to keep going forward, destination unknown.
Popular literature reminds people that “grief is like a fingerprint”: everyone’s experience is distinctive. Yet there are some commonalities, and this woman’s story displays them. Early grief feels like shattered glass. Gradually, time rounds the rough edges. A lot of people grieve the acute pain of early grief: it makes them feel somehow closer to the one they mourn. Yet, the physical and emotional intensity of early grief is hard to maintain over time. Even if they do not know where they are going, people move forward. Sometimes they fast-forward to a “New Normal,” catapulting themselves into a new relationship or situation. Addiction literature calls this “doing a geographic”; inevi- tably, unresolved grief catches up. A better strategy is to limp ahead, without knowing exactly where the path leads. Often, as in this case, the only direction available is the certain knowledge that there is no going back.
3. “Core of love”
“She had four children in five years. The most significant thing that happened to her in her life, she told us, was losing one of those children to cancer when he was five years old. ‘I don’t talk about this very easily,’ she said, looking down and speaking very quietly, ‘but it was pivotal for me. It changed my life—jelled it in a profound way. I have an image that comes to mind about that time. It’s of a white fire roaring through my life and burning out what was superficial, frivolous or unimportant and leaving a core of .. . I don’t think
there’s any other word for it than love. A core of love. It’s hard to convey what that means.’ ”11
The loss of a child ranks as one of the cruelest, and this woman puts it graphically. Yet, the “huge fire” she describes could have left a lot of things in its aftermath: rage, bitterness, despair, or simply black ashes. How did she find herself in this space of love? Love symbolizes ulti- mate connection between two people. It is a delicate balance between enmeshment, where one self dissolves into another, and narcissism, where every other self functions as nothing more than a mirror.
THE PATH FROM CONTROL TO SURRENDER: THE PRACTICE OF
PILGRIMAGE
What points the path from control to surrender? The ancient reli- gious practice of pilgrimage offers a compass. Understood as “a trans- formative journey to a sacred center,”12 pilgrimage may take people to sites held holy by a religious tradition, Mecca or Jerusalem. Or pilgrim- age may take them to sites made holy by intense struggle or bloodshed, like Auschwitz, the killing fields in Cambodia, the battlefields at Gettysburg or the beaches of Normandy. Pilgrimage can also be more personal. People use the term to describe visits to the residences of authors or statesmen or even celebrities. Indeed, the homes of Emily Dickinson or Jane Austen attract a kind of reverence usually seen in places of worship. Finally, whether it floats to consciousness or not, people who visit gravesites are on pilgrimage.
Whatever the destination, pilgrimage involves a journey, with the planning travel requires and the dislocation it brings. Further, pil- grimage involves some kind of physical effort, often walking, whether on a trail, through a graveyard, or from room to room. Even journeys described as “inner pilgrimages” employ some regular physical prac- tice, like mantram repetition, yoga, or Centering Prayer.13 As is the case with all spiritual practices, pilgrimage invites “the body to mentor the soul.”14
Many world religions look on pilgrimage as a spiritual practice, and Islam recommends that every pious Muslim make the hajj at least once a lifetime. Medieval Christians made their way to Rome or Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela. They walked to do penance, seek healing, visit holy sites or the relics of saints. Their journals recount stories and companions along the way. At the outset, the point of pilgrimage
seemed to be reaching the destination. Along the way, though, the journey became an end in itself. Wherever its destination, pilgrimage taught believers to travel light, be receptive, and rest.
Since pilgrims carry everything they need on their backs, they find out very quickly to travel light. Pilgrims physically feel the weight of their possessions, and as they plod along they may well begin to pon- der how their possessions in fact possess them. Everything borne on the back registers on the feet. In a spirit of surrender, pilgrims learn to let go of all but the essentials.
Like pilgrimage, loss strips everything away. The mother above remembers that the death of a child hollowed her out. It cleared away everything “superfluous, frivolous, or unimportant,” leaving behind only emptiness. Janis Joplin (1970) put it more bluntly: “Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”15
The experience of loss creates a terrible freedom. Just as the pilgrim chooses what she will carry, one whom suffering has hollowed out chooses what will fill the emptiness. That is the freedom. The danger is that anything can fill that hollowed space: love, peace, bitterness, despair. That is the terror.
It is not clear that Bill W., founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, stud- ied pilgrimage, but he certainly understood emptiness. Alcoholics Anonymous speaks of that “God-shaped hole” in every person. Twelve Step programs encourage people in recovery to fill that hole with spirit and not spirits, with divine mystery and not substances: “Let go and let God.” Alcoholics Anonymous also picks up on another dimension of pilgrimage: receptivity.
Because they carry so little, pilgrims learn to receive. Dependent on others for food, for shelter, for companionship, pilgrims relinquish control over their surroundings. Wrestling with pain and fatigue, they relinquish control over their own bodies. Whatever the weather and whomever the company, pilgrims move forward into a space of sur- render. On the way, they discover the daily graces. Grace comes incar- nate in the person of shopkeepers and concierges, hospitalers and fellow travelers. Unbidden and unmerited, the kindness of strangers sustains pilgrims along their way: a sign of divine compassion.
Physically and spiritually, walking is work, and pilgrims relish reach- ing the day’s destination. Rest becomes a mini-sabbath, and pilgrims learn to honor it. Tutoring people in rest and sabbath, pilgrimage emphasizes being rather than doing. Pilgrims are not doing anything. They may begin by thinking they will achieve their goal of making it to Mecca or Jerusalem, but it does not take long to be disabused of
that idea. The point is as much making the journey as reaching the destination.
A woman who climbed Kilimanjaro put it this way: “The other members of our party spoke of conquering the mountain, I think the mountain let itself be climbed. I understood ‘majesty’ after that climb.” Only in retrospect did she identify the climb as pilgrimage, but she put its sense of sabbath into words. Just as she leaned into the moun- tain, pilgrims lean into the holy.
Together traveling light, learning to receive, and honoring rest: these aspects of pilgrimage cultivate a spirit of surrender that is at the heart of pilgrimage. Surrender works to unclench the grip of con- trol, acknowledge life’s contingency, giving thanks for what has been and being hopeful for what lies ahead. In these three aspects of letting go, receptivity, and rest, pilgrimage is similar to Centering Prayer, itself an inner pilgrimage. Jane Ferguson’s chapter in this volume sug- gests striking similarities.
Pilgrimage extends outwardly into immersion. Many colleges and universities offer opportunities for “immersion experiences,” which take students abroad for an in-depth encounter with another culture. Minneapolis’s Center for Global Education offers immersion experi- ences to interested adults, and Director Orval Gingerich is quick to distinguish them from mission trips or service learning projects: “We encourage people to go as receivers. We want to disabuse them of the idea that they have something to offer. We want them simply to receive” (O. Gingerich, personal communication, July 10, 2009). The Ignatian Colleagues Program runs a curriculum for college and university administrators, part of which involves a 10-day immersion in a Third World country. Director Edward Peck calls this part of the program “pilgrimage,” and he reminds participants: “You’re not there to give; you’re there to receive” (E. Peck, personal communication, July 7, 2009).16
Why do this? Immersion affords a kind of deep knowing of some- thing else, and that knowledge has a double edge. It opens both to beauty and to pain. Describing a sport he loves, long-distance runner Richard Askwith (2008) captures that double-edged knowing: “The man who is truly at home in the mountains .. . enters into an intimate relationship with them is so deeply in touch with himself.”17 Such inti- macy bears pain as well as beauty. Askwith claims it is crucial to get “cold, or wet, or lost, or exhausted, or bruised by rocks or covered in mud. The point is not the exertion involved, it’s the degree of
involvement, or immersion, in the landscape. You need to feel it; to
interact with it, to be in it, not just looking from outside. You need to lose yourself—for it is then you are most human.”17
Immersion returns to incarnation, for this athlete gives a luminous description of the divine immersion in humanity, living deeply into the beauty of being human—but also into the suffering. Through Jesus Christ, the divine-human, God became one of us, even to the point of death. Jesus laments, and he draws on the psalms to give voice to his suffering. Jesus asks for his own suffering to be lifted, interced- ing with the divine parent for his burden to be lifted. Then, as he dies, he intercedes for the very people who put him to death, asking his divine parent to forgive them. Finally, his entire life on earth was a pilgrimage. Some would say it led only to Jerusalem and his death. We argue that it led deeper and deeper into the human soul. God knows suffering, because God has been there. In these contemplative practices we walk in the steps of an incarnate God, a God who suffers with us. This was how God came to know the beauty and pain of being human.
CONCLUSION
Retrospectively, we recognize that the entire journey from suffer- ing to solidarity with others and with God has been a pilgrimage. These contemplative practices invite us to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who leads us deeper into the mystery of being human. At the same time, as they did for Jesus, they take us further into solidarity with the suffering of all people. Poet, essayist, and farmer Wendell Berry has a beautiful poem that ends with the counsel to “practice resurrection.” These contemplative practices invite us to “practice incarnation.”18
REFERENCES
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13. Several chapters in this volume emphasize the importance of specific physical disciplines: rhythmic breathing (e.g., T. Anne Richards, “The Path of Yoga”), silence (e.g., Jane Ferguson, “Centering Prayer”), or the repetition of a word or phrase (e.g., Jill Bormann, “Mantram Repetition,” Tim Flinders et al., “The Eight-Point Program of Passage Meditation”), or even repetitive motion (e.g., Amy Wachholz, “Shaking the Blues Away”).
14. Brown, P. (1988). The body and society: Men, women, and sexual renunci- ation in early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.
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16. For more information on the Center for Global Education, see http:// www.centerforglobaleducation.org. For more information on The Ignatian Colleagues, see http://www.ignatiancolleagues.org.
17. Coffey, M. (2008). Explorers of the infinite. New York: Penguin.
18. Berry, W. (1994). Manifesto: The mad farmer liberation front. In
Collected Poems: 1957–1982 (pp. 151–152). San Francisco: North Point Press.
CHAPTER 14
