On Pilgrimage: The Thread, Insight, & Sacred Travel
In June of 2013, I was part of the first trip of pilgrims to travel from Cody, WY to Taizé, France with the youth group from Christ Episcopal Church. I was 14 years old. As I was preparing to write this article, I was collecting pictures from the trip. I shared what I was finding with a friend; she looked at the pictures of 14-year-old me on my first pilgrimage and stated (in the humorous way she does), “Insight from every angle.”
And if that doesn’t just hit the nail on the head. Every single candid picture of me shows the face of someone deep in contemplation. Someone looking at the world outside of them and wondering about the world inside of them.
My pilgrimage to Taizé was the beginning of so much: the start of my self-discovery journey, a rite of passage, a download of who I could become. And it has endured in so many ways in the last 12 years. This was the trip where I first started to give feet to the work of bringing what is sacred inside of me to the life of the world; a thread that has woven through my life since and has been embodied in the soul of my business (Wellspring Coaching) and every step I take on this earth.
Taizé was the first time I wrote a letter to myself. It was the first time I had been on an adventure without any of my kin. It was the first time I spoke Swedish. It was the first time I worshipped with chanting, while sitting on the floor. It was the first time I carried a full pack on my back. It was the first time I heard words from the book of wisdom. I have been known to lament the eroded cultural structure of my community (where is the companionship we need to become adults? Where is the support to become parents? Where are the songs we sing to the trees?) And yet my pilgrimage to Taizé is a knot in the thread of my becoming: it was a beginning in so many ways.
“People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread.” William Stafford
If I’m not to leave you in confusion while reading this I have to explain about the thread. In the dimensions that require perception beyond what only my eyes can see (and I’m talking about that inner sight, soul sight, intuition… the place where the words get sloppy trying to explain this) I have a sense of a golden thread weaving through the pieces of my life and I have found that my truest work is about following it. The thread is what clues me into my heading. I started consciously following and collecting the thread in Taizé, And I know it’s the thread because of the radiance I feel deep in my chest when I encounter it.
In the traditional sense, a Pilgrimage is a journey taken on foot and faith to a sacred place. On foot: you are doing the walking, and one step at a time, with your feet planted on the earth. On faith – well now, that one’s trickier to answer. And so is sacred.
On Faith:
According to Soren Kierkegaard the idea of participation and self-creation is absolutely critical in order to understand faith. For him, faith is deeply individual and something that is incapable of being learned vicariously. Even more, faith is not just a destination, but rather the process itself. For Kierkegaard, faith is the anguish, the fear and trembling, the wrestle – it is the deep inner work.
In other words, faith is something you learn on foot: you learn it as you walk, as you live in your body, and as you experience the world. I learn this lesson every time I come back to my body (which I tend to forget I have) and realize that the body is in the soul. I am only able to access the sacred & the true when I am in a state of coherence. If I pretend I am just a mind, I lose the portal within myself (my heart). When I was a 14-year-old I felt awkward in my skin all. the. time. I had lost the magic of a kid who simply belongs to themselves and did not yet know who to achieve the complex weave of adult authenticity and integrity. I was walking around in a body that wasn’t quite my own and so felt like I had to look outside of myself before I could look within.
In addition to self-creation as critical to faith, Kierkegaard also explores the interaction between interiority and exteriority in his understanding, and here enters the work of the paradox. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a paradox is a statement or tenet contrary to received opinion or belief, especially one that is difficult to believe. For Kierkegaard, faith is exactly the paradox that the interiority is higher than the exteriority, that the particularity is higher than the universal.
When I was 20, I studied abroad in Northern India, and it was a pilgrimage both deep and wide. It was a semester of transformation (and you can read the details of it here.)
In my Sacred Himalayas class, my final question was “What is sacred and how have you experienced it while in India?” And this project turned out to be a capstone that helped me make sense of some of the most important pieces of pilgrimage for me: what it means to learn something on foot (with your body), on faith (with inner work and growth), and in a sacred place (the heart). (I think everyone should ask the question: what is sacred and how have you experienced it and find their answer).
The paradox I lived in India was how I could access what was beyond me through what was within me – the way going inward is actually about going into the divine. I saw (and I mean I really got) what it meant for the interiority to be higher than the exteriority. What was within me was really a portal, whereas what is outside of me can only take me so far. I learned how the recognition of sacred landscapes occurs internally – it is the moments & interactions (touchpoints) where my heart beats faster, stronger, deeper, where my breath is taken, and where I feel exquisitely alive. After all, I believe those are the moments we are really here for: when creation is able to experience the awe of being alive.
In her book Braving the Wilderness: The quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone, Brené Brown also cites the paradox as a spiritual tool. She calls on Carl Jung who believed that the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions and a great witness to truth. For Brené, living out the paradox of love in our lives is the crucial axis in which we find true belonging.
If my trip to Taizé was me trying to understand my outer world and how I fit, India was about understanding and becoming myself. It was about true belonging. I was able to look upon my true self for an extended time. In Hinduism, darshan is the act of seeing a sacred object, deity, or revered person. It means viewing, really seeing the divine. On my pilgrimage in India, I learned how to take long true looks at the divine within.
I experienced the sacred through my personal growth and self-discovery. The person I was able to become was so true, beautiful, and expansive. And I was able to become this person because I choose to take a journey on foot – on where I walked my way to who I am one step at a time, an unfolding & emergent process. (If you’re curious to learn more about my experience of sacredness in India, you can read more here.)
A Knight of Faith:
I believe we take pilgrimages to learn how to live in connection to source. I am here to be the vibrating, living, pulsating bridge between the mundane and the sacred, the physical and the metaphysical, the numinous and the ordinary (for the are intimately woven). This position is what Kierkegaard dubs the Knight of Faith.
According to Kierkegaard, The Knight of Faith is “solid through and through. Her stance? Vigorous, it belongs altogether to finitude… she belongs altogether to this world… The Knight of Faith is continually making the movement of infinity, but she makes it with such accuracy and poise that she is continually getting finitude out of it.” (You bet I changed he to she). Being in the paradox of faith, doing the inner work of anguish, and belonging to this world is precisely what makes real the Knight of Faith. They live the paradox of love, they hold the tension of the unknown, and they delight in the world.
As Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “the most profound fruit of the transformation process is that the individual ceases to be an individual and instead is transformed into a person.” The Knight of Faith has made the movement from individual to person. Their journey has taught them of soul and true belonging. My pilgrimages in Taizé and India helped me make this move from individual to person. They helped me come home to my humanity, my wholeness, my coherence.
Through the structure of pilgrimage, I learned the skills requires to make the movement of infinity, and to do it with poise and accuracy so that as I do it, I am altogether part of this world. I participate in my self-creation. I engage with the tensions and quandaries and tangles of being alive in a complex and problematic world. I do not separate or cloister myself from the truths of being a creature. I change the diapers, mourn the deaths, smell the smells, taste the food, laugh and sneeze and itch through it all.
Someone who has learned to take journeys on foot and on faith (a pilgrim) is someone who has learned to do what Sue Monk Kidd calls Delight. She says, “I am speaking of a unique kind of response to life that can coexist with our most painful realities. I am speaking of the joy of saying yes to life with the core of our being.” The Knight of Faith is intimately connected with creation, with emotion, with complexity and nuance – they are present to the world and they know delight. It is the Knight of Faith that is able to “transform the leap of life into a gait,” (ah yes, the ‘on foot’ part of pilgrimage).
I am able to yes to life with the core of my being because of the experiences I have had as a pilgrim: a person who is paying attention to the soulful pieces, the threads. Becoming a pilgrim is about becoming someone who has the skills to get in touch with life, with the deeply real. It is an invitation to become one who can see the thread and glimpse the underglimmer.
Transforming the leap of life into a gait… the work of pilgrimage in my life has been about taking the leaps of faith and learning how to fall into that trust, that surrender, with every step I take. Again, it is the connection between the sacred and the mundane for on its own, taking a step is a mundane thing. We all take thousands of them every day. But when done with a reverence of approach, with the living knowledge that every movement of this body is actually the act of creation experiencing life, that is when the leaps of faith are transformed into a gait of faith and a pilgrim is born. (And this is why I have two tiny stars tattooed on both of knees reminding me to walk through the world with magic).
To Be a Pilgrim:
To be a pilgrim is to be one who cultivates a holy imagination. It is to be one filled with soulfulness. According to Phil Cousineau, soulfulness is our ability to respond from our deepest place. Your imagination is a powerful tool; it can make the invisible visible, transform the unseen into the seen. Our imagination is one of our senses capable of perceiving the divine. If we truly want to know the secret of soulful travel, we need to believe that there is something sacred waiting to be discovered in virtually every journey. A pilgrim is someone who can see the wonder.
To be a pilgrim, all you need do is pay attention to the soul. In my life, this looks like the depth resonance of the thread (inside my heart space lights up when I come across important pieces), the coherence of a brain and heart working together with the heart in the lead and the brain regulated and online, and a practice of noticing the glimmers. I promise if you pay attention to life, you will learn how to see the magic, the wonder, the awe. This world is absolutely dripping with the wonderful, we just have to learn how to see it.
In his book The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau talks about the work of pilgrimage as learning how to see; it is about becoming aware of the imagining that is required of us to contact the sacred.
Images resist translation into singular, comprehensive, and incontestable facts - according to Lisa Stevenson, the image drags the world along with it, keeping the complexity, mystery, and wonder of experience intact rather than divorcing and simplifying them. Stevenson is an anthropologist who studies care in the Canadian Arctic. She has come to see that images, as opposed to facts, hold space for subjectivity and the density of our feelings; in this way, the image is able to resist the demand for objectivity and replicability: it is whole and complete as it is. Images can hold us. Deeply. Lovingly. Truly.
What image do you use as your map? Do you have a sense of where you’re going? Of the sacred within and around you? Can you see you true self? Do you have a holy vision within you? The place you go to feel the presence of the divine?
The Thread:
A pilgrimage is praxis: theory realized in action. We are ever evolving as pilgrims. What began as a trip to France when I was 14 has spiraled onto become a series of trips, both inner and outer, a business, and ultimately a way of living. To me, pilgrimage is something I make contact with every day as I open to and pursue direct contact with source, with the sacred, with divine.
As I write this, I recognize that living in connection to source isn’t the modus operandi of our world. And so going about it is also about being capable of holding the tension. It’s about weaving the pieces together.
A weaving is a textile in which two sets of yarns or threads (called the warp and weft) are interlaced with one another, forming a new whole. The warp and the weft are able to form a cohesive whole by looping around one another and holding each other in tension: the whole emerges through being held in tension.
Throughout this piece, you may have noticed words and phrases that I’ve bolded. Those emphasized pieces tell the story of paying attention to life, of insight, soulfulness, radiance. They tell of a journey taken on foot and on faith, of becoming a person, of surrender, and saying yes with the core of your being. The thread is the compass of the pilgrim. For me, it guides me to the deeply real.
I hope you learn to see and feel you thread, fellow pilgrim.
The Five Excellent Practices of Pilgrimages:
Practice the arts of attention and listening.
Practice renewing yourself every day.
Practice meandering toward the center of every place.
Practice the ritual of reading sacred texts.
Practice gratitude and praise-singing.
- Phil Cousineau
Reading List/References:
When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd
Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown
Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau
Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue
Wisdom Way of Knowing by Cynthia Beuougeault
Life Beside Itself by Lisa Stevenson
Woven: A Faith for the Dissatisfied by Joel Mckerrow