The Progress of Pilgrimage

The Voices in "The Tree of Life": Accusation or Lamentation?

2011-06-24T15:11:00.000-07:00

There's not a lot of conversation in Terence Malick's new movie "The Tree of Life" --but there's a lot of murmuring. Barely audible, these voices create a second soundtrack for the film. But what are they saying -- and to whom?

Sometimes these voices murmur to the audience, offering insight, even instruction: "There are two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace." Unlike the Camino to Santiago, yellow arrows do not mark the path ahead. Nor is choosing it a one-shot deal. There's always a fork in the road, and good luck prompts it as easily as bad. Haunted but highly successful, the adult Jack (the ravaged Sean Penn) achieves everything his father didn't, yet still wrestles for his father's blessing. Even as an adult, he struggles to be seen, to be heard, and to be loved.

Sometimes these voices make up a kind of interior monologue: "Father, I wrestle with you. Mother, I wrestle with you," a young Jack spits the words out. The words never surface to the level of speech, but Jack's adolescent behavior puts them eloquently. This elder son has always been struggling to be seen, to be heard -- and to be loved.

Sometimes the voices speak to God, though "God" seems both a cosmic mystery and a person, a little too closely modeled along the lines of Jack's abusive father. When speaking to God, the voices occasionally adopt the language of scripture, paraphrasing it to fit their experience. "Who are we to you?" the mother's voice demands. "How could you do this to us?" another voice asks, as a child drowns at a swimming hole. "Where are you?" yet another voice cries, as a telegram delivers news no parent should ever receive. The struggle to be seen, to be heard, to be loved is not Jack's alone; it belongs to every creature.

Perhaps the Creator faces similar struggles. Against the film's background of lamentation, other words make a different kind of sense. "The Tree of Life" opens with a quote from the book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" (Job 38:7) -- only this time the voice speaking belongs to no creature, but to the Creator of all things. It's the voice from the whirlwind.

I've always heard accusation in these words: God telling Job that, in effect, his suffering is a mere blip on the divine radar screen. But now I wonder....

After listening to the murmuring in Malick's film, I wonder if the voice from the whirlwind doesn't register a lament of its own, a divine plea to be seen, to be heard -- even, to be loved. The Hebrew scriptures are a testament of mutual longing, of the Creator for the creature, of the creature for the Creator. "Where are you?" "Listen to me!" the psalmist begs. But so does the Creator: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone." (Deuteronomy 6:4) On both the side of time and the side of eternity, the plea is the same: "Hearken to me!" or to put it more bluntly: "Listen up!" "Pay attention."

Mutual longing, mutual hearkening, mutual lament: what would it be like to edit accusation out of the divine-human equation -- and let love fill the void? We might get a god who suffers with us.

Walking the Months: Dorothy Day's "On Pilgrimage"

2011-04-27T15:48:00.000-07:00

Pilgrimage is not just about place; pilgrimage can also be about time. Instead of making their way to a sacred site, pilgrims chronicle their journey through the days, the months, the seasons. As with place, walking through time demands a focused attention to detail. For, as with place, pilgrimage through time yields its insights in the particulars.

In a luminous journal "On Pilgrimage," the founder of the Catholic Worker movement Dorothy Day chronicles a journey over the course of a year. She organizes by months -- technically, she keeps a "mensual" record, as opposed to one that is daily (diurnal) or yearly (annual). Her reflections mark the round of the seasons, as she observes them from the Catholic Worker House on Mott Street in Manhattan,in upstate New York, where the Catholic Worker had a retreat house and farm, or on her daughter's farm in West Virginia.

Like a true pilgrim, she notices details: the smell of poor neighborhoods (like dead rats), the thick mud of early spring, the fragrance of fresh-baked pies, the snap of wash on a clothesline in a windy day. Her description wraps the reader in places long gone and times long past.

Maybe for policy-makers, "the devil is in the details." But for pilgrims, insight lies in the details. As Lisa and I noted on the Camino, we set out with Great Thoughts to think and hard texts to ponder. As we made our way toward Santiago, however, we learned, not from our heads, but from our feet. Pilgrimage tutored us in everyday, embodied knowledge: we fed on it as our daily bread.

And for Dorothy Day, the harvest of finely wrought details from the streets of New York to the stables of West Virginia yields a single, central insight: love. She returns to love throughout the book, and it becomes the refrain that binds together the round of monthly reflections.

Love seems to be the special province of women, particularly women of Day's generation. As she waits with her daughter and son-in-law for the birth of their child, her days fill with washing and baking and housework. The rare empty hour is "found time" for reading, and the result is a pilgrim's journal that moves easily between reflection and description, between abstract and concrete, between theological musing -- and an account of what the family had for dinner, where it came from, and how much it cost. Doesn't love happen exactly at that interface? Love longs to be made. In order to be love, it needs to be put into words or gestures or images. Poets call it expression; painters call it art; theologicans call it incarnation.

One particular insight into love won't leave me. From a priest she doesn't even admire, Day extracts a truth: "It's too late for anything but love." Suddenly I understood that Day intends two things when she talks about love -- and the second is the more interesting.

1. First, Dorothy Day speaks prescriptively about love: it's a moral imperative. She fears the people around her have forgotten how to love, particularly as they sharpened the instruments of war. Dorothy Day exhorts her companions along the way to love.

2. But Day has a second insight into love. She speaks of love descriptively: it's a simple fact of the human condition. It survives direst poverty; it lights the darkest night; it pilots the lost. When therapies fail, when causes fail, when death does its cruel work, love remains.

For Day that simple fact is beyond dispute or explanation: love.

Maybe that's the point of every journey, whether through time or space, whether to a sacred site or through a calendar year. Love is the answer; love, the question; love, the destination.

Love.

Alabaster Pilgrims: The Journey from Life -- to Life Abundant

2011-04-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

Outside the royal city of Madrid lies Philip II's great palace of death, El Escorial. The king retired there to die a long and painful death in 1598. He surrounded himself with the sarcophagi of the kings and queens who had predeceased him -- as well as relics he had rescued from certain destruction in Protestant regions across the Pyrenees.

Like the royal court itself, death had its attendants. Philip II annexed a monastery to his palace, so that perpetual masses could be said for his soul. The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca summed up Spanish attitudes toward death: "In all other countries death is the end. It arrives and the curtain falls. No so in Spain. In Spain, on the contrary, the curtain only rises at that moment...." Philip II intended to keep that veil between the worlds raised.

But Lorca must have never visited the 13th and 14th century tombs of the dukes of Burgundy in Dijon. The tombs reside in a "charterhouse" or monastery for the Carthusians, an austere monastic order. As they prayed the hours, the monks walked the cloister, a sheltered courtyard adjacent to the church. The dukes commissioned miniature cloisters at the base of their tombs, filled with statues of mourning monks. These mourning monks would attend them in perpetuity, circling their bodies in perpetual prayer.

Renovation in the monastery in Burgundy, now a museum, allowed these sixteen-inch alabaster figures to walk on. As part of an exhibit called "The Mourners," they traveled from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts this winter. The exhibit closed on Palm Sunday. Walking with these alabaster pilgrims was the way to begin Holy Week.

As they walk, the monks move through the postures of grief: faces contorted with weeping, bent, burdened shoulders, downcast heads, a cowled hand wiping a tear from a cowled face. Despite the unyielding stone, their robes reveal forward motion. The monks still walk their cloister, offering frozen alabaster prayers for the departed souls of the dukes. The curtain is always lifted.

As we move through Holy Week, we journey toward resurrection. We want to sprint toward Easter, but these stone figures remind us to take it slow, tend to our tears -- and watch as the curtain slowly rises.

The transit from life -- to life abundant.

Lent's Pilgrimage, Lent's Joy

2011-04-10T05:38:00.000-07:00

Lent signals a certain sobriety. It’s a season of renunciation, where your piety is pitched to how much you depend on whatever it is you’ve decided to do without: alcohol, meat, that shot of vanilla in your favorite caffeinated beverage – that favorite caffeinated beverage itself.

When I traveled with a more Catholic crowd, we had a St. Patrick’s Day party, and we decked the house in green, made buckets of Irish stew, and stocked the bar with Guinness – which, to the Irish, is liquid bread. Well, that year St. Patrick’s Day fell in the dead center of Lent, and all of my husband’s high school buddies had given up alcohol for season. They looked longingly at the Guinness – and sipped on water. We told all the old stories anyway, this time at half the volume and without forgetting any of the punch lines.

Scripture commends fasting, almsgiving, and prayer as signature Lenten practices. All of them are practices of renunciation: fasting gives up food – at least, in excessive amounts; almsgiving gives up material goods, urging us to spread the wealth – and in so doing reminding us how much we have and how little we need; prayer gives up control, nudging us to listen to someone else.

The point of renunciation is to create space: carve out openings in busy lives, so that we too can set our faces toward Jerusalem, as Jesus did, so that we too can journey in solidarity with him along the way.

Lent is a season of renunciation, and sobriety is one of its soundtracks.
Yet there’s another soundtrack in Lent, fainter perhaps but more compelling. Lent is also a season of completion, and joy is its soundtrack. Some people live out of this Lenten counsel. A man decided to work in a soup kitchen during Lent, and suddenly all the panhandlers he’s seen in the streets had names: Shafik, Richard, and the ubiquitous Dot Lady. A woman adopted the practice of writing a poem each day. As she sipped her morning coffee, she’d traced a circle onto a piece of blank paper with one of her saucepans. She stared at the blank space until the words came. And if they didn’t come at the moment, she simply finished her coffee and moved into the work of that day. But periodically she returned to that blank circle, adding words until the circle filled, a poem complete. She wrote in pencil; she allowed herself to erase; the whole exercise gave her great pleasure – another word not used often enough in Lent.

I’ll cite Luther on that precise point – he seems to have some credibility around here. Luther gives us that wonderful snapshot of Adam in the Garden of Eden, drunk on God – or as he puts it, “ intoxicated with rejoicing toward God and ...delighted also with all the other creatures.” (LW 1, “Lectures on Genesis,” 94) Not exactly a picture of sobriety, but the image captures something important. We are hard-wired for joy.

Scripture seconds this impulse of completion and joy as well, perhaps most powerfully in the final counsel Jesus gives to his disciples before his death. It’s Lent in this season of his life, and he knows what lies ahead: the certainty of death and the promise of resurrection. So what does he spend this last supper talking about? Not so much renunciation and sobriety, but completion and joy and love: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”

Jesus’ death will leave a huge hole in the disciples’ lives: he knows it. And, beneath those gluey, obfuscating layers of denial, they know it too. And yet, he tells them: “You will not be left comfortless. When I go, I will send my Spirit – in fact, unless I go, my Spirit cannot come to you.” (paraphrasing John 16:7) There’s this economy of the Spirit in John’s gospel: the Spirit can’t come unless and until Jesus goes away. But when Jesus goes, the Spirit will come. There’s a similar economy of the Spirit in Lent: the Spirit can’t come until and unless there’s room. Renunciation clears out a space the Spirit fills.

What does the Spirit bring? It’s very simple: joy. Paul expounds on the fruit of the Spirit in his letter to the Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). And the apostle only elaborates what the psalmist delivers with lapidary punch: “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). Jesus’ final speech to his disciples – which takes chapters and chapters in John’s gospel – could be boiled down to two words: “Expect joy.”

It’s so easy to get dragged down by the renunciation and giving up, by sobriety and the gritty reality of loss, we forget that other pulse in Lent: joy. Here are three things to remember:

1. First, remember to breathe. Whether you give up eating meat or take on writing poetry, renunciation and completion are like respiration, breathing in and breathing out. We need to do both to live. If you only expel, you will surely collapse. Equally, if you endlessly inhale, you will explode. Renunciation breathes out, expelling toxins even as it creates space for the next breath. Completion breathes in, taking into that empty cavity oxygen, the breath of life.

2. That’s the second point: breathe in joy. Lent’s joy comes into that empty cavity, whether the space has been carved out by renunciation or deep need or grave loss. Joy comes in – if we but let it. In their book The Cultural Creatives (Three Rivers Press/Random House, Inc., 2000), Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson interviewed a young mother:

“She had four children in five years. The most significant thing that happened to 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.”

Whether we choose it or it chooses us, renunciation and loss hollow out empty spaces within the soul. And, make no mistake, that’s a vacuum that all kinds of things can fill: anger, bitterness, resentment, distraction, or perhaps most sinister of all, just general busy-ness. But Jesus promises to send his Spirit. All we have to do is breathe it in.

When we do, joy comes – or as this young mother put it, a core of love. I can’t explain it any better than she couldn’t, but I know it’s true.

3. And that’s the final truth of Lent’s joy: it’s social. The joy I can generate on my own is always incomplete. It must be completed by another. As Luther sees him, Adam in the garden, drunk on God, needs something to complete his joy. So, he delights in God -- and also all the other creatures. Creator and creation complete his joy. Jesus completes the disciples’ joy; they complete his. The apostle Paul – speaking simply for once – tells the community at Philippi: “make my joy complete” (2:2). It’s kind of like the dare Clint Eastwood utters as Dirty Harry (Sudden Impact, 1983), “Go ahead, make my joy.”

Lent invites us to dare the Spirit: make our joy.

Lent leaves us with these lessons:
Remember to breath;
breath in joy;
lean on someone else to complete that joy.

Mere happiness cannot stand up to the harsh truths of loss and war and tsunami. Lent’s joy is truer than all those things: it’s the promise that we are not in free fall.
And that death is not the final word.

Start with that at least.
(From a talk at Foss Chapel, Augsburg College, April 9, 2011)

Lessons from Kilimanjaro: Breaking and Remaking

2011-02-18T12:57:00.000-08:00

Mt. Kilimanjaro inspired this grant on pilgrimage. If you scroll back to the first entry, you’ll see the climbing party at the summit. Kilimanjaro hadn’t been on my bucket list. It was a time in my life when the mere thought of bucket lists turned my stomach. I had lost my husband to brain cancer the year before, and the whole concept of a bucket list seemed a luxury that had cruelly passed me by. I was broken, in pieces, and quite literally, list-less.

So when a friend invited me to join his climbing party, I shrugged -- listlessly – and said: “Why not?” One morning a few months later, I found myself at the base of the mountain. We climbed through the rainforest, steamy and close with the calls of strange birds.
There was evening and there was morning, a second day.

We climbed through the alpine meadow, filled with scrub trees green against red volcanic rock. There was evening and there was morning, a third day.

We climbed above the tree line, into a zone where plants hugged the ground, bursting with color from every crevass and cranny, and we learned the hearty species that survive altitude and intense swings in temperature.
There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

We climbed out of realm of vegetation entirely, entering the fierce landscape of the summit itself. Here there was nothing but scree, searing sun, and shards of sharp fragments of lava. It looked for all in the world like we’d stumbled into a giants’ kitchen. Maybe there had been an earthquake or a violent domestic argument, but something traumatic had happened. The ground looked littered with shards of red-clay pottery – and little else. Here, a once perfect bowl, angrily smashed into pieces; there, a pitcher, broken beyond repair; up ahead, a plate, dashed into fragments.
There was evening –

— and at midnight we made the final ascent. And by that time, like the landscape we ourselves were in pieces, shattered by exhaustion, thin air, and the cold. The only thing that kept me going was the pull of the hundreds of hikers in front of us, the push of the hundreds from behind. Broken as we were, together we snaked up the mountain like something alive, our headlamps steady shards of light in an inky darkness.
There was the rest of that evening and there was morning, a fifth day

And as that day dawned, we stood at the summit and surveyed the wreckage we’d spent the night climbing through. As I looked at the earth’s curvature gently falling around us, I remember thinking: this whole mountain is one huge mound of broken pieces, shards from something else. And yet, there it was, Africa’s “Shining Mountain,” the highest peak on the continent. Out of these pieces, a new creation.

And that wasn’t the only high point of the trip, though it certainly scored in terms of elevation. The following week we visited the school a member of our climbing party had started in his native village outside of Iringa in central Tanzania. We lost a tire to a pot-hole on the way there, but when we finally arrived, students stood at attention in their classrooms in faded green uniforms to greet us.

Their green jackets and pleated skirts looked worn, but clean, relics from another century. Their desks and chairs looked vaguely familiar, kind of like the ones I’d used when I’d been in grade school. Broken and badly in need of repair, they done hard service for at least that long. The names on the back of the chairs told a story: Anderson, Jenson, Carlson. Those weren’t Tanzanian names. Later the principal proudly explained that the furniture, the uniforms, even the schoolbooks had all been donated by a MN non-profit – hence the names. Like the mountain, the school had been built on shards, cast-off pieces from somewhere else.

And yet, there it was, in so many ways more magnificent than Kilimanjaro, a school at the end of a red dirt road, the only opportunity for education beyond third grade for miles around. Out of these pieces, a new creation.

These images stuck with me, broken as I was, like scraps of an insistent rhyme that at first I could neither shake nor completely make out. But then I started to hear it everywhere: breaking and remaking, breaking and remaking. Out of the pieces, a new creation.

You catch the rhyme in the story of the first creation. Let’s be frank: there’s a lot of breakage involved. For anything to happen, the smooth stone of matter, which was “without form and void,” had to be shattered, rather like the aftermath of the domestic argument we imagined on Mt. Kilimanjaro. Light is broken apart from darkness, day from night, the heavens from the land and the seas, sun from moon and all stars – the stars themselves, like headlamps, shards of light in an inky darkness. And at the end of each day, God looks at all these broken and repurposed pieces of creation – and blesses them: “God saw that it was good....God saw that it was very good.”

There is evening and there is morning, another day. And then we come upon the creation of Eve, itself a story of breaking and remaking, because the only way to get Eve is to break Adam apart, break Adam open, break into Adam. From his bone and from his flesh, literally, from pieces of his body, Eve comes forth, the second human. Out of the pieces, a new creation.

Backgrounded by the soundtrack of breaking and remaking, another story of creation makes a different kind of sense. This is the story of the creation of the disciples, which now seems a lot like the story of the first creation, at least when Matthew rolls the camera, because if you listen to Jesus’ first public sermon, he’s surrounded by wreckage. He makes his recruitment speech to a broken bunch of people:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit...
“Blessed are those who mourn...
“Blessed are the meek....
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness....”

These are people who’ve been broken into pieces by the world’s ways – and yet these are precisely the people whom Jesus blesses and refashions into his disciples. Jesus calls – not by command – but by blessing. Out of the pieces, a new creation.

Jesus seems to have done a pretty good job of this new creation, because by the close of Matthew’s Gospel (25:31-46), these disciples, broken, blessed, and repurposed, have become a new creation: giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, comfort to the sick and imprisoned. What I love about this is that these once-shattered disciples are shocked by their own makeovers! They barely recognize themselves – or Jesus: “When was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?” But these blessed pieces have become a blessing to others, without even knowing it. Out of these pieces, a new creation.

And should this surprise us? Because the central practices of this broken band of disciples today, bound together by duct tape, piano wire, and a fair helping of grace, they are all practices of breaking and making. Look at the Lord’s Supper: you take a nice loaf of bread perfectly round – and tear it into pieces. These pieces nourish a new creation. Look at the rite of baptism, where you take an infant, break it away from the arms of its family of origin, adopt it into a new family, the family of the faithful, and give it a new name “Child of God.” It’s shocking, and I keep waiting for some parent to suddenly see what’s going on, take the child, and run screaming from the sanctuary. Out of these pieces, a new creation.

And should this surprise us? Because this pattern of breaking and remaking calls to mind the story of Jesus himself, broken, blessed, and repurposed as the risen Christ, a creation so new even his disciples wouldn’t have recognized him – were it not for the marks on his body, witness to his own brokenness. Out of these pieces, a new creation.

The pattern of breaking and remaking is only another way of thinking about cross and resurrection, this time using the body of Christ as the mountain, the school, the broken pieces of our own losses.

Ah! The most terrifying words in scripture may be the words God springs on us at the end: “Behold, I make all things new!” Because the new creation always comes out of the shards of the old creation. Call it divine recycling, if you will, but this is God’s way of working in the world.

Here are some ground rules for moving through this divine construction zone:
First, make no mistake, navigating the new creation takes time – sometimes more than seven days. And you may be in Day One or Day Six, but there is evening and there is morning. Another day.

Second, remember that, just as God blessed each day of creation, God blesses broken pieces, so that they can come together into something new. Expect that blessing – look for it, if you like, but it will find you. Let your loss bless you.

Third, the new creation is just that: new. It’s not the old creation warmed over. I used to tell my friends that if anyone saw my Old Life wandering around, they should remind it where I lived. But I knew the Old Life wasn’t coming back again. Resurrection is never resuscitation; it’s something new entirely.

Finally, just for the journey ahead, take a mental snapshot of this image of the creation of Adam that Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. This time notice two things: that God’s finger is not quite touching Adam’s – but it’s close. And notice, of course, the crack. There’s always breakage.

Go forth with good courage.

(Taken from a talk in Foss Chapel, Augsburg College, Minneapolis MN on February 10, 2011)

Nicaragua: On pilgrimage without walking

2011-01-27T02:12:00.000-08:00

Last week I was in Nicaragua to visit Augsburg College's house of studies in Managua. As part of a semester-long immersion in Central America, students travel to Guatemala to spend four weeks learning Spanish, moving on to El Salvador for more formal course-work in Latin American culture, politics, and liberation theology, and finishing up with home-stays and more course-work in Nicaragua.

As part of its commitment to global education, Augsburg's president Paul Pribbenow took a team of board and cabinet members to Nicaragua to share in our students' experience. If global education is a College-wide commitment, then it's important not just for our students, but for people throughout every facet of our common work. It's the only way to crack institutional culture open to global realities.

The trip also resonated with a key commitment of our pilgrimage grant, which seeks to understand the symmetry between international immersion trips and the ancient practice of pilgrimage. Fellow-traveler and co-researcher Lisa Fullam and I found lots of similarities. Both experiences feature a kind of intentional dislocation. Pilgrims and immersants consciously step outside the familiar. Both experiences involve surrender to situations that can be neither foreseen nor controlled: a sudden rainstorm, a flat tire, an appointment that begins thirty minutes late, still "on time" according to Latin American standards, but messing with the tightly packed schedule we were given for the day. Finally, both experiences demand receptivity, not the relentless productivity most of us strive for in our various vocations. There's nothing you can do, except let the experience wash over you -- and keep telling the stories. Pilgrimage and immersion share a lot in common.

But I ran into one glaring dissimilarity my first afternoon in Managua, when I tried to leave the hotel for a walk around the neighborhood. The look of terror on the concierge's face gave me pause: she vigorously recommended against it. How was I going to be a pilgrim in a place where I couldn't even go outside for a walk?

Another member of our group elected to go with me. He'd grown up in Colombia and knew how to read the streets. We stripped off our jewelry, left our keys at the desk, and ventured out. The neighborhood seemed safe enough -- though we observed that most houses had "guardianos," armed guards at the entrances of homes and businesses, and that they sat inside, and not outside, locked gates. We found a busy street, seeking safety in traffic.

But when my friend sighted a gang of young boys a block away watching our approach, he balked: "We're heading back." When we arrived at the hotel, the concierge greeted us with evident relief. How to be a pilgrim without walking?

I remembered the trek along the Camino, where we made shrines for everything we had to leave behind. Apparently, I was going to have to leave even the walking behind. It seemed ironic, but necessary. I shifted all that physical energy into observation instead.

And in that week without walking, here's what I saw.

The gang of young boys on the street had probably come to the city from rural areas where their families had farmed. Trade agreements displaced these campesinos, along with weather patterns that brought to their fields now drought, now deluge. People streamed into the cities, where they contributed to a population that was, as we kept hearing, not so much "unemployed" as "underemployed." The government provided education for everyone through the sixth grade, but private schools offered the only option for further schooling. Private education cost more than the average urban peasant could afford. Money was as scarce as clean water, as looking out over the polluted waters of Lake Managua reminded us daily. Kids in cities were too young to work in factories, but old enough to get into drugs, find gangs, make babies. The street scene mirrored the harsh economic and educational realities of the country -- and so many other countries around the world.

Being on pilgrimage without walking taught me a truth more painful than the Camino's blisters. The only thing to do is tell the stories.

This is one of them.

Home and homeless....

2010-11-29T14:02:00.000-08:00

"The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect for whom the entire world is as a foreign land." -- Hugo of St. Victor, Didascalicon iii

This twelfth century monk knew what he was talking about. He'd come as a boy to Paris from Saxony. The French city did not feel like home to him. He disclosed to students who might have suffered from a similar homesickness: "From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and paneled halls."

Hugo of St. Victor was himself "someone for whom the entire world is as a foreign land." In short, he was a pilgrim, "peregrinus," and he leaned on an image from his Augustinian training. In his "Confessions," Augustine used "pilgrim" to describe the Christian's sojourn on this earth, a spiritual displacement. For Augustine had experienced a physical displacement similar to Hugo of St. Victor's when he left North Africa to continue his studies in Milan. There he encountered the cultural disdain people reserved for someone born in one of the Roman colonies in North Africa. Like Hugo of St. Victor, Augustine was spiritually and physically a "pilgrim."

For my part, I feel spiritually at home, maybe more so than in Berkeley. The dominant place of worship on Sundays is not the coffee shop, where Berkeley gathers its devotees of the Church of the Latte Day Saints. Here lots of people are in church on Sunday. And many of those who aren't, are at the mosque or synagogue on Friday. There's a spectrum of practicing believers, with a richness I'm just beginning to appreciate. It's not the dismissive divide between the "churched" and the "unchurched."

Such worship is not just habit: a deeper mystery sustains it. Something gets people through these fierce winters; something animates their evident civic spirit; something engenders ready discussion of a common good. So spiritually, this feels like home, and I can't share Hugo of St. Victor's spiritual displacement.

But physical displacement registers keenly. Though I love the skyscape and its palette of gunmetal blues, it's not home. The river is mighty, but it's not the grey Atlantic. And I fiercely miss friends and family in Delaware and the Bay Area, but I can't imagine them here.

Nor does being in any of these other places satisfy. I'm eager to get back, because I'm supposed to be here. More accurately, I'm called to be here. But home is not where your mail comes, nor is it where you have a job. Home is not even where you've found a calling. I'm honestly not sure "what" it is, possibly because I'm not even sure "where" it is -- at least not at the moment.

Is this the "perfection" Hugo of St. Victor was talking about? I won't aim for so lofty an ideal. But the image of the pilgrim is consoling....

Camino de Invernio: The Way of Winter -- or Thinking like a Squirrel

2010-11-19T03:48:00.000-08:00

The highest point on the Camino Frances ascends to O'Cebreiro, a tiny mountain hamlet of slate roofs and stone houses. Lisa and I sweat buckets climbing up to O'Cebreiro. Once there, however, we put on every article of clothing we owned. On that late September afternoon, an autumn chill crept into the air before the sun set, and we huddled around vats of steaming sausage just to keep warm. A street festival was in progress, and Galician folk music -- Celtic with strong hints of the Middle East -- filled the streets. The air smelled of snow, and I tried to imagine how medieval pilgrims made it up to O'Cebreiro in winter.

They didn't. Most of them took the Camino de Invernio, literally "The Way of Winter," a route that heads south from Ponferrada to cross the mountains that border Galicia, the region of northwestern Spain where Santiago de Compostela is located. Galicia reminded us a lot of Ireland, with thatch, sheep, stone fences, and houses huddled together against the chill.

I feel like I'm walking the Camino de Invernio right here in Minnesota, only it's not the highest point of the journey -- but the lowest. Everything leans into darkness. The sun can barely lift its head above the horizon, as if it too were weighted down by the cold. Fall's rich yellow glow has already given up, ceding to that thin watery winter light. Runners along the River Parkway have a grim set to their faces.

And I need extra time to stop for stop lights, extra distance between my car and the one ahead, extra minutes to layer on clothing before I go out and to take it off when I return. The "What-Ifs" rent too much space in my head: What if the temperature plummets before I have to walk home? What if it snows/sleets/rains? What if I get stuck?

And it's only mid-November!

I need to think more like the fat grey squirrels that have been scurrying around the bikepaths. They seem energized by the winter's work of gathering. I'm taking note.

Gathering is the work of the Camino de Invernio, and it can be a work of quiet joy. I'm reining my circles in. I'll return to the manuscript that can only be written against the backdrop of falling snow. I'll cook that recipe that seemed too complicated for summer's distractions. I'll stockpile candles to match the sparkling stars.

This is winter's way.

Pilgrimage and Prayer IV: Unburdening

2010-10-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

At the hostel in Roncesvalles, the first Spanish town after crossing the Pyrenees from France, pilgrims are asked to state their reasons for hiking the Camino. They are check the following boxes -- religious, spiritual, sport, historical, cultural --or fill in their own. An Italian journalist Giovanni we met along the way said he'd checked them all. He later told us he had bought only a one-way ticket to Spain. He didn't know when he'd be returning home -- nor whether he'd have a job when he got there.

We did our own informal survey. Chris and Gil, a retired couple from Santa Fe, said they were trying to figure out "Stage Three." A young man from Spain said he did part of the Camino every year for his "spiritual health." An Australian woman spoke laconically: "I needed to let go of some things." She didn't elaborate. We didn't ask -- but the response stuck with us.

What were we letting go of?

Physically, we let go of a lot of things. We simply brought too much stuff. Lisa had a hard-bound book, which she was reviewing for an academic journal. We finally cut off its binding. We left that behind. I had a pair of sox too many, a third t-shirt, a Spanish dictionary. We left them behind too. We tore pages out of books we were reading when we finished, and every day I'd choose a spot to leave the day's readings from a lectionary I'd brought along. All of this, we left behind.

We made tiny shrines of all our extra stuff, took a mental snapshot, and started walking. We never looked back.

Like pilgrimage, prayer invites a similar unburdening. To get to the place of prayer, one has to leave things behind possessions that have begun to possess us, but also cares and anxieties that clutter our spiritual space.

Luther wrote that on days when he was most busy, he had to spend at least three hours in prayer. Initially, this puzzled me: it seemed a lot of time precisely on days when he had so little to spare. The experience of the Camino made me see the truth. On his busiest days, it took Luther longer to clear the decks for prayer.

Prayer is letting go. The Christian tradition calls this "kenosis," literally, a pouring out.

Prayer tips the soul. Worries and anxieties drain out, so that we can be filled with the Spirit.

Maranatha!

Pilgrimage and Prayer III: Sabbath

2010-10-17T20:19:00.000-07:00

A third symmetry between pilgrimage and prayer is Sabbath. My friend Jan Ruud hinted at this: "You walk your own Camino." I thought this was just another Camino koan. We'd heard a lot of this stuff from Camino-heads in our acquaintance. Then mid-way through our first week, we hit the wall. We'd been following John Brierley's wonderful book, "A Pilgrim's Guide to the Camino de Santiago," which laid out the route in daily chunks: one day 21.1 km, the next 27.7 km, the next 24.8 km -- and by the fourth day, we were foot-weary, discouraged, and driven to reach Brierley's daily destination.

Then it struck me: we weren't walking our own Camino. We were walking John Brierley's. His pace was clearly too fast for us -- and he didn't leave any room to rest. We needed Sabbath.

That day we stopped 9km before Brierley recommended, found a B&B, showered, and enjoyed a long, leisurely lunch. We waved to pilgrims forging ahead. This was our sabbath; it didn't need to be theirs. From then on, we walked in sabbath-time.

When we got tired, we'd find a village, put our feet up at a cafe, and let the air blow through our blisters. Sabbath.

Or we'd plan a short day of walking by design and spend the rest of the afternoon doing laundry. Sabbath.

One day we took off entirely, shedding pilgrim habits to become tourists and poke around the intricate Knights Templar castle in Ponferrada. Sabbath.

We observed mini-sabbaths along the way, stopping for no less than 45 minutes to savor a cafe con leche each morning after a couple of hours of walking. By that time we needed an extended period of "horizontality," as Lisa put it.

Prayer creates its own sabbath. It's not a performance sport, as a lot of "how-to" self-help guides lead one to believe. Rather, prayer is a way of leaning into the Lord. Prayer invites the traveler on the inward journey to rest in God, or as Brother Lawrence, a 17th Century French lay brother put it, "practice the presence of God." This practice is more receptive than productive. Rest allows the soul to receive.

One way to shed the urge for production and performance is to simply let the words of Psalm 46:10, wash over you, until there is nothing left but silence.

"Be still and know that I am God."
"Be still and know that I am."
"Be still and know."
"Be still."
"Be."
"....."

The silence holds everything.

Pilgrimage and Prayer II: Displaced destinations

2010-10-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

As beautiful as the Cathedral of Santiago is, pilgrimage is not about getting there.

But isn't that the point?! In the beginning, I thought it was. And I was hustling down the trail, face set toward Santiago. Early on, though, I discovered that pilgrimage is less about reaching the destination than about the way itself -- and the people on it.

This simple truth hit me during the first days of our trek. Lisa and I were both carrying too much stuff, and we unburdened that extra pair of sox, the third t-shirt, etc. But we were also burdened by something that was harder to jettison: the idea of reaching our destination. It possessed us like a demon -- and we realized we had to let go of even that.

One morning we couldn't find a pace that would allow us to walk together. I kept bounding ahead; Lisa kept lagging behind. We were yelling at each other like a married couple carrying on a conversation from room to room. Finally, she sat down in exasperation and evident pain, saying: "If you want to go on ahead, go. I'll meet you in Santiago. I simply can't keep up with you, and I'm getting angry trying."

In that moment, I realized that the point of pilgrimage wasn't about getting there, it was about being a good companion to my friend and colleague on the way. I jettisoned my heaviest and most burdensome possession: my desire to reach our destination. And together we found a pace that worked, a conversation that eased the pain, and a rhythm that carried us to Santiago -- the destination we'd abandoned.

Quite simply, we encouraged one another, just like Paul counseled his communities at Thessaloniki (1 Thess. 5:11). I'd never understand his advice until that moment.

And others encouraged us. A Danish psychologist and his friend, a Swedish jazz dancer, taught us how to "sew" our feet, keeping our blisters drained and dry. In turn, we encouraged a young Korean woman, who was walking a long, hot stretch of the trail without water or food. We shared our provisions with her and accompanied her to the town of Viansa. I saw her later in the town, rested, hydrated, radiant. She looked transformed.

I thought we'd have deep theological discussion along the trail. Back in Berkeley, we had talked about "walking the questions" of John's gospel -- and there are some great ones: "What is truth? "What do you seek?" "Who are you?" But in fact our "theology" was much more embodied, our conversations much more prosaic. We spent a lot of time simply making up a shaggy dog story around one of the hospitalero we encountered along the trail. The miles eased away. But wasn't that Geoffrey Chaucer's insight in his "Caunterbury Tales?" It's not a book about Caunterbury, the supposed destination; it's all about the tales pilgrims tell each other en route -- to encourage each other.

That was our prayer along the way. Quite literally, we were meeting Christ in these other pilgrims. And they were meeting Christ in us -- in spite of ourselves.

Prayer is a lot like pilgrimage in that regard. Christians think it's all about union with God, and they keep trying to find the right formula. The disciples were always pestering Jesus to tell them his secrets: "Teach us how to pray...." His response was the Lord's Prayer, which gives God praise -- then, asks for bread, protection, and forgiveness. These are all highly concrete and highly corporate practices, because we share bread, we look out for one another, and we need pardon because we're hard-wired to get on each other's nerves. Just like Lisa and me.

Prayer also gets crowded pretty quickly. The needs of the neighbor rush in, and suddenly a solitary practice becomes peopled. We think prayer is about union with God, but discover instead it's about communion with the neighbor, who bears Christ to us, even as we bear Christ to them.

It was great to reach Santiago. But it was even better to have the journey bring me closer to my traveling companions -- and allow us to finish the journey on speaking terms.

Pilgrimage and Prayer I: Intentional Dislocation

2010-10-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

The professorship I now hold is named after Bernhard M. Christensen, president of Augsburg College from 1938 until 1962. He authored a book entitled "The Inward Pilgrimage" (1976), in which he likens Christian discipleship to pilgrimage. It's not an original insight: Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) spoke of Christians as pilgrims, in Latin "peregrini," a much more modest designation than the "athletes for Christ" the church of the martyrs had used.

In his book, Christensen does not give his readers directions for the journey of the discipleship, because every disciple begins from a different place. Nor does he give his readers a map for the landscape of discipleship, because every disciple traverses different terrain. Instead, he gives disciples traveling companions, people who've made their own journey -- and left their travel diaries behind. He trusts that, if you've in good company, you'll get where you need to go.

And what company this is! There's Augustine of Hippo, who probably looked like many of the North African peoples who populate the area around Augsburg College today. There are the Desert Fathers and Mothers from the Egyptian desert of the fourth and fifth centuries. There's Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, John Bunyan, Thomas a Kempis, alongside Martin Luther, Soren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It's a motley crew, probably a lot like the disciples who traveled with Jesus in the first century.

Finally, pilgrimage is pointed -- not toward some destination -- but to prayer, union with God and communion with the neighbor.

The symmetry between Christensen's interest in pilgrimage and my own -- grace, not mere coincidence! He prompts me to think of the parallels between pilgrimage and prayer that I would make.

The first is that both involve a kind of intentional dislocation. Pilgrimage and prayer both step out of the ordinary, leaving the familiar behind. On the Camino, Lisa and I met a couple who were entering a new phase of their life and marriage. They'd met, married, and had kids: Stage One. They'd raised their kids and had careers: Stage Two. Now newly retired and empty nesters, they were beginning what they called Stage Three. They wrenched themselves from jobs and children and familiar settings to go on pilgrimage. Walking the Camino would help them figure out what Stage Three was all about.

"And what has the Camino taught you so far?" I asked them as we approached Burgos. The woman, Chris, has a ready answer: "I don't know what it's going to be like, but I do know it will involve service." The intentional dislocation of pilgrimage had opened a new path.

So it is with prayer, which involves a similar kind of dislocation. Sometimes that dislocation is bodily or somatic. The gestures of prayer wrench the body from its familiar poses, calling for bowed head, folded hands, closed eyes, even breathing. I remember watching eight Jesuit priests enter the diaconate by prostrating themselves on the cold stone floor of a cathedral in downtown Oakland, as we sang above them.

Sometimes the dislocation of prayer is spatial, and we make places for prayer: chapels, shrines, and quiet spaces. Sometimes these spaces are designated by others; sometimes we make them up ourselves. A student said that driving to work each morning across the Arizona desert, she imagined Jesus next to her in the passenger seat. It was a great space for conversation. Another woman had a "prayer chair," a special chair she set aside for prayer. Whenever she sat in it, that's what she did.

At other times, the dislocation is temporal. Benediction monks practiced a rhythm of work and prayer, in Latin "ore et labore," during the day, gathering six times in the course of the day for prayer. Their lives became infused by the psalms that structured these offices -- not a bad way to live, when you consider the emotional range of the psalms!

A busy Silicon Valley executive realized that he was praying before difficult meetings by taking the long route around from office to board room. The path led him to a window overlooking the campus, where he could take in the beauty of the well-groomed campus grounds before heading into his meeting. It was the dislocation from the ordinary that he needed to gather himself. It was a tiny pilgrimage, but it was prayer.

So how do disengage from the familiar to pray? How do you dislocate -- to re-engage again with renewed spirit?

Directions, maps, and compass: Navigating on the road -- and off

2010-09-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

When I set off on the Great Road Trip East, I started in Oakland, California and pointed the car in the direction of Minneapolis. I figured if I covered two states, one set of mountain ranges, and one time zone each day, I'd make the trip in three days.

That is, if I didn't get lost.

I downloaded directions, which gave me point-to-point instructions, right down to which way to turn out of my driveway. Basically, my directions were simple and idiot-proof: Take interstate 80 east and turn left at Des Moines. That was good for about 1800 miles.

I also brought along maps, because maps pointed out small towns, larger towns, and the spaces in between. Maps told me when I crossed the Rockies and where the Wasatch Range lay. Maps pointed out the North Platte River, which so many pioneers followed west -- and I now followed east. Most helpful, at least on the Great Road Trip, maps revealed rest stops, gas stations, and the Golden Arches of McDonald's, where I could caffeinate for the road ahead. This was good information to have.

I also brought along a compass, just in case. The compass lived on the dashboard, and it always pointed to "true north." For some reason, that gave me great comfort. One foggy morning in Nebraska, I couldn't tell whether the sun was rising or where. I pulled into a rest stop to consult the compass, just to make sure I was still going east. When directions fail, when maps lose their bearing, a compass can orient you in deep fog. That deep fog can be physical or spiritual; it can be personal or institutional. Compasses are kind of good to have around.

This is kind of a trinity of travel paraphernalia: each one does something the others do not.

Directions are linear, moving from point-to-point. They are enormously helpful, if you know precisely where you're coming from --and precisely where you're headed. Directions are sequential, like cookbooks, giving a step-by-step plan of action. First, peel; then, puree -- not the other way around! Finally, directions are bossy: they tell you what to do. And after all the decisions that went into packing up my old place and setting up my new one, my executive capacity had snapped like a worn-out rubber band. I needed someone else directing traffic.

Maps are planar and spatial, surveying a particular terrain. They display relationships; they tell you what's alongside. Here is this range of mountain; there is that river; twenty miles ahead you'll find a rest stop. Finally, maps are simply descriptive. They display the quadrants of the known world, laying them out for you to figure it all out. While directions say: "Do this!" a map, in contrast, says: "Here it is."

A compass offers basic orientation. Nothing more -- and certainly nothing less. A compass provides the most comprehensive -- but least specific! -- kind of guidance. They are useful when the destination is not known. Or not clear. Or has not yet been manifest.

Now I've arrived: I'm here. And I did not get lost.

I've thrown away my directions, because I'll never be making the journey from that place to this one ever again. I've put away my maps, because I'm not on the road.

The compass, however, I keep in my pocket, for it provides sturdy and unflinching direction for days whose destination is unknown or unclear or not yet manifest. If only the endpoint of each day would arrive in a little envelope outside my door like the morning paper.... But to navigate the days off road, a compass gives the best guidance.

Off-road travel is really different from being on a great road trip. I find myself listening for direction. Sometimes that comes from friends and trusted confidants, both in what they say and what they leave unsaid. At other times, that compass comes from some internal gyroscope that spins away, pointing me in both right and wrong directions.

Mostly, I just try to pay attention, hoping Isaiah got it right:

"And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction,
yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore,
but your eyes shall see your Teacher,

And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying:
'This is the way, walk in it,'
when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left."
(Isaiah 30:20-21)

This is the journey of ordinary time.

Pilgrims, seekers, and other lost souls....

2010-09-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

Pilgrimage is a practice tailor-made for seekers. Even Augustine knew this, for Augustine is the quintessential, pre-modern seeker. His autobiography, "The Confessions," is one of the first memoirs, and he chronicles how he looked for love in all the wrong places: philosophy, Gnosticism, music, women. Dissatisfaction mounted -- until Love found him.

But his lost-and-found story made its dent on his soul, and Augustine projected it outward, calling people pilgrims, "peregrini." In this, he only echoes the sentiments of the author of the epistle to the Hebrews, who tells the earliest Christians they are destined to be "strangers and pilgrims on the earth" (11:13).

The book "Eat Pray Love" gets catalogued as a "memoir," but it's really the travel diary of a seeker. Fresh out of a bad marriage, Elizabeth Gilbert sets out for a destination she cannot quite identify, knowing only the places she will pass through along the way: Italy, India, and Bali. She learns to eat in Italy, pray in India, and love in Bali, things she did not actually set out to accomplish, but finds in retrospect.

Indeed, she owes her plot line to Augustine: looking for love in all the wrong places -- only to be found by love in the end. It's not capital "L" Love, but it'll at least get her through another couple of memoirs, one of which is already out "Committed."

Gilbert's is a decidedly post-modern pilgrimage: no capital letters at all, no meta-narratives. Like most things post-modern, it struck me as pretty self-absorbed, even a bit precious. After all, who has the resources -- time and money! -- to travel for a year after a loss like hers. Most of us simply have to hunker down and pay the bills.

Still, as we kept reminding ourselves, Lisa and I could not have trekked across the top of Spain without the generous support of a research grant. Take all of our whining about blisters with a grain of salt. We earned them in achingly beautiful terrain; we eased the pain with liberal doses of Ibuprofen and Rioja.

This made me look more sympathetically at Gilbert's plight. And I was intrigued to find an earlier collection of her short stories entitled "Pilgrims." How would this post-modern seeker develop her theme?

The stories handle people who could hardly be called privileged, and their author treats them with respect, even awe. A scrappy Hungarian immigrant worries that his daughter is too clumsy to achieve any acclaim being the magician she longs to be. Yet, as the story closes, she has literally produced a rabbit out of thin air, redeeming her father's longing and her own aspirations. In "Alice from the East," a widowed rancher offers to help a pair of teenagers whose car has broken down on the prairie. The terrain breathes solitude, and one of the teenagers recognizes her own loneliness in the rancher's -- and treats him as kin. A simple kindness in "The Many Things That Denny Brown Did Not Know (Age Fifteen)" runs like water in a desert -- and the desert blossoms. Such epiphanies abound in Gilbert's stories, as an ordinary gesture sparks a shock of grace. Hard-scrabble as these characters are, they have not forgotten compassion. Neither has Gilbert.

In a very real sense, pilgrims, seekers, Gilbert's characters, possibly Gilbert herself are all lost souls. Certainly pilgrims get lost regularly, trying to find the right path. But they're really lost when they realize: "it's not about getting there, stupid!" It's about the path itself -- and, more importantly, the people on it. Then, pilgrims understand they are on a different journey. To find this new path, they have to pay a different kind of attention.

Compassion is the kind of attention pilgrims need to pay, if they are to find their way forward on a journey that is suddenly not about "getting there." Compassion for themselves, compassion for their fellow-travelers. I think Gilbert gets that. Her stories demonstrate her compassion for these pilgrims and lost souls, her fellow-travelers. Her memoir records her own efforts to find a way to treat herself with compassion.

For pilgrims, seekers, and other lost souls, compassion acts as a compass.

Slowing down to the speed of Real....

2010-09-03T05:43:00.001-07:00

I'm waiting....

At the moment, I'm waiting for John the Painter to come finish painting. All the furniture has been huddled in the middle of each room, like some post-modern football game. I walk in and excuse myself for interrupting play.

I'm waiting for the semester to begin. There was orientation for new faculty this week, vastly disorienting because I'm decades older than the other new professors. But they didn't treat me like a mom -- and I didn't treat them like children. I can already tell I'm lucky to have such creative and energetic colleagues.

I'm waiting to finish writing an Advent commentary, which has been the work of the last few weeks. Advent is a season of waiting. As I reach for the right words, I realize how appropriate the posture is to the liturgical season. Which hasn't made the waiting any less frustrating, but given it slightly more gravitas.

I'm waiting......

In contrast, I see that the earlier weeks since my arrival in mid-July have been a rush of activity. People comment on how much I've gotten done -- and it's true. But high productivity is like a drug to me: it's not called "workaholism" for nothing! James Joyce put the addiction more elegantly in "Dubliners:" "Rapid motion through space elates one." I've been elated, giddy almost, with all this rapid motion, all this activity, all these people, all these meetings.

And now that so much has been accomplished, there's nothing left to do but wait for things to begin. All the trappings for it -- paint and permits, bank accounts and dry cleaners, furniture and pictures -- have been graciously settled. There's nothing left to do but live into it all. Real spaces in real time.

I remember that at the beginning of our trek to Santiago de Compostela, Lisa and I were appropriately elated. We set out strong and vigorous, striding up hills and sluicing down scree. We kept that up for a couple of days. Then The Blisters arrived. We tended them every morning; we stopped earlier in the afternoon to simply sit and let the air blow through our toes. We waited for our feet to heal -- at least enough for the next day's walk. Blisters were real -- and our pace slowed to reflect that.

I'm happy not to have The Blisters to deal with this time, but something analogous is happening. I'm slowing down to the speed of Real: real life, real time, real spaces. Elation is finally pretty evanescent: it comes and goes. Beneath it, though, is a steady pulse of joy.

The painter has come -- I'm off.

The Grace of Surrender...Or Why "Eat Pray Love" is not a Chick Flick

2010-08-22T06:05:00.000-07:00

So is it a chick flick? I suppose if you look at Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir-turned-movie from Hollywood's perspective, the answer is yes. The movie version combines gorgeous scenery with a happy ending: divorced woman finds great food in Italy, a soul in India, and love in Bali.

But from a pilgrim's angle of vision, there's a broader message: receiving the hard grace of surrender. A self-acknowledged control freak, Liz easily lets her guard down around food. She even teaches her girth-conscious Swedish friend Sofie to delight in the fabled Italian cooking.

Liz is less able to surrender to prayer, and she struggles with the Geet, the hours- long prayer that ends the night and begins the day in her Indian ashram. Yet, as she gives up control over her schedule, her sleep, and her thoughts, she finds that she can live inside that prayer -- and it's a surprisingly crowded place.

Liz is least able to surrender to love. Yet, eventually she untethers her heart to fall in love with Felipe in Bali.

While its plot moves the movie into the genre of romantic comedy, or "rom-com," the
lesson is one we can all take to heart, at every age and any gender. The journey from control to surrender is itself a pilgrimage, one from isolation into greater community.

I've been musing on the connections between pilgrimage and surrender for some time. In part, I was prompted by Lisa's observation last September somewhere in mid-Camino: "Pilgrims are really pretty useless, aren't we...." She was right: we weren't producing anything, and we were receiving a lot. For two highly productive people, that was a real switch.

And in part, I'm spinning out work on a chapter Sonny Manuel and I wrote for Tom Plante's book "Contemplative Practices in Action" (Greenwood, 2010). We highlighted dimensions of suffering: denial, isolation, and the need for control; we probed remedial practices: lamentation, intercession, and pilgrimage, respectively. As we worked, we discovered that each of these practices not only solaces the one suffering, it invariably creates solidarity with others. For example, pilgrimage addresses the need for control by placing people on a journey where they move forward only by surrendering everything they do not need. Pilgrims depend on the kindness of strangers and the camaraderie of their fellow travelers. As they move forward, reaching the destination recedes behind the joy of being with one's fellow-travelers. Each of these practices reaches out: they have an outer impulse.

It's an important parallel to the movie: eating, praying, loving all have an outer impulse. They are highly social activities, in themselves and especially as they are depicted in the movie.

And to reach out, one has to let go -- or surrender. What gets left behind? Excess baggaage, spiritual and physical; possessions that have begun to possess us; scripts that we labored over -- and expected to live out.

Joy is the grace of surrender, giving us a script beyond our wildest imaginings.

And joy is the pleasure of communion: it's always social. What's finally significant about the movie is that each of Eating, praying, loving: all of these are finally about joy.

Back home again

2010-08-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

Rapid transitions in my life have kept me from this blog--indeed, away from very much of what could be called contemplation at all. Blogging, at least on a blog like this, involves small snapshots of contemplation.

In the hectic meantime, among my other endeavors was that I became again, for a time, a tourist. I wandered various towns in Italy, marveling again at how isolated tourists are, while pilgrims form connections based in common need. Tourists eschew need for a more powerful stance of unneedful freedom. Of course it is an illusion, one based on the tourist's emphasis of difference rather than commonality in the endeavor. Tourists don't go to new places to see what we've always seen, but rather to see what's new--we lead with our differences. Pilgrims lead with, or, if the pilgrimage attains its end, come to appreciate, commonality instead. Commonalty is a step away from community, but commonality can make the pilgrim a better member of his or her community upon return. Pilgrims return different, but more deeply cognizant of the mutual need that is the basis of true community. Tourism is toxic if that sense of difference and unneedful freedom take root deeply. At its extreme lies elitism and entitlement. The opposite vice is parochialism and a different elitism.

I found this lion somewhere in Rome, and was struck by its insouciance. The sculptor caught something of feline poise--cats relax better than anybody, and I'm convinced it's because they also are good at total coiled-spring muscular concentration and its release in the attack.

Pilgrims, perhaps, become good at being on the road--which should make us better at staying put. The skills of pilgrimage we've talked about here are also valuable askeses for life generally. Carry what sets you free. Know that your companions are essential, not accidental. Find grace in tiredness as well as in the strength you develop, since, as the Franciscans say, all is gift. Cherish small things like a good sandwich or cool water. Pilgrimage is, ultimately, about being able to rest well as much as it is about being able to be free on the road.

There's a catch. Pilgrims--at least this pilgrim--can never be completely content staying put. Nor completely content on the road all the time. Like the lion good at relaxing because good at hunting, a pilgrim is a creature who might knows that freedom is practiced both on the road and in the staying put, each feeds the other, and each is a necessity for freedom that's not merely the illusory unneedfulness of the tourist.

Walking the City of Angels

2010-08-14T04:37:00.000-07:00

I was in Los Angeles this week, in between conferences. The Lutheran teaching theologians had just gathered up in Thousand Oaks, a place first noticed by airline pilots heading into the Los Angeles airports as a valley with no smog. That's distinctive in the LA area.

The pilots moved in on orchards and chicken coops to build retirement homes and McMansions. My tribe met at California Lutheran University, the new game in a town dedicated to golf, assisted living, and the few remaining chickens.

At the end of the week, I'd be part of a panel at the American Psychological Association (APA) in San Diego presenting a chapter I co-authored with colleague Sonny Manuel in a book on contemplative practices.

In between conferences, though, I had a "dead day" in Los Angeles, literally, "The City of Angels." For convenience, I was ensconced in one of the many hotels ringing the international airport there, LAX: Airport Siberia. What to do?

I thought of museums, and The City of Angels has an impressive collection, from the Getty to LACMA, the wonderful Los Angeles County Museum. But public transportation is not great and the exhibits didn't compel.

Sleep recommended itself, and I remembered that only two months before I'd been in Paris at the end of another pilgrimage, this time the ancient route from Toulouse into Santiago de Compostela, which we followed to Pamplona. Then only a month ago, I'd been about to embark on the Great Road Trip that took me to Minnesota. The trip had been luminous and long, clearly a pilgrimage that would lead to a new city, a new job, and another chapter in calling.

As I considered these precedents, I realized I wasn't simply looking for something to do, but weighing how to mark this time. How could I take account of the journeys that had brought me here? What would be fitting?

Framing the question in terms of pilgrimage, it didn't take long to come up with an answer: I'd figure out how to get to the ocean. I need an ocean of reference anyway, and a month in land-locked Minnesota -- even though the terrain was once the bottom of a great inland sea -- left me starved for salt air. The runways at LAX head due west, and planes take off out over the ocean, using the prevailing westerlies for lift.

Finding the Pacific shouldn't be hard: just follow the runways.

And so I did, walking down long, unbroken, tree-lined boulevards. As I walked, I watched the planes land, pulling up slightly and precisely just as their rear wheels touch the ground. They landed on the ground just like great birds on a branch, making the transition from air-borne to earth-bound seamless. Watching I gave thanks for the transitions I'd made over the last two months, if not seamless, at least smooth. As I played back all that had happened, I crested a hill -- and the blue Pacific spread out at my feet.

I could taste the salt, watch the surf, and get my feet wet. That's what I needed: the line of a vast horizon, invariant behind the waves' crashing. In times of transition, you need a few things that don't change.

I took a mental snapshot -- and headed home.

Getting Oriented....

2010-08-05T06:05:00.001-07:00

Since I got to Minneapolis almost a month ago, I have spent hours walking the city, trying to figure out how the city "works." Nothing more, nothing less.

I know a few neighborhoods -- Longfellow, Cedar-Riverside, Milltown, Northeast -- and know there are many, many more. I find a pool and learn the best times to swim and the quickest routes to get there and back, factoring in traffic and time of day. I discover where to shop, bank, dry-clean, and get coffee. I memorize the grid of "avenues" running north-south and "streets" running east-west -- at least mostly.

What has puzzled me, though, is Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown, because Uptown doesn't seem "up" at all, but "down," specifically, south of the downtown area. I was stumped.

Then, a conversation with DeAne Lagerquist, Americanist and lover of the Twin Cities, made everything clear: "It's all about the River," she said matter-of-factly. "Everything is oriented around the River."

The River -- the great Mississippi, which bends through the Twin Cities on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Suddenly everything falls into place.

The Twin Cities developed along the River, and Minneapolis was the mill town, with the mill races and wheels. Pillsbury and Gold Medal lined the River; their signs are still here, though the granaries have long been converted to museums and lofts. Downtown was the area around the River; Midtown, a bit further afield; and Uptown, an ex-urbia, far enough away to be residential, but still close enough in to get to work.

With the River to orient me, everything suddenly made sense. It really is all about the River.

So I begin paying attention to the River: the Great Blue Heron that fishes its shallows, the loon's cry in earliest morning, the locks and how they work, the short blast of a horn that signals it's safe for boats to motor out again, where the river has structure and shoals, and the fish that hide there.

Attending to the River, I notice other things. It captures light in the evenings, lighting up the city long after the sun has set. Power lines arc along its banks, and their towers are not horizontal, but curved. This seemed to me an odd design until I realized the curves allow ice and snow to slide off, where horizontal structures would eventually only break under the weight. The arches of these powerlines are painted whiter than the vertical columns that support them. Against a gunmetal blue sky, they are luminous, like giant seabirds winging their way to the Pacific.

Attending to the River, I'm settling in. I could dwell here.

Dwelling demands a different kind of attention than pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is about destination. Even though the way becomes as compelling as the arrival, pilgrimage requires a kind of focus. I wanted to get to our destination each day; I wanted to reach the top of that hill before stopping. I wanted to log at least two hours of walking before we found a cafe con leche.

Dwelling demands I take a broader view, a more unfocused kind of focus. I pay attention, but I try to take it all in -- even what I'm not expecting to see or hear, smell or taste. Now that I've found my bearings -- or my bearing, the River --I scan broadly, taking in as many things as I can in a glance.

It's like looking for dolphins. I love to watch for them when I'm back in Delaware. There, it's all about -- the grey Atlantic. Occasionally, a fin breaks the surface, and all I know is that the next sighting will be anywhere but where I saw the first.

I learn to look with a broad view, taking in as much surface water as possible, waiting for the next epiphany. Good practice for dwelling in a place.

I'm surprised at what I'm seeing. Mary Oliver was right:

"Everything in the world
comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially."
("Where Does the Temple Begin? Where Does It End?")

Freeways and Footpaths: Different Forms of Pilgrimage

2010-07-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

A week ago Sunday I qualified as a Freeway Warrior, having driven some 1900 miles from Oakland, California to Minneapolis in about three days. Aside from the brief detour through the University of Utah campus in search of a Marriott there, all of it was on this country's great interstates.

I basically took 80 East to Des Moines -- and turned left onto 35 North. The only traffic I encountered was on the Iowa/Minnesota border, then again outside of Northfield, Minnesota, home of two colleges, five railroad tracks, and a grain elevator. I went to one of the colleges in Northfield, Carleton, and I suspect this traffic jam was staged to make me slow down and pay attention to the place that has been so formative. Finally, there was traffic getting into Minneapolis itself, but as we crested the last rise and gazed on the skyline of the city, I found myself suddenly in tears.

Many of the pilgrims coming into Santiago tear up when they cross under the portal of the old walled city, graduating to full weeping when they see the lantern of the great Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella. I was not one of them -- which was good: someone clear-eyed needs to lead the way forward. Hopefully, someone who is not crying like a baby.

But here's the question: how is pilgrimage like or not like a road trip?

First, you have more space in the trunk of a car than you do in a backpack. That's a huge relief. I find myself camped out in my loft waiting for furniture to arrive. But aside from space, the discipline of packing is the same: I needed to anticipate everything I would need and weed out everything I could make do without.

Even so, I left a tiny altar in Salt Lake City of "stuff" I'd packed that I could clearly see I would not need for the road or for the camp-out. I arranged it ritually, left it on the floor, took a mental snapshot -- and never looked back.

By the end of the first day, I was confident that I had everything I needed for the journey. Just as on pilgrimage, I knew after a few days what could be left behind and what needed to remain. And that feeling that I had everything that I would need gave me great hope.

Second, freeways are like footpaths, even if the pace is faster. I basically did about 80 mph on 80 East: 80 on the 80. I figured that if I did two states, one set of mountains, and a time zone each day, I'd probably get there in three days. The first day, I passed through California and Nevada, crossed the Sierras, and entered into Mountain Daylight Time. The second day I passed through Utah and Nebraska, crossed the Rockies, and entered into Central Daylight Time. It got me to Minneapolis on the third day -- but I confess I was looking hard for a set of mountains in Iowa and southern Minnesota.

The countryside is vast and stunning: a car is the way to see the West. The Nevada deserts, the Utah salt flats, the Wasatch Mountains (which you do not cross, as they run east-west -- the only range in the country that does so!), the horses in Wyoming, the Black Angus cows in Nebraska, the pigs in Iowa: I saw it all, under clouds as spectacular as the terrain. Yes, there was "weather," particularly as I left Nevada. But the high desert stretches out so far that I could see blue sky beyond the hail. And like pilgrimage, I ached for that view over the next rise.

As on pilgrimage, I attended to landscape and skyscape and weather in ways that I do not usually.

Third, as on pilgrimage, I attended to my body in ways that I do not usually. I was somewhat anxious about driving by myself. I knew I was tired, and I suspected that cumulative exhaustion coupled with the ache of saying goodbye would hit as soon as I started driving. Yes, I wept my way out of California, but crying keeps you awake. I quickly learned how much coffee I could drink to stay awake without stopping at every next rest stop! And when I felt tired, it was time to eat. Food sends that extra jolt of sugar and adrenaline into the system when you need it. I gave myself peanut butter crackers like communion wafers: they kept me alert.

Finally, I depended on traveling companions to keep me attentive. Just as on pilgrimage, I depended on the people I was with, so on the road, I came to know the people I was traveling with. I'd lead for a while, then drop back and let the car behind me forge ahead. We all quickly knew the "jerks" on the road: speeders and lane-changers, non-signalers, slow drivers, and just plain road cretins. I just passed them. Truck drivers became my friends: they always signaled, they always slowed down on a hill or a hailstorm; unfailingly, they watched. I watched them, and I watched with them. And when I drove off at a rest stop, I silently blessed my pod of fellow travelers, offering a prayer that we'd make it safely to wherever we were going.

Then, there were my companions in the car: Lou Harrison's lyrical compositions for chorus, violin, and gamelan, "La Koro Sutro," which became the way I started each day's drive; author, poet, and Catholic writer John O'Donohue reading his lyrical book "beauty," which became my morning meditation; brilliant post-modern author David Foster Wallace's book "The Broom of the System," which may represent what O'Donohue charges as the "ugliness" of contemporary writing. But which I found enthralling -- and, at 17 cds, inexhaustible. These traveling companions got me through the hours and the innumerable miles.

It's different than hiking with a buddy, and I dearly missed Lisa, my companion on Kili and the Camino, as well as John, Jan, Sonja, and Dave from the Chemin d'Arles earlier this summer.

Finally, distance: it's important to notice. "There" is not "here," and it was important for me to notice the difference. Friends urged me to have the car towed along with my furniture, but I needed to mark the miles.

So, I'm "here," via freeways, not footpaths.

The right path for this pilgrimage.

Here... and There

2010-07-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland: "There is no there there." She wasn't stuttering; she had simply failed to find a heart in the city, a center that held it together. Although I like to agree with Stein in most things, I think on this matter she was dead wrong.

In protest, Oaklanders fashioned a flag: a white outline of the Oakland Tribune tower on a green background with the word "There." at the bottom.

There is a heart in Oakland. It may be different for different folks, but it's there: Lake Merritt, Jack London Square, the Farmers' Market every Friday morning, the Coliseum, Raider Nation, Eastmount Mall. For me the "there" of Oakland was walking around Lake Merritt in earliest morning, as the sun was rising and the citizens were out taking their exercise. Asian couples walking vigorously together; black teens in training; white women walking and talking like pigeons; the ever-present Canadian geese who came through on the flyway -- and stayed. Every time I walked the Lake I could feel the city alive and waking.

There's a "there there," but you won't find it from a distance. You have to be there. More accurately, you have to be here -- not there -- to find it. The heart of a city never opens to those who consider it from a distance. The heart of a city opens only to those who walk its streets, gather with its people to celebrate a holiday, mourn a verdict, protest a policy. When you are here, there's a "there there."

And now I am here: Minneapolis. "Here." I wrote the word on my calendar the day I arrived. I hadn't known when that would be. One morning I drove out of Oakland on Interstate 80 and started driving east. I knew I'd turn left at Des Moines, but I didn't know how long it would take to get there. Or here. But the road beckoned; the weather cooperated; and the landscape was enchanting. At the end of three days of hard, luminous driving, Oakland had became "there" and Minneapolis became "here."

People say of Minnesota or Minneapolis what Stein said of Oakland: "there's no there there." Particularly Californians can never fathom why anyone would leave California. These people have been telling me: "Do you know how cold it gets in the winter?" "Do you know how hot it gets in the summer?" "Do you know that the mosquito is the state bird?" Yes, I know all of these things. But I also know what one knows only when she is here: there's a "there" here.

Maybe it's the view of the city skyline from the bridge I run over every morning. Or all the people out up and down Nicollet Mall on a warm summer night. Or the Mississippi as it cascades over St. Anthony Falls. Or that feeling, when heat matches the humidity, that you are in something that's alive.

Here. I love it.

Unburdening: Backpacks -- and Houses

2010-06-25T11:39:00.000-07:00

At various points along the Camino this past September, Lisa and I would look at each other and say: "It's time to unburden." We'd slither out of our backpacks, stretch our spines, and sit down. We'd unlace boots, shed socks, and let the breezes blow through our blisters.

Pilgrimage is a process of unburdening. It begins before you even leave home: with packing. I remember the initial unburdening. On the bedroom floor, I laid out everything I thought I'd need. I regarded each item: How much do I need you? Enough to carry you across the top of Spain? It was an unburdening.

Then I loaded everything up into the backpack and shouldered it: Could I haul this for a day's hike? And for the next day? And the next? Another unburdening.

Even along the trail, I left tiny altars of suddenly superfluous stuff. What had seemed so essential back home on the bedroom floor, had now become dead weight. I shed them like a snake molts dead skin.

By the end of the pilgrimage, I knew what to carry -- and what not. I didn't need to carry food: there were cafes and tiendas along the way. I didn't need to carry water: there were fountains in abundance. By the end of the journey -- and only by the end, we knew exactly what we needed.

I wish it were as easy to unburden a house as a backpack. I'm selling mine and moving from California to Minnesota. I've been unburdening my house.

The process of moving requires a discernment similar to packing a backpack. For weeks I've been lining up things and asking similar questions: How much do I need you? Enough to carry you across the country? Then follows an unburdening.

A graphic Lisa used in an earlier post haunts me: someone carries a house on her back -- instead of a backpack. I know I can't take it all with me. And I don't want to. If I take all the baggage from the old lives, there won't be any room for a new one. So I've been unburdening: furniture and photos, memorabilia and that most precious possession to a writer, books! It's hard; it's exhausting; it's evokes a spectrum of emotion. And it's the necessary askesis of change.

I know that by the end of the trip -- and only then -- will I know what I need. I only have to set out with what it takes to get me going.

The photo above is probably a good visual mantra for the journey. One needs water to survive, but often you don't have to carry it. There are fountains in abundance.

And look how lightly I carry that pack.

Taking Notes -- and Taking Note: The Difference

2010-06-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

One day I counted up all the years I spent in school. I started with nursery school and kindergarten, ended with college and grad school, and added them all up. Total? Let's just say it's a lot: I couldn't count it on all my fingers and toes. I had to borrow someone else's.

Over that obscene number of years, I took a lot of notes. I outlined arguments of all the major texts on my comprehensive exams. I underlined and highlighted so much, that the original text became hard to decipher. Eventually, I bought second copies of some books, because I found the marginalia in my first copy either distracting -- or just plain wrong. Re-reading my notes decades later, I realize that they say more about me and my state of mind at the time -- than the text itself.

This does not make me proud. I have devoted so much time and energy taking notes, that I failed to simply take note.

Taking note is simply letting something speak to you, in its own voice and on its own terms. Taking note is simply paying attention. In my feverish effort to take notes, I failed to attend to what was right in front of me.

Of course, the visual analogue to taking notes is taking photos. As with all forms of travel, on pilgrimage you see lots of people taking photos -- and lots of them. Yes, it's an excuse to rest up and catch one's breath. But, I fear that photo-obsessed tourists and pilgrims see the entire journey through the lens of a camera -- if they are as obsessed about taking photos as I was about taking notes.

In which case, the camera rules, disciplining the landscape to its eye. Terrain ceases to transform; it becomes the object of the voracious photographic lens. A landscape poses -- and just for you, often with one of your best friends littering the view with a goofy smile. With a camera's lens, the photographer can crop and edit, enlarge or diminish, zoom in or out. A photographer composes a scene, rather than letting what's actually there take her breath away.

I'm not a fan of heavily documented trips.

And yet, I lugged a camera along both pilgrimages, trying to make myself use it for taking note, not taking notes. When I was not successful, viewing the image today merely baffles. When I was successful, though, the image triggers memories of a feeling, a smell, a story, a stretch of the road.

That's using image to take note, rather than using image to take notes.

Thanks to John Rosenberg, who found that bright line. When he read the post entitled "I'd rather be fishing....!" he sent me the image above of a French fisherman we met along the trail that followed the Aspe River. Our band of pilgrims included three avid fishermen -- John among them. When this man realized there was a first language of fishing among our ragged band, he produced his catch.

A brown trout, a luminous moment, and a great memory.

Really, wouldn't we all rather be taking note -- than taking notes.

Patricia Hampl captures the grace of attention, and even if she uses the plural form, "notes," she's talking about "taking note." I excerpt from her essay "Memory and Imagination" in THE DOLPHIN READER (1985):

"Our most ancient metaphor says life is a journey. Memoir is travel writing, then, notes taken along the way, telling how things looked and what thoughts occurred. But I cannot think of the memoirist as a tourist. This is the traveler who goes on foot, living the journey, taking on mountains, enduring deserts, marveling at the lush green places. Moving through it all faithfully, not so much a survivor with a harrowing tale to tell as a pilgrim, seeking, wondering."

The difference between a circle and a line: Returning to Pamplona

2010-06-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

This seems the question of a mathematician, not a pilgrim. But I find myself again in Pamplona, this time not at the beginning of a pilgrimage, but at its end. When Lisa and I did the Camino in September, Pamplona was our starting point, the easternmost part of our journey. From here we hiked west. This time Pamplona is our ending point, the westernmost part of this journey. From here we fly home.

I spent the afternoon circling the city, one of the best fortifications in the whole of medieval Europe. But this time, I know what the city holds, and I can navigate by the spires of the three churches that mark the medieval neighborhoods of the Franks, the Basques, and the Navarrans.

When I visited the churches in September, I asked the local saints, Frank, Basque, and Navarran to bless our journey. We were just setting out, and I had no idea what was ahead of us, how we´d find our way, or how we´d hold up.

This time I can only offer thanksgiving. It has been a wonderful trip.

In September, I walked outside of town to find the pilgrim´s trail through the city. We wanted to be sure the pilgrim route did not coincide with the route for the running of the bulls! But I also wanted to acclimate myself to noticing the signs marking the pilgrim route: yellow arrows and scallop shells. It would take a few days to get used to looking.

This time I walked the same route, helping a couple of pilgrims find their way into the town. Jason from Brooklyn was going to walk as far as he could in three weeks; Ulrich from Sweden was in for the long haul. They were decades apart in age, but bonded for the journey -- and by the journey.

Finally, in Pamplona I looked to the west for what lay ahead of us. Our window on the third floor looked west. During the night, when jet lag woke me, I stood at the window, trying to read the western sky. I had no idea what was behind Pamplona, what the road was like that brought people here.

This time I know what´s behind Pamplona. We walked into the Pyrenees, up and down rivers that drain the mountain snows. I can situate this city into the landscape -- and the pilgrim route.

Most in the party have done parts of the Camino before, ending each of their treks in Santiago. It´s odd not having a destination like Santiago before us. We´re walking a pilgrimage route, but we won´t reach the relics. And for goal-oriented folks like those in this group, that´s a bit like training for the 1500 m. freestyle, entering the race, swimming the first 1000 m. as hard and as fast as you can -- and then getting out of the pool.

But then finishing the race isn´t why we did this, not now. And not even in September. Each time, we walked for what walking would teach us.

Walking around Pamplona, I´ve been considering what walking taught me. Taking one step at a time adds up over time -- but you´ve got to take the first step. I´ve learned to look, in the sense of attending to things, people, my surroundings. And I´ve learned to embrace that spirit of what-the-hellness, that has allowed me to roll with whatever the day brings. Not insignificant lessons.

So that´s what Í´m thanking all the local saints, Frank, Basque, and Navarran, as I revisit these old Romanesque churches in Pamplona. It feels like completing a circle I hadn´t even known existed.

"I´d rather be fishing...!"

2010-06-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

I´ve fallen in with a group of fisherman masquerading as pilgrims. We walked into the mountains along the Aspe River. We walked out of them along the Aragon River. Whenever the route drops down along the river, we run into the local fishermen. And the pilgrims I´ve been traveling with suddenly turn into fishermen. Whatever language barriers exist evaporate. The art of fishing is a common tongue.

One local fisherman we encountered along the Aspe must have been sent there by the French Bureau of Tourism. With his straw fishing basket, beret, and waders, he looked ready for a postcard. We obliged -- and when we asked his permission, he pulled a small brown trout out of his bag. It wriggled into the picture as well.

Traveling fishing rivers with fishing men has been an unexpected pleasure of this trip. I´m learning to read rivers.

They are as eloquent as a good novel.

Fishermen look for transitions, places where there´s change. Sometimes rapids bleed into quieter pools; sometimes a lazy stretch of water suddenly cascades. These pilgrims turned fishermen delight in imagining where they might cast and what they might pull out. Transitions bode good fishing.

Fishermen also look for waterfalls, and there have been plenty of them. Rapids and waterfalls aerate the river, filling it with oxygen. They are also pretty good at oxygenating pilgrims, and every time we pass a waterfall, we hang out for a while just breathing in all those positive ions. Oxygen and ions are signs of a healthy river.

Finally, fishermen look for "structure," underwater architecture where fish can simply hang out. A stretch of river with a lot of structure means fish have good hiding places, where they can sequester themselves and wait for a bite to eat. Structure signals a fine place for casting.

Transition, aeration, structure: if you´re a fisherman, it´s a trifecta. These aren´t bad metaphors for pilgrimage either. Quite literally, pilgrims walk from one place to another. Though not exactly fishing for something, they have a destination in mind, whether Santiago or Mecca or Jerusalem. Some pilgrims are actually "fishing" for insight, in hopes that physical discipline will spark spiritual insight. Transition is key to pilgrimage.

So is aeration. Walking in the mountain air and taking in all the positive ions of waterfalls and rivers has literally cleared my head. Gone the fraught atmosphere of semester´s end, the haze of moving, the press of decisions. I´m full of good air and great energy.

Then there´s the structure, particularly the underground structure. Our feet register the road, whether mud or the springy forest of fallen leaves, or mountain scree. Over the weeks I simply trust my feet to find the way, and when I try to help them, I falter. Fellow pilgrim and ace fisherman Jon Rosenberg caught me hesitating over some slippery rocks in a shallow stream: "Don´t overthink this one, Mart. Just follow your feet." He was right.

There´s a deeper underground structure to pilgrimage as well. The first days are full of new impressions, gear adjustments, packing and repacking to find the right arrangement of stuff. After that, you can go on forever, and the rhythm of walking molds you.

Transition, aeration, and deep structure: not bad metaphors for life either.

Shifting Gears: From Pilgrim to Tourist....

2010-06-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

We followed the River Aragon all day to the medieval city of Jaca. In France, the Pyrenees were in front of us, beckoning. Now in Spain, they are behind us, bidding farewell.

I hate to say goodbye.

And I have to admit, crossing them was the part of the trip that most excited and terrified me. Mountains are a fierce landscape, gracious and unforgiving depending on the weather. We were lucky to cross these mountains in a fine drizzle rather than driving rain or dazzling sun.

As we push west to Pamplona, though, the mountains recede. I can barely see the snow-capped peaks over the walls of Jaca.

We have only another day of walking, from Jaca to Santa Cruz de la Seros, where we´ll spend two nights, making a day trip to the monastery of San Juan de la Pena. We´ll do that without the packs that have become like another appendage.

As much as I groaned picking up my pack every morning, I will hate to say goodbye to that too. Everything I needed was in that pack. I´ll feel naked without it.

Not surprisingly, I´m already fantasizing about the sundress I´ll buy to cover the nakedness.

I can shift from pilgrim to tourist so fast it scares me. The clothing fantasy that kept me going for the last days into Santiago this past September were a pair of Spanish jeans. I wanted something besides my trekking pants to wear.

This time I lust after a sundress -- and a pair of high-top sneakers. I must want to shed both the pants and the boots. I can´t vouch for the combination, but the fantasy is there.

So what´s the difference between pilgrim and tourist? I think it´s interesting that I long to "buy" something. Consumption marks tourism. You see it in the way people take pictures with cameras and iPhones, "bagging" another experience for their scrapbooks. Pilgrims, in contrast, are too busy walking.

You see it in the difference between tourist hotels and pilgrim hostels. Hotels are full of "stuff" to do and places to eat, each flyer vying with another to catch the eye. Pilgrim hostels are empty, tables bare and rooms waiting. The blank space work like empty canvasses, inviting impressions to emerge. Like animals along the trail, if long enough to become part of the landscape.

I see it in the difference between my tourist and pilgrim habits of mind. Believe me: I am a full-bore, world-class tourist, and I can "graze" a city like no one else, figuring out in record time what needs to be seen, when, and which route gets there most scenically. But as a pilgrim, I simply reach a city -- and sit. I can sit for hours watching.

It´s as if my pilgrim feet have taught my inner tourist to slow down. After all, the speed of consumption is far faster than the speed of simply looking.

Mary Oliver put it well:

"I look. Morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around,
As though with your arms open.

And thinking
Maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind
Or a few leaves from any old tree
They are all in this too.

And now I will tell you the truth:
Everything in the world comes.

At least closer.

And cordially." ("Where does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?")

I hate to leave this kind of looking behind.

The Road Less Traveled....

2010-05-31T07:35:00.000-07:00

...and the Chemin d´Arles is. Maybe it´s the time of year, maybe it´s distance from Santiago -- still some 800 kms away!, maybe it´s that Santiago himself simply is not the hero for the French that he is for the Spanish. But this chunk of the trail is definitely a road less traveled.

First, I noticed what´s not there. For a traveler whose first experience of the Camino was popular Camino Frances, I missed the ever-present, always open bistros along the way. In September Lisa and I came to take for granted that perfect cafe con leche about two hours into the day´s walk in a picturesque village right by the trail. Often people we´d met along the way were already there, lifting a steamy cup in greeting.

Here, that´s not been the case. Picturesque villages abound, but nothing is open.

I missed the other pilgrims, whose encouragement I needed more than I knew. A smile and a ¨Buen Camino" were worth about 400 mgs of Ibuprofen.

Here, we see few other pilgrims. Ten days into the walk, I could count the number of fellow travelers on both hands.

I missed the sense that we´re getting somewhere, and that "somewhere" is what this route is all about: Santiago de Compostela. And even if I wasn´t wedded to seeing the saint´s relics, Santiago represented a destination. We knew when we got there, we had accomplished something.

Here, that sense of having "arrived" is more elusive. We´ll get to Pamplona, where Lisa and I set out from in September. But Santiago will still be over 500 kms away.

So, yes: first, I first notice what´s not there, what´s absent. And then I notice what is there, what´s present.

Precisely because the trail is not so well-supported, we´ve had to think ahead and we discover a kind of self-reliance I hadn´t quite noticed in the first trek. We carry food -- and we share it. On a rough stretch as we climbed the Col de Somport, a high pass in the Pyrenees that would take us into Spain, we split a milk chocolate bar. It had been purchased long ago in some hotter, drier part of the trail, and it had melted and cooled into weird and wonderful shape. But it tasted glorious -- and gave us the push we needed to summit.

And then there was Barran, which we reached in the middle of a hot Saturday afternoon, in need of water. The only place open was Coiffure Bea, a hair stylist, and Bea herself served us instant coffee -- with sugar! -- and filled our water bottles. We sat on the street and toasted her -- Santiago in drag and with hennaed hair.

Precisely because there are so few other pilgrims around, we have gotten to know our hospitallers and innkeepers better. We talk a lot about hospitality, where we find it -- and where we don´t. We know what counts as good hospitality, how important it is, and how it manifests in the first minutes of an encounter. We resolve to practice it better when we come home. We remember fondly Nicolas, the initially reticent innkeeper in L´Urbe St. Christau, who kept telling us ¨"I am not a restaurant I am not a restaurant," but proceeded to ply us with beers and fine wines throughout the afternoon. That night Nicolas turned out a first-class meal, before we discovered he was a highly regarded pastry chef and spent winters rolling around the countryside teaching people his craft.

Finally, in absence of a destination like Santiago, we follow markers along the way. We walked up the Aspe River into the French Pyrenees; we descend into Spain along the Aragon River. Rapids and waterfalls release a lot of positive ions into the air -- and we´ve been drinking them all in. I watch the mountains, as they advance and recede. Their brooding presence blesses this journey.

I noticed first the absences -- of support services, of other pilgrims, of destination, but it was into that very vacuum that something else spilled, luminous, perhaps even more mysterious.

Getting Ready to Go Again: The Camino, Part II

2010-05-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

There are two seasons for a pilgrim: walking -- and dreaming about it. I'm in the dreaming phase, which may be as delicious as actually walking. A colleague confessed to envy. If he were the one leaving, I'd be envious too.

I roll on my tongue the names of the towns we'll pass through: Toulouse, Gimont, Auch, Oleron Ste. Marie, Cette Eygun, Jaca, Santa Cruz de la Seros, and finally Pamplona. Could any of these be as luscious as they taste?

I study Jan's Gear List, graciously supplied by one of the planners of the trip -- and compare it with a growing pile of stuff in the corner of the room. Would I be happy to shoulder these things across the Pyrenees?

With Jan, Jan's Gear, Jan's daughter and two of his friends, I leave on May 17th to walk the Camino -- again. I tell people this, and they seem surprised: "Didn't you already do that?" I explain that there are as many roads to Santiago as to Rome -- and for the same reason. Like Rome, Santiago was a pilgrim's destination. Routes to Santiago spread all over Europe like a spider's web with the city at its center.

This time we'll begin on one of the outer whorls of the web, starting in Toulouse and picking up a route known as the Chemin d'Arles. We don't have time to walk all the way to Santiago, but my friends have mapped out a route that ends where Lisa and I began our trek in September: Pamplona. In fact, we'll spend the final nights in Spain where Lisa and I started out, a pilgrim hotel on the plaza of the mysterious Virgen de la O.

I feel like I'm completing a circle I didn't even know existed -- and in a Holy Year at that.

The year 2010 ranks as a special year in the Roman calendar, and from all parts of the web, thousands of pilgrims will be making their way to Santiago. Even though we're leaving before peak season and taking a less well-traveled route, the closer we get to Santiago, the more crowded the path will be. Indeed, the press of pilgrims, dirty, sweaty, grumbly pilgrims, will mean we're on the right track.

In September, Lisa and I got lost only once -- and it was not very lost and right outside Santiago. We must have been deep into conversation, because it took a while before I realized that no one else was around us. We were walking alone -- and that was the signal we were on the wrong track. In fact, we'd gotten lost in some park being prepared for a papal visit in 2010, so we weren't far off the beaten path. But there were only construction workers around us. Not pilgrims.

The workers helped us get back on track. Within a few hours we were in Santiago, waiting in line with a crowd of tired, happy pilgrims to get our credentials. We were surrounded -- no, swarmed! -- by pilgrims. From our various starting points, we'd made it to our common destination.

I was reminded of the metaphor one of the Desert Fathers, Dorotheos of Gaza, used:

"Suppose we were to take a compass and insert the point and draw the outline of a circle. Let us suppose that this circle is the world and that God himself is the center: the straight lines drawn from the circumference to the center are the lives of human beings....Let us assume for the sake of the analogy that to move toward God, then, human beings move from the circumference along the various radii of the circle to the center. But at the same time, the closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God."

The dear Dorotheos must have been a frustrated mathematician turned eremite.

Writer Tobias Wolff condenses his insight: "If you're a Catholic, the world's a very crowded place." He telegraphs the vivid presence of a communion of saints whose lives seem more real than our own. From the great beyond, they offer direction and a love that cannot die. He testifies to the camaraderie of fellow travelers whom we meet along the way. Along the gritty streets of this world, they accompany us -- with a smile, a shrug, and a "Buen Camino!"

I can't wait to walk: bring on the crowds.

Burden, Unburden, Voluntary, Involuntary

2010-04-21T21:31:00.000-07:00

On the Camino, one of the disciplines, an askesis, really, is to strip down to the minimum that you're willing to carry. How many shirts do I NEED? How many books? Marty wrote of the little "shrines" we left of things we decided that we would carry no longer. We wouldn't just toss the stuff--we'd leave it carefully stacked, imagining another pilgrim might want it.

On immersion, a different kind of stripping down goes on. We try to reach a kind of understanding of those we meet that reaches across cultures, so we try to relativize our own cultural stuff--do I NEED American TV? DO I NEED a nice steak with a decent California Zinfandel, or can I experience pupusas with an openness to their own delights? Tourists take in the superficial delights of other cultures in limited doses, while immersers dive in. Culture, of course, cuts deeper than entertainment and food, but the idea is the same--we strip down closer to the common humanity that we share, discovering different ways to approach life's challenges and opportunities. We discover that the basics are available wherever we go, and that some of what we thought was essential to happiness is merely auxiliary, and we gain, perhaps, a sadness and outrage when the essentials we have in plenitude are denied others for no reason other than greed.

Returning can be jarring, because we suddenly become aware of the burden of our excesses--if I only NEED three shirts, why do I have 20? Why am I burdened with storing them, choosing a shirt every day, with wanting new ones? Simple living comes to be seen as a freedom, not a deprivation, though, 'tis true, if I wore only one of three shirts, it's possible my students and colleagues would take note, and not in an approving way. One advantage of religious habits is that you can't tell whether the wearer has 19 more, or only 1 or 2. And there's little point in having 20, since they're essentially identical.

Returning jars when we see the excessive plenitude--why an entire grocery store aisle of pet food when people are hungry? Do cats really NEED a choice of flavors of food? Do we really NEED to cosset housecats so? (Dogs, well, that's another story...)

When I returned, I moved into a house, the first I've ever owned (co-owned, in this case.) My sense of being feral is curtailed by having an address that is "mine" in a way that an apartment or studio never really is. I have painted, cleaned, replaced toilet workings, swept, raked, mopped, chipped old paint. The house is a form of security--I realized that unless I had some major investment, I would never have the option to retire. And if I become seriously ill, I would be purely at the mercy of the state. A house for me represents, (if the market rebounds,) a kind of paradoxical freedom to be able to take care of myself should I need to. It roots me to one place, but enables independence.

Then we were robbed. My housemate's computer was taken--a serious machine because it's a primary workstation. Among other things taken were my late mother's wedding band, and a ring she'd had made from her first engagement ring. Neither especially valuable--we're not an "estate jewelry" kind of family. We've been broke for generations! But they were hers and they're gone. We have a lead to the burglar, but the Oakland police are disinclined to investigate--they have more important crimes to track, and we don't live in the kind of neighborhood where the police are especially attentive. If we were wealthy, the police would protect our belongings, but since we're not, burglary is tolerated where we live.

What do we carry, and what do we leave behind? I seem to be carrying a house now, a serious burden, but perhaps a form of freedom, not unlike the freedom of carrying my netbook across Spain. It's not a burden I ever anticipated would be possible for me--without my co-owner, it still wouldn't be.

The burglary reminds me that I can be stripped involuntarily of my stuff, without recourse. In the end, of course, we leave everything behind except love. But still--my mother's rings. I was willing to carry those, despite their minimal value. Now I don't have to. And I'm sorry about that.

The Dog Days of Pilgrimage....

2010-04-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday night, at the invitation of the Graduate Theological Union's Women's Studies in Religion program, Lisa and I were invited to talk about our grant. I had no idea what to look for.

We didn't know what our audience would be like: students from various degree programs, members of the larger community, colleagues? We didn't know the venue: would our wonderful slides project? We didn't know how many folks to expect -- "Oh, maybe between five and fifty."

We did know one thing: these are the "dog days." The ancient Romans used the term, "dies caniculares,"to describe those hot sultry days of mid-summer, when fall's cooler mornings seem far away and spring is an all-too distant splash of green. During the "dog days," the dogs languish. Forget frolicking; mere panting takes too much work. Even the angels sleep.

Tuesday is the "dog day" of the week: the blush of a new week has worn off -- and you can't find your way to weekend. More enervating, it's the twelfth week of the semester here, and the end of the semester seems three weeks too late. All gears grind. Even our scheduled time was a "dog day," too soon after our last class to relax and grab dinner, too late in the day for hard-ass scholarly discourse.

But as soon as the projection screen registered our first photo, I felt energized. Then, when Lisa passed the ball off to me in mid-sentence of her opening remarks, I knew we'd have fun.

"You're doing exactly what you did to me with the novel!" I responded in mock protest. She laughed wickedly.

And this is how we walked the "dog days" of the Camino, when everything ached but we were nowhere near finished with the day's walking. In mid-pilgrimage, we started a novel. One person would begin, then pass it off to the other -- in mid-sentence.

One day, during the "dog days" of a hot afternoon, we turned to Richard, a young American we'd met working at pilgrim hostel. We embellished his story, fabricated a sweetheart for him from the small hillside village where we'd met him, spun a story around her and her out-of-wedlock child from a high-school sweetheart, who'd gone off to med school in Salamanca, cut off all contact with her and the village -- and fallen in love with a fiery Nicaraguan pre-med student committed to social justice. I'd tell the story for a while -- then pass it off to Lisa just as something exciting was about to happen.

We'd pick up the threads the next afternoon, just as the "dog days" of the afternoon set in, just as the pain asserted itself, just as the day's heat focused its energies upon us. We spent literally miles wrapped up in our story. Telling a story whose ending we did not know kept us from hurting; it kept us from fighting; it kept us going. The resultant novel still has no ending -- and defies all taxonomies of genre. It probably falls somewhere between Jesuit science fiction and bodice ripper.

I could see the same tactic was going to get us through the "dog days" of this evening, the "dog days" of the semester, the "dog days" of any present and future pilgrimage.

What's in it, this magical antidote to "dog days?" There's humor, of course: the ability to laugh at anything, everything, but particularly yourselves. Then, there's imagination, but imagination rooted in reality. After all, there was a real Richard. We'd met him. His character in the novel was remarkably true to his character in the tiny village where we'd met him. Finally, there's gritty truth: we knew we had to keep walking. And we could do it grumpily -- or gracefully.

Telling stories helped us find grace.

And how does grace come?

Usually where you least expect it: we thought the pilgrimage would be more "spiritual," and we'd packed readings from the daily lectionary to contemplate while walking. But the graces we encountered came through our feet -- and our imaginations. Immersing ourselves in the fictional worlds of Bianca and Richard, worlds we had fabricated on the basis of the real, helped us face our own world more graciously.

Grace also comes with skin. Sometimes I wanted to shake her awake or hurry her along, but for me Lisa was grace with skin.

We're in a season, the Easter season, graciously given to the disciples so that their eyes get used to recognizing the Risen Christ, grace with skin in their own lives. The same skin that had been crucified was now resurrected and among them. They had a hard time recognizing it: so Jesus stuck around, appearing every once in a while as an occasional eye exercise.

It makes me aware that if I want to find grace in the world around me now, I'd better look to the people around me.

Grace with skin.

The Pilgrimage of the Easter Season: Where's Jesus?!

2010-04-06T08:13:00.001-07:00

When my nieces were young, they cornered me on the couch with a book and said: "Where's Waldo?" I looked at a double-page spread of images piled on top of one another in dizzying vertical array. There were busses, cars, trucks, skyscrapers, houses, with people, cats, dogs, and birds all over the page. Where was Waldo? I was no help, because I didn't know what Waldo looked like to begin with.

I had no idea what I was looking for.

That puts me in a very similar situation to the disciples in the season after Easter. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! But no one knows what he looks like. No one knows what they are looking for.

Mary Magdalene mistakes him for a gardener. The disciples on the road to Emmaus mistake him for a wandering rabbi. And the usual suspects who've returned to their usual pursuits -- fishing on the Sea of Tiberias -- think he's some backseat fisherman, giving orders from the safety of the shore. Nobody recognizes the risen Christ.

It's pretty clear no one has any idea what they are looking for. So these forty days between Easter and Ascension give their eyes time to adjust to life in the Resurrection Zone. Forty days -- the same as Lent. And even more important.

Jesus comes back to teach, to leave peace, to touch and be touched -- and to cook the disciples breakfast. Like the Last Supper in Holy Week, the First Breakfast is the meal of the Easter season.

More congregations ought to celebrate that!

One of my friends complained about having the post-Easter doldrums: after the drama of the Triduum, we're now in "ordinary time -- and it just seems, well, so ordinary."

Hey -- it's not ordinary time yet! In the liturgical year, this is the season of Easter, and these forty days constitute a pilgrimage every bit as important as Lent's. Along the way, we learn to recognize the resurrected Christ.

So, where is he in the midst of that dizzying vertical array of appointments, deadlines, and e-mails in our lives?

Do we even know what we're looking for? Or will he surprise us along the road, like he surprised the disciples en route to Emmaus?

Be watching.

Rituals of Re-Entry: What Immersion Teaches Pilgrims

2010-04-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

Entrada: this way forward. If only it were so easy! Both pilgrims and people on immersion trips wrestle with problems of re-entry. Every semester winds down, and the student returns to campus. Every road comes to an end, and the pilgrim packs up for home. What's the way forward?

Yesterday afternoon I pondered the question of re-entry with fellow pilgrims and "Camino-heads," Kathy Gower and Lin Galea. Guidebooks and websites tell the pilgrim how to prepare for journey: what gear to pack, how to train, where to stay along the way. But no one tells pilgrims how to return. The disorientation can be profound.

The conversation explained my own behavior. I suddenly understood why, immediately upon returning, I joined the American Pilgrims network (www.americanpilgrims.com). I understood how I'd been drawn to the first Bay Area meeting a thumbtack to a magnet, like everyone else in the room. I understood why were we were sitting together, watching rainshowers and sunshowers roll across the Bay.

It was as if we'd all awakened one morning speaking a language no one else could understand. It was a relief to find some other native speakers.

Seasoned leaders of immersion trips expect problems of re-entry -- and they try to prep students for them. Directors of the Casa have a final retreat focused on the way forward. Similar to the orientation retreat that opens the program, the closing retreat preps people for "disorientation." As I listened to how the final retreat worked, I realize that immersion can teach pilgrims a lot, particularly three important rituals of re-entry.

First, acknowledge the disorientation. A long-time leader of delegations talked about preparing a group of college students for re-entry after they'd gone down to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. The students had shoveled mud, waded through muck, scoured and scrubbed --and were heading home for the holidays. Summoning them, their leader spoke as strongly as she knew how: "You are going to hate your families for not having been there. Those feelings are real and powerful. I absolutely understand your feelings -- and it would be absolutely inappropriate and sinful to attack others as a result of them."

Her warning probably prevented a lot of bloodshed. And certainly pulled some punches that might otherwise have connected.

A piece of advice that Kathy Gower passed on months ago made new sense: "Pack for pilgrimage as if you are never coming back." For medieval pilgrims, this could be literally true: they could be killed, robbed, or felled by disease. Today those dangers have largely disappeared, but the truth remains: you don't come back. Even though you return to the same surroundings and relationships, you're not the same person. Everything needs to be recalibrated.

If pilgrims knew to expect this -- as immersants do, re-entry could be less frustrating, less confusing.

Second, think about how to give back. Not everyone has the time and money, means and sheer physical ability to do either pilgrimage or immersion. How can you share what you've learned or experienced? For Lin, this has been quite concrete: through the American Pilgrims network, she's trained to be a hospitalero, worker at a hostel. She's return this summer to work outside Sevilla at a site on the Via del Plata. Her work will directly benefit the influx of pilgrims expected to converge on Santiago in the summer of 2010, a "Holy Year" in the Roman Catholic calendar.

At the end of our delegation in Mexico City, we had a final "disorientation" session, where we committed ourselves to "action plans." In the presence of the other delegates and our leaders, we covenanted ways to be in solidarity with them back in El Norte.

A key piece of this ritualization needs to be the recognition that you can rarely ever repay the kindness and hospitality you've received. Sometimes all you can do is to "pay it forward," acting locally in appropriate ways to witness to what you've experienced.

Finally, stay in solidarity with those who've accompanied you. Casa students find ways of keeping in touch upon their return, and Director Kevin Yonkers-Talz is intentional about convening groups of Casa alums on his frequent trips to the United States. Pilgrim networks abound, drawing like magnets people who suddenly discover they speak a language they'd never bargained on learning.

Keeping company: that's what we were doing yesterday, as we watched spring rains rake the Bay. After all, three people can do things one person can't manage alone.

Re-entry: Immersion -- or Theological Tourism?

2010-03-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

The sign shows you the way out -- the way out of the Jesuit University where we spent much of our time, the way out of the SuperSelect where we shopped, the way out of customs and immigration, even the way out of the airplane as it took off from El Salvador's Comalapa Airport on Friday morning and circled out over the country's fabled surf breaks on the Pacific.

It's easy to exit airports and supermarkets; it's not so easy to exit the experience. Everything reminds me of where I've been. The birds here are quieter and more subdued, not the loud squawking parrots of San Salvador. Here the sun comes up and goes down more slowly, leaving grainy hours of dusk and dawn. There, because of proximity to the equator, the sun pops out of the horizon in the morning, making things suddenly bright; there, night falls in minutes. Here air breathes in more easily, unencumbered by diesel fumes. There, I had a sour throat after four days. All of this I mark.

It's not so easy to exit the experience. Nor would I want to. Marking the differences between "there" and "here" is common to both pilgrimage and immersion. Also similar is a deepening awareness that the differences mark me, in ways I can't yet imagine.

Since I'm still unpacking my bags, let me unpack this thought -- at least a little --
by way of a story. The last day we spent at the Casa, we overlapped with a delegation from another Jesuit university. Some members in the group seemed eager to partake of the Casa experience; others were not so sure. Was this not one more way of exploiting the Salvadoran people, learning personal and social transformation at their expense? Was this just tourism -- with a different thrust and even less benefit to the natives?

The latter group pressed their case. After all, to do an immersion anywhere, you need money, means, and time. Students in the Casa program were largely white, middle- to upper-middle-class students -- whose parents could afford to come down and visit. Although scholarships were available, and some of the Casa students had them, my interlocutors were not swayed. Sullenly, they climbed into a bus -- and were gone.

Here's how I would want to have continued the conversation:

First, the experience of other peoples and cultures prompts change: you simply can't see the world in the same way any more. Particularly if the dislocation is intentional, as it is in both pilgrimage and immersion, people don't expect to return to their familiar. They seek that expanded vision. Immersions are a first step toward that new vision.

Second, I do think the Salvadoran people with whom students work in praxis sites should weigh in -- and judge whether they are being "exploited" or not. The directors of this program work closely with the people in-country to keep a pulse on their needs and their perspectives. Indeed, Kevin Yonkers-Talz, director of the Casa program, spoke very pointedly about the praxis communities being "educators," giving them title and a key role in the pedagogy at Casa. Is this exploitation or theological tourism? It's a question for people in-country to address, not for a delegation from the outside to judge.

So I posed the question to some Salvadorans. "Tell our stories," one woman said, "so that people will never forget." A man judged the accompaniment to be crucial: "You can't fix it, because your country is part of the problem. But being with us means everything."

Finally, yes, there is a danger of what colleague Kevin Burke SJ called "theological tourism," once again taking from the poor to benefit the rich -- this time for insight. But the change that immersion prompts mitigates that danger. Participants will live their lives differently, some in greater and lesser daily solidarity with the people they've encountered in El Salvador. But all will be changed -- "if they have eyes to see, ears to hear."

Intentional action plans, covenants, plans for the future: all these are part of the final retreat in the Casa program. This was certainly how we spent the last day in Mexico City in January. And in equally powerful, but more implicit ways, this is how we exited the pilgrimage to Santiago -- following the exit signs, even as we knew the experience had marked us for life.

In the end, all "exit" signs point to an irony. They mark the boundary between "there" and "here." They get you out, but they can't make you free. You'll carry that place withyou forever.

"There" will always be right here, marked on the body like a bold tattoo.

Theoretical Musing

2010-03-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

[Warning! Ethical Methodological Material Ahead! Beware of Soporific Content!]

In virtue ethics, we talk a lot about virtues as perfections of human capacities. Virtues perfect our character the same way exercise perfects our muscles--they tone and strengthen us for specific contexts. A virtue ethics generally speaking focuses on the cardinal virtues (classically: Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage, or, in one contemporary spin, Prudence, Justice, Fidelity and Self-care.) All other virtues "fit" into one of the cardinal virtues, which are like a sorting system for the general way virtues function. (E.g., temperance classically restrains us from grabbing too much of something that's good.The opposite vice, which Thomas calls "insensibility," happens, but is much less common than the urge to have too much of a good thing. Humility fits into the temperance category, since we're to be restrained from grabbing too much honor.) To have lots of various virtues is not to be super-human, it's to be excellent as a human being, to be living in tune with one's nature. It's "being all you can be," morally fit like an elite athlete is physically fit.

But particular endeavors like the practice of medicine or ministry, have particular virtues attributed to them, in light of the goal or end or telos of the activity. Doctors are to work on physical or psychological well-being, so what is required of them includes all the regular virtues, but also "professional" spins on each of them. For a doctor, e.g., fidelity to patients requires a devotion to their thriving, (as the Kaiser-Permanente people say.) So a plastic surgeon who's in it just for the bucks is failing in fidelity, while a plastic surgeon who looks to the patient's well-being overall is being professionally virtuous. (Somewhere along the line, some plastic surgeon should have said "no" to Michael Jackson. Maybe not at first, perhaps, but somewhere along the line.) I add to the cardinal virtues for professionals the virtue of trustworthiness. Trustworthiness includes things like being assiduous about your work. Ministers whose theological education ends with seminary are not being trustworthy. Courage for a lawyer might include defending a notorious client in the face of public outrage--consider the ACLU defending white supremacist speech, e.g.

To become a professional is to be formed in the work and ideals of the profession. It is to engage oneself in the process of acquiring the virtues specific to the work. This also involves dealing with profession-specific temptations--MD's are scheduled for appointments every 15 or 20 minutes, yet are expected to deal thoroughly with each patient. The temptation is to keep the schedule, while sometimes you need to stop and listen more deeply. K. Lebacqz (I think--sorry no citation) has written movingly about this. Sometimes what a patient needs more than medicine is to be listened to.

The Casa speaks of "planting seeds," helping people become "their best selves." Of course, the seeds they seek to plant include virtues like compassion, trust, devotion. They don't want to encourage avarice, hard-heartedness, etc. So there's an implicit anthropology at work--what makes a "best self"?

They aren't seeking to form professionals, but to help each person grow in the cardinal virtues. Each of us can be said to start with a certain baseline level of a given virtue. Some people are naturally bold, others naturally more temperate than others. Each of us develops our virtues (or not) toward an ideal that is universal yet personal, just as fingerprints or DNA are universal yet unique. They resist speaking of "formation," perhaps, because that term implies formation for a particular role or profession. They want to help people be just, compassionate accountants, or whatever they do.

Traditional religious formation engages, on a good day, both. A young Benedictine learns the routines of the monastery, finds out that whatever work they're doing stops when the bell rings for prayer. Prayer is the "opus Dei," the proper works of monks. The floor that needs sweeping can wait until after lauds. Priorities indicate meaning. Yet insofar as religious formation is engaged with service of God who desires our flourishing, in the infinite variety in which we're created, a person who seeks to subsume his or her humanity, or ANY aspect of it, in the "mold" of a monk, is making a fundamental error. (Some have suggested that the reason there seem to be more pedophiles in the Roman Catholic priesthood than the rest of the male population is that some pedophiles--not all of them--entered priesthood seeking to escape their sexuality through celibacy. As the newspapers show, it doesn't work that way.) A Benedictine monk is to be his or her "best self" as a Benedictine. If the life doesn't complement and enhance his or her ability to "praise, love and serve" God and neighbor, then the monk doesn't have a vocation to that life. Complicating this statement is the fact that one can grow into a vocation--but not always.

Professional formation these days, in all three professions, tends to downplay "human" formation in the cardinal virtues in favor of formation in the practices and techniques of the profession. Partly that's appropriate, partly not.

Sometimes the virtues of a profession are attended to, but too often not. But absent formation in the professional virtues, medicine, law and ministry are just careers, not professions. When Roman Catholic priestly formation documents speak of "human" formation, they tend to mean formation in celibacy. Too bad--the category is much broader than that, and needs attention for all professionals. We all arrive in the process of becoming "our best selves." Training for professions changes our image of our best selves.

I argue that the process of integrating the "best self" of the cardinal virtues and the professional virtues is more significant for ministers than for doctors or lawyers because of the nature of the work as involving spiritual growth--but that's another topic.

Students in Solidarity: Who comes on an immersion to El Salvador...

2010-03-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

...when they could be pub-crawling in London? Or bistro-hopping in Florence? As we close out our time in El Salvador, we've been asking that question of students. They have ready answers.

One of them rephrased it for us: "You mean why did I choose to Study Abroad, rather than Party Abroad?" He laughed: "Here we learn whether we want to or not." He identified very precisely how his perspective had changed: he'd come as a proponent of neo-liberal, free-market capitalism. He's learned how that economic philosophy cripples countries like El Salvador. He's learned that "place makes a difference," where you are located in the global market makes a huge difference in what you see. He's learned "never to be complacent again."

Then he began to tell stories about working with the children in the praxis site to which he's been assigned. The conversation turned to a series of verbal snapshots of "my kids."

Another student observed: "Most of us have been involved in protests at the School of the Americas. It's a common thread." Of course, most of the students come from Jesuit universities -- but not all. "Students already come with an awareness of the world," she said. This experience deepens it. As an undergraduate, she first participated in, then led Alternative Spring Breaks. "AB's" count as another kind of immersion that involves three components: direct service, education, and reflection. Each component is crucial: "Without education, everything gets mushy; without reflection, it gets meaningless; without service, it gets heady."

What would she carry with her when she left El Salvador? "Community," and as she unpacked that, it's clear community is multi-dimensional. Living in an intentional community with other students, working in the praxis sites or Salvadoran communities, learning with the Romero scholars -- and seeing this country through their eyes: all these components of the Casa program take her experience of Alternative Break to a new and deeper level. She's looking for ways to re-create that kind of community back in the States.

She too left us with a bunch of verbal snapshots of a mother in her praxis site, the family who hosted her for a week's visit early on. As with her colleague, these stories told more than any book or article on the country. She'll carry these people with her.

As we gather our things for tomorrow's return to the States, I'm thinking about these new colleagues in El Salvador. Theirs are the faces in my mental photo gallery. Theirs are the stories I'll carry with me.

I wonder what re-entry will be like for all of us? How will these students live out what they've learned here in El Norte, on campuses where everyone arrives in class plugged into their own individual soundtrack? Where texts and cells provide easy access to friends, but block contact with the people sitting right next to you? Where meaning is measured out in salary scales, consumer goods, and material success? What will re-entry be like for them?

What will re-entry be like for us? What's our calling, even after this brief visit? We haven't been here long; still, we have been here. How has the experience claimed us? Or, to borrow language that threads through every dimension of this program, how can we accompany this program, our gracious hosts Kevin and Trena Yonkers-Talz, and the students here?

I know that's the right question. We'll keep searching for the answer.

Things I was wrong about, Part IV (or whatever...)

2010-03-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

We are now in day 5 of the third leg of our pilgrimage grant. We have been talking and listening, marching and resting. We have enjoyed hot tortillas right off the grill, scarfed with salt and a nice cool glass of white wine at the end of the day. We have walked, because that's what we do--we process, we imagine, we wonder.

This is a much more reflective trip than our previous trip to Mexico City or than my previous trip to El Salvador, when I came with students from my schools as a delegation to mark the anniversary of the killing of 6 Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter. This feels to me more a summation than a new leg, likely because of my previous time here.

I thought, before we came, that perhaps what is accomplished in immersion here could be done as well in the US. After all, there is no shortage of poor communities one might accompany in the US. It would be much easier to integrate that kind of learning into the seminary curriculum. We could integrate adult learners (i.e., folks with families) much more easily. We could be a more continuous presence in the communities we'd be present to. And, over time we might make a difference, a contribution more than is possible in a short trip.

But I think now that there are three facets of this kind of program, each with its own particular dynamism. The three are: dislocation, integration, and accompaniment.

Dislocation: Marty has posted about dislocation, and I agree. Being out of one's own context is de-centering. it throws the person into the particular group of immersers the new community. Matriculating in a school in a new town can do this, but in the US we're all pretty good at staying connected to "home." We're not easily dislocated in-country. Here, working in a language that isn't one's native tongue helps this dynamic.

Integration: In a well-run immersion, classes can build on students' experiences in local communities and also be connected to their spiritual and group formation. Classes can be interwoven to speak to each other because of the common context. The whole person is educated, not just the left brain.

Accompaniment: The word "accompany" is related to the word "companion," one with whom one shares bread. To accompany is not reducible to charitable acts--it is a true and mutual sharing of the vicissitudes of one's situation. Students here accompany people in local villages.

A local immersion (i.e., an immersion near school in the US,) can achieve two of the three ends, and perhaps three, given VERY intense community formation, which would be tough to achieve.

I think there's another factor involved, though. By dropping people into a culture other than their own, they are encouraged to "read" the culture, to see what's different, what's the same, with their own. This is true to some extent in the US, where communal cultural norms and attitudes in the inner cities are very different from those of the wealthy and/or white folks. "Reading" a culture is a skill that can best be practiced by experiencing another from inside. Related to this: asking hard questions like "what can I do?" might be easier when, as in most immersion programs, the answer is, "ultimately, nothing." Like pilgrims, people on immersion are useless. Their job is to notice, to be transformed, and to return home different. But there's a comfort in distance. I cannot fix El Salvador. I cannot contribute anything much in the space of a week. But when I notice something I might be able to do in, e.g., West Oakland, my continuing to be useless is wrong. I would then be implicated in the dysfunction by inaction. I hope that people who begin to learn deeper compassion in immersion trips come home more willing to enter into the particular situations of injustice that confront them in ministry. Injustice is everywhere--it involves poverty, sexism, class-ism, homophobia, clericalism, age-ism, and any number of situations where people of faith, especially leaders in faith communities, really need to wade in. We need to be prepared to engage injustice where we find it, rather than having our skills-building processes determine the contours of the injustices we will take on ourselves.

So--not to rule out local immersions. Far from it! It'd be great if we take on a local situation with a real commitment to accompany the community over time. But getting people out of their own land has a pedagogical value that really can't be replaced.

Formation or Germination? Higher Education, Theological Education -- and the Difference

2010-03-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

In February our grant took us to Pittsburgh. Not so exotic as Mexico or El Salvador or Spain. Walking the bridges of a city in transition, I realized: I'm in transition too. This would be my last meeting of theological educators, the title given to those of us in graduate theological education. In July I move to Augsburg College and focus on undergraduate education, known in the biz as "higher ed."

Outside the academy, perhaps, such nomenclature matters little. But I ran into a big difference here in El Salvador, where my colleague and I, two theological educators teaching at grad schools, met with a group of educators involved in undergraduate education, or higher ed.

I was trying to get a handle on what goes on at this immersion program, an endeavor that has three components: intentional dislocation in another culture, accompaniment through all levels of the program, and -- "formation."

The word "formation" clattered to the floor, and I knew immediately it was the wrong one. But, in the moment, I couldn't think of a better one. "What do you think we're trying to form?" asked one of professors in the immersion program. I responded, "You tell me: citizens of the world?" He replied, "We're just planting seeds, trying to help people be their very best selves."

The conversation haunts me still, but let me offer some provisional thoughts. Formation comes straight out of the context of theological education, i.e., graduate education directed toward shaping leaders for the church. I'll speak as a theological educator here: seminaries do have a "form" or mold we're trying to shape students into. We aim to produce certain kinds of leaders. Candidacy committees demand them; my institutional website describes them (hyperlink to http://www.plts.edu -- and click on "Dimensions of Ministry Excellence"); the church needs them. Formation is appropriate for theological education: it's what educators aim at.

Undergraduate education is more about planting seeds: germination. E.g., Santa Clara University names them pretty clearly: competence, conscience, and compassion. Augsburg College, my new calling, puts it differently: "We believe we are called to serve the neighbor." Germination is more appropriate for higher ed: it's what educators plant -- and hope students will grow from.

Depending on where they are called to serve, students will be formed in any number of different ways. They'll receive professional formation as lawyers and nurses, teachers and organizers: the soil will be different, but all flowers will bloom.

We spoke yesterday with a business major from Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He chose the program intentionally: "I didn't want a party abroad program, I wanted a study abroad program. And this has been fantastic. How could I ever be complacent again?" Raised by a poor family in the Philippines, he found in this program a way to reconnect to his roots and reposition himself to do business with a conscience. A global conscience. He'll enroll in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps before pursuing an MBA.

Germination pushes from behind -- or better, below, like a sprout pushing up through moist earth. Formation draws from ahead -- or better, above, like the sun drawing all the heliotropic energies of a new shoot into the air.

Even as they are different in thrust, we need both for healthy growth.

Location and Dislocation: Thoughts on Immersion and Pilgrimage

2010-03-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

When selling a house, the realtors are right: it's all about location, location, location. On immersion trips, however, the pilgrims are right: it's all about dislocation.

Pilgrims pack up for a destination as yet unseen through a terrain thoroughly unknown. Pilgrims take maps, but, as historian of religion J.Z. Smith observed, map is not territory. Our guidebook for the Camino made no mention of what became our highlights: lunch at that golf course clubhouse that welcomed pilgrims, even though our packs were full of gear -- and theirs full of clubs; the perfect cafe con leche on a rainy day in Galicia; the mysterious geometry of the Knights Templar church in Rioja.

Nor are maps peopled. No map could have introduced us to Linda and Nancy, whom we ran into so often I finally said: "Seeing you makes me feel I'm on the right track." They located me.

I need location -- and so I relish the challenge of both pilgrimage and immersion. Both aim at an intentional dislocation, cutting all connection with the familiar.

I watch the students taking their parents around neighborhoods that two months ago were equally foreign to them. I watch their vigilance with their parents, as they point out landmarks and caution against curbs -- truly perilous with their ever-changing height. To the students the neighborhood has become familiar, even "theirs." They greet the locals; they walks the streets as if they belong here, at least for the time being.

It brings back memories of the Camino, except that the pilgrim never stays long enough to make a single place "home." Anything and everything familiar to me, I carried in my backpack. I grew familiar with dislocation, if that's possible. I knew how to make a place home, if only for a night or a coffee break. More important, I knew how to leave it the next morning -- and without looking back.

What's the impact of such dislocation? Surely it invites introspection. When everything is foreign, the individual psyche becomes "the still point of the turning world," (T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"). This prompts a dimension of introspection not possible in the midst of quotidian distractions.

Dislocation also forges connection, particularly with people who are similarly situated. Or un-situated. Students who might never have noticed one another on the Gonzaga or Boston College campus now depend on each other to navigate the newness.

Finally, this particular immersion in El Salvador opens a window into the experience of people who have experienced similar dislocation. From one of the community coordinators of the Romero scholars, Gris, we heard the story of a family during the civil war who fled its home in the middle of the night, because the military were coming. In an instant, they had to figure out what they could not bear to leave behind -- and could actually manage to carry and run with. For days they traveled moving only at night and sleeping every day in a different location. Years later, a little girl who fled with her doll returned to her village as an adult -- and tried to find that doll.

Dislocation became a way of life. Forcibly evicted from their homes, these people had to find a center of gravity within. And they did. They returned with an internal compass that provides location in the midst of dislocation, celebration in the midst of death, and a still point in the turning world.

Through the experience of dislocation, immersion and pilgrimage alike sow the seeds of gravitas.

Parents in Solidarity with Salvador -- and their Children

2010-03-22T19:05:00.000-07:00

We overlapped with Parents' Weekend at Santa Clara University's Casa de la Solidaridad. That means we simultaneously overlapped with different families -- and different solidarities.

What kind of parents send their kids to a semester abroad program in El Salvador, when they could be pub-crawling in London? Or tapas-hopping in Madrid? We heard a variety of responses.

A couple from the Bay Area said their daughter had spent the fall in Florence before signing on to this spring semester in El Salvador. "We could only afford to visit one of the sites," her mother said. "This is the one we chose." We heard later that the father was of Armenian descent. Stories from families who experienced the civil war here evoked stories of the Armenian genocide. Immediately, he had something in common with the people his daughter had been working with.

We talked to another couple from Maryland as they were packing to go home. "I wish schools were doing this when I was in college," the mother said wistfully. She seemed reluctant to go home. They'd attended classes with their daughter, visited her praxis site, and spent the week interacting with other parents. "This is our youngest of four," the father said. "The rest of the kids have jobs that serve others -- and don't pay. Two of them came home to live with us." He was proud of the fact.

Another mother addressed our question directly: "My daughter knew we weren't always like her friends' parents. We made certain choices. She knew they weren't the same choices that her friends' parents made. I guess she noticed. It was a very powerful lesson for her."

I walked much of the Romero procession with another couple. I realized that all three of us were "herding" the rest of the group like border collies. We kept a lookout for where everyone was. Later I found out they were evangelicals who'd sent their daughter to a Jesuit university. I must have looked puzzled, because the mother immediately explained: "Go figure -- we liked their values."

What are those values? For sure, one of them is simple solidarity. Parents show solidarity with their chidlren, when they find time and money to spend a week with them attending their classes, sharing in their reflection groups, and visiting their praxis sites. Not surprisingly, their children show solidarity with the people accompanying them in their daily lives and work.

I had a feeling that showing up for their children in El Salvador wasn't an isolated event, but just another expression of being there -- at soccer games, recitals, and basketball games. Solidarity becomes a habit, that then gets hard-wired into the next generation. It's wonderful to behold.

We've deeply appreciated being here during Parents' Weekend. Meeting these families has been both a witness and a grace.

And what kind of student chooses this semester abroad program? We'll find out. We're camping out at Pop's, the ice cream joint outside the university, for the next several afternoons to meet with students.

More to come!

Pilgrimage Salvadoran-Style

2010-03-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

In September we hiked in a procession thousands strong and centuries old to the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela. Last night we joined a candlelight procession to the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador in honor of Archbishop Oscar Romero. His sainthood by the Vatican is pending, and people here hope the process of beatification will be announced this week, the thirtieth anniversary of his assassination.

But in the eyes of the thousands who walked last night, Romero has already become a saint.

Over and over the loudspeakers announce our procession as a "pilgrimage." That would make us pilgrims, if only for a night. There are similarities between our prior treks and this one-night pilgrimage, and they are both trivial and profound. As with the final summit at Kilimanjaro, we carried light against night's darkness. There we wore headlamps; here we bear candles, lighting and relighting them in the early evening breezes. But as the pilgrims dip under a bridge, I can see lights from the crowd in front of and behind us, just as we saw headlamps snaking up the face of the summit at Kilimanjaro. Now, as then, it gives me hope.

Like pilgrims on the Camino to Santiago, the way is long. A man in our party makes his way on crutches, and his face pours sweat even in the cool night air. His wife wears a neckbrace. She is sweating with the rest of us. We can't carry each other, but we cheer each other on, dropping in and out of conversation along the way.

As on the Camino, there is the frequent boisterous outburst. Last night a group of young people do the "wave" along the way. Every few blocks, they crouch in the middle of their chant, then leap into the air with the word "resuscitado." We join in -- though, for some of us, leaping is a little out of the question.

Along the way, loudspeakers broadcast readings from Scripture, but mostly from Romero. Banners carry sentences from his writings. His words are the people's bibles. Then, when intercessions end at the Cathedral Mass, dozens of white and red balloons are released into the night air. Many carry hand-written prayers aloft, attached to their strings, and a tiny flotilla of balloons elevated a picture of Romero himself. All ascend slowly into the night air.

Who is this man for whom the crowd gathers? To Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, who spoke at the beginning of the procession, Romero's agenda is his own, a platform of justice and human rights.

Who is Romero for the thousands of young people in the procession? They are too young to have known him. Yet he stands for them as a hero, political as much as spiritual, who sided with the people and fought for their dignity.

Who is Romero to the many North Americans who came down for these anniversary celebrations? Clearly some have had a long history with Latin America, El Salvador in particular. They accompanied people being repatriated to villages ravaged by war.

Who is Romero to us? Because we are here too. Is Romero the hero we long for, but cannot summon the courage to be? Is he holy on our behalf, relieving us of the burden of discipleship? What does solidarity with this man, these people, and their history mean for us? For me?

I don't know the answer to this question. I only know that my perspective will be altered irrevocably by this pilgrimage. And that's what pilgrimage does, sometimes subtly. You think you're headed for a destination, then discover your vision has changed. Travel has "corrected" it in ways that a prescription could not.

I know something else in addition: Romero was right. Shortly before his martyrdom and knowing that his time had run out, he promised he would rise again in the Salvadoran people. "Resuscitado" was the word he used.

He certainly did last night. And the resurrection continues.

Always coming home: San Salvador

2010-03-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

Even though I've never been here before, the city feels familiar. I spent hours yesterday studying maps of the various neighborhoods and rolling the names around on my tongue: the Zona Rosa, the Centro, Parque Cuscatlan, and of course the Jesuit university, the UCA or the Universitario de Centro America.

In the Jesuit circles in which my late husband Bill moved, the UCA was ground zero. One of the Jesuit martyrs was at the University of Chicago the same time we were there, and another, American-born Dean Brackley SJ, now teaches on the faculty. I've heard much about the work of the Casa de la Solidaridad that Santa Clara University runs, its unique combination of study and service learning, its emphasis on formation for justice.

I've listened to stories from other delegations. In the 1980s SHARE delegates accompanied displaced villagers to their homes. Bill came with a Santa Clara group ten years later, shortly after the civil war ended. My sister-in-law and a dear friend came on another delegation, and her group visited the rough chapel built on the site where the American nuns were raped and killed. As the group sat in the pews listening to a presentation, blossoms from a flowering tree drifted in the open windows, covering the group in a mantle of purple and blessing. Lisa was here in the fall of this past year to commemorate the martyrdom of the Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter.

All these stories, all these connections, all these maps: I feel like I know the city.

Still, nothing could have prepared me for the volcanoes that preside over the city, casting shadow and capturing clouds. Nor could I have supplied from a flat map the slope of the Alameda Araujo as it rolls into the center of town. Or told where the sun would rise as we barreled in from the airport at dawn dodging trucks spewing diesel fumes and laden with sugar cane. Or understood the impact of seeing where the Jesuits and the two women were assassinated.

It's all familiar -- and yet so different than I imagined. Yet being here makes something deep click into place. Like shifting into a gear I hadn't known was there. Only now that it's fully engaged can things move forward.

I hadn't realized I'd been standing still.

Maybe that's a telling resonance between immersion and pilgrimage, necessary next steps to a place that's been beckoning.

Maps, stories, relationships only point in the right direction.

Educating for justice: How? Where? Why?

2010-03-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

Educating for justice: how does it happen?

Not by accident!

It's the intentional focus of educators like the people at Santa Clara University's Casa de la Solidaridad. Their semester-long program involves specially designed courses in sociology, politics, economics, and philosophy. In addition, there are be-weekly "praxis sites," where students "accompany" Salvadorans in their daily lives. Students are cautioned against thinking of these assignments as "service learning," as there is often no service they provide. They listen; they experience; they receive. Nothing more than accompaniment. And nothing less.

Courses then use the stuff of this experience as "text" for the classroom. Mark Ravizza SJ described his "Philosophy of Suffering" course: "When I taught in the States, I never knew where my students were coming from. They came to and left class in their own little bubbles. They arrived texting and they left texting."

Here's it's different. Mark continued: "Because I've visited their 'praxis sites,' I know very concretely where my students are coming from. I know the communities. I know how the experience impacts them. That's where we begin."

In his class, Annie Dillard's "Holy the Firm" prompts a reflection on the stages of the students' encounter with another culture: first, elation and embrace; then, despair; and finally, a hope tempered by realism and fueled by resurrection.

For better and for worse, San Salvador is not a good place to go walking around at night. Students in this "semester abroad" program don't get to know local pub culture. Evenings are spent in reflection, processing the events of the day. Or doing homework. "That's my chief problem with the program," a student confided. "There so much going on, I can't turn in the caliber of work I'm used to at home." She's learning how to complete the "good-enough" assignment. Not the perfect one.

By deliberate intention, though, a lot of homework is interior. How does this experience in a third world country impact the whole sense of work and calling?

That question is at the core of this experience. Spiritual direction -- even for the "spiritual, but not religious" -- is readily available. "I learned here that I am loved. Unconditionally. And for who I am," said one alumna of the program. "It's enabled me to love others." She's back in El Salvador leading a delegation from Seattle University.

How does all this relate to pilgrimage?

Like pilgrimage, this program educates citizens of the world, an allegiance it sorely needs. Maybe Hugo of St. Victor's insight applies to both students and pilgrims:

"The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land."

If foreign, the world needs to be explored, known -- and loved.

Packing as if....

2010-03-19T06:25:00.000-07:00

We're in the final approach to departure: mail withheld, newspapers suspended, shuttles ordered, bags -- well, bags almost packed. As I manage the last bit of stuff, I calculate the difference between this and the first leg of our pilgrimages: the trek to Santiago de Compostela.

First, we're not walking to El Salvador -- and that's a big difference. Most of my anxiety focused on whether in fact we actually could walk that far. The rest riveted on gear: did I have the right stuff? It was as if Spain were alien territory, and the people there had never heard of things I depended on daily.

Of course, they did. What I needed I could either buy or discover wasn't really that important after all. With no small embarrassment, I remember all the shrines I left in B&B's in the early part of the trip: gear I was leaving behind. I simply wasn't willing to carry it any longer. I wish I had taken pictures of all those altars.

This time, I'm traveling light: I know how little I need, and more stuff will only get in the way of being there.

Then, on the first trip, I needed an itinerary: where we would be and when. I plotted out the entire trek, adjusting for our poor feet, until I registered what seasoned Caminista Jan Ruud told me months ago: "You walk your own Camino." He was right. My passion for itineraries meant I wasn't walking my Camino; I was walking the one in the guidebook by John Brierley. It's a great book, but it covered his Camino. Not mine.

This time, I don't have an itinerary -- and opportunity abounds. Thanks to Kim Erno, director of the Lutheran Center in Mexico City, Phil Anderson, director of the Central American desk of the LWF, Cesar Acevedo, director of Augsburg's Central American wing of their Center for Global Education, and our incomparable hosts at Santa Clara University's Casa de la Solidaridad, Kevin and Trena Yonkers-Talz, we'll have plenty to do.

Though I couldn't have told you a year ago, this trip is about Romero, his witness, and his dedication to the people of El Salvador.

Finally, I'm packing as if -- I won't return. It's advice fellow traveler Kathy Gower passed on: "Pack as if you were never coming back." Of course, I have appointments scheduled and trips planned, classes to prepare and articles to write after our return on the 26th. The calendar is full of concerts, dinners, and dear, dear friends.

This time, though, I'm closing things down. I finished one article and submitted edits on another, both of which could have waited until my return. I read and graded a fine set of papers before leaving. All of those could have waited. And in a larger way, I find myself trying to leave behind as more peace and less clutter.

Not a bad way to travel -- even if you're not going anywhere.

Last leg of pilgrimage: What are we looking for?

2010-03-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

On Friday, March 19th, we leave for the final leg of our pilgrimage grant: El Salvador. We visit Santa Clara University's semester-long immersion program at the Casa de la Solidaridad located at the Jesuit-run University of Central America. Students in the program have been studying, living, and working in the community since January, and we arrive just after a visit from their parents.

"What are you looking for?" asked one of our hosts.

I'd just given a retreat that considered that question. It's the way we meet Jesus in John's gospel, literally the first words out of his mouth. It's a rather extraordinary introduction.

Disciples of John the Baptist have been tailgating him, and Jesus suddenly wheels around and confronts them: "What are you looking for?" As is so often the case in John's gospel, that question only prompts another. In response, the disciples ask: "Where are you staying?"

Crowded into a single verse (1:38), both questions prompt responses that range from the superficial to the profound. Jesus could have given them directions to his current digs -- or a map like the one above. The disciples are looking for the Messiah, an identity their master, John the Baptizer, has steadfastly refused to claim. So they have a very specific and overt agenda.

But the questions also expose their own deepest longings, complex and unstated in this text --or any text. What are they really looking for? Safety? Comfort? Meaning? An end to Roman occupation of the promised land?

The response to the second question is simple, evocative: "Come and see." As as is always the case in John's gospel -- and possibly in life as well, the action unfolds from questions left hanging in the air. Perhaps action is the best response.

So what are we looking for? Like the disciples, our responses have a broad range.

On the surface, we seek conversation with students and directors of this program: what have they been looking for and what have they found? How have they structured the program to meet these goals?

Further down, we're looking for how immersion compares to pilgrimage, its similarities and differences. We've got some ideas, and we want to see how close they are to the reality on the ground.

Finally, though, I suspect we seek something that pushes every pilgrim out of her familiar surroundings. Walter Burghardt SJ calls it "a long, loving look at what is real." What does that look like in this setting?

Like Mexico El Salvador's economy is deeply impacted by the United States', more so because they use US dollars, having abandoned the colon as their common currency. We'll see effects of globalization and trade agreements that favor our own country and dis-favor our host's. We'll survey the impact of a civil war in which the United States sided against the majority will, lending arms and training to the opposition. We'll see more "collateral damage" from a military trained at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia. All of this we will see.

There will be lots to look at: here's hoping we keep focused.

"A long loving look at what is real" demands a steady gaze -- and an open heart.

We're also hoping for announcement of the beatification process for Archbishop Oscar Romero, rumored to be announced by Rome on the thirtieth anniversary marking his assassination, March 24, 2010.

He took "a long, loving look at what is real" -- and sided with his people.

A pilgrimage into prayer: Two paths

2010-02-27T09:12:00.000-08:00

Pilgrims -- people walking -- attend to their feet. They have to: feet determine speed, progress, and levels of pain. While hiking the Camino, we posted endlessly about our feet. I shopped for moleskin the way I shop for lipstick back home.

Pray-ers -- people praying -- attend to their hands. Indeed, praying means doing something with hands other than texting, typing, and gripping a steering wheel. Pray-ers either fold their hands together, as if trying to keep them away from all manual distractions, or they keep them open and ready to receive. Martin Luther wished he could pray "like my dog at table waits for a bone."

The pilgrimage of the moment leads through the mysterious terrain of prayer. Since Lisa and I are teaching course on comparative spiritualities, Lutheran and Ignatian, we're learning lots from two spiritual masters who not only wrote about prayer -- but did it.

Luther demolished an edifice of intercessors, saints and priests upon whom people could call to act as intermediaries between them and the divine mystery. The believer stood naked before the mystery, clothed only in the righteousness of Christ. I bet those hands, folded or not, were shaking. I bet those pilgrim feet were quaking.

Someone as ordinary as Luther's barber, Peter Beskendorf, noticed the nakedness -- and asked the obvious: "OK: you've taken away everyone I had praying for me. How then shall I pray?" And Luther's response comes in the form of a letter, "A Simple Way to Pray" (Luther's Works, Vol. 43). Presenting some scriptural texts, the Lord's Prayer and the Decalogue, along with the Apostle's Creed, he first invites Peter to let the text instruct him -- surprise him with a new insight, the "Aha!" moment; then, let the text prompt his gratitude -- the "thanks!" moment; then, allow the text convict him -- the moment of penance; and finally, let the text remind him of those in need of his prayer -- the moment of intercession. It is a "simple" way to pray: Luther essentially uses scripture as the foundation for prayer.

Imagine the hands above filled with words.

Ignatius' analogous form of prayer uses, not biblical words, but experience. He invites believers to look about over the day, thanking God for the day's blessings (the moment of thanks); asking for grace to see and overcome shortcomings (the moment of penance); reviewing the day for moments of desolation and consolation (the "Aha!" moment, now yielding psychological, not didactic, insight); seeking God's forgiveness (another moment of penance); and finally, planning for the future. Dennis Hamm SJ describes this form of prayer, known as the Examen (Exercises 24-43), as "rummaging for God" by moving "backwards through your day."
http://ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen/rummaging-for-god-praying-backward-through-your-day/

Imagine the hands above filled with experience, the lived experience of the one praying.

The two ways are striking in their similarity, but very different in the "stuff" of prayer. Both attend to the elements of instruction and gratitude, penance and forgiveness. But scripture and experience are very different sources to engage.

Finally, we need both: a way of reading scripture for life and a way of reading life through the eyes of scripture.

Mostly, though, I yearn to pray with the concentration of Luther's dog!

Pilgrimage to -- Pittsburgh?

2010-02-20T03:24:00.000-08:00

Pittsburgh in not on any list of pilgrimage sites; it claims no relics or special miracles. In mid-February, it's simply another city whose rivers no longer bring busy traffic. The steel mills are silent, the streets tired and empty. And it's full of grimy, slushy snow.

Yet, pilgrimage brings us here, for the Lilly Endowment, source of our pilgrimage grant, has gathered its scattered scholars and fellows here to discuss their projects for a kind of mid-course correction.

There are other elements of pilgrimage in Pittsburgh. On the Camino we would arrange to meet up with Eric the Lame or Sophie the Jazz Dancer at the day's end for a drink, so here we gather at a meeting that has been on my calendar for months. On the Camino we'd enthusiastically share strategies for the best way to treat blisters. So here we share cross-disciplinary counsel for our work, tending each others projects the way we'd tend fellow pilgrims' feet.

In the spirit of pilgrimage, we're here simply to receive.

And for busy, productive, Type A scholars, that's no small order.

In the seasons of a scholar, I would put us all at mid-career. We're past the scramble for tenure, with several books and a score of "important" articles under out belts. Or, better, in our backpacks. We've raised kids (at least some of us!), paid mortgages, served as administrators, contributed to our various guilds, and shaped the discipline.

In short, we're settled. And now it's time to ask the question: what have we settled for? It's the question of vocation, as Frederick Buechner put it, where do you own deepest longings meet the world's greatest needs?

I see a lot of the world in this room. We bring Spain, El Salvador, Mexico, along with questions of solidarity, immigration, globalization. Others bring Madagascar and its practices of healing, the Congo and its carnage, the Sudan and tribal warfare. And more than even before at a scholarly conference, I notice that people are working not simply across the centuries, but around the world.

Where will we meet that world's need? I'm eager to learn.

Yes, Lisa is here. And yes, we've been walking. We walked the bridges over Pittsburgh's three rivers, the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Monongahela.

Availability

2010-02-18T08:36:00.000-08:00

In common parlance, to be "available" means generally one thing--are you free to enter into a relationship? "How about her? Is she available?" I like this term better than "single," because singleness doesn't always imply availability. One can be single but not available emotionally (and Oh God have I met some of those!) or not available for other reasons--a consuming job, disinterest in deep relationship, recent loss.

In her comment, Marty draws an astute (as usual!) distinction between affective or emotional avaliability and literal, missional availability. I'd said in the post that the deeper dynamism of availability means availability to love, to be called deeper into connection.

In Ignatian spirituality, we have one ultimate call. We are to be available for whatever--and whomever--God calls us to, with Jesus our companion, for the kingdom. It's as simple as that. But the call can take so many forms, even in one person's life. In my first post on availaiblity in Ignatian tradition, I talked about literal vs. affective availability, and argued that we are called to affective availability. d. Affective availability is what Jesuit general Pedro Arrupe was getting at when he advised people to “Fall in love...” to give themselves wholly over. Our literal availability, however that plays itself out, is always in the service of that deeper freedom to love. Here a similar distinction, between availability to projects and availability to people.
--By projects I mean anything from personal initiatives like working to keep music education in schools, to jobs, to careers to professions to religious life. Availability that cannot encompass commitment to long-term projects is no longer Ignatian and risks that we become flighty and unreliable, unable to follow through on our commitments. HOWEVER, there is no project that can claim our ultimate loyalty. Jesus and the Kingdom have our final loyalty. Availability does mean that we are free to discern whether the time for our involvement in a particular endeavor is over, whether because it can sustain itself without our help or because its time is past or, most significantly, because continuing in this project is keeping us from being available for more urgent needs, including needs of other people and needs of our own. We are not free to commit ourselves to self-destruction.

In the Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius lays it out: "For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created." Why are we created? "To praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save our souls."

Created things. Not people. His examples are goods, not people. Availability for people in Ignatian spirituality, I think, follows a slightly different rule. Availability in its Ignatian sense does not mean non-attachment to people because the fundamental call of Christ to those who would follow him is to love God and others as well as we can. Indeed, availability in its Ignatian sense means that we strive to be available to love and serve. To apply the Principle and Foundation to people would make this a profoundly narcissistic spirituality. Plus, serving God implies prioritizing what God prioritizes, and God seems to care about people rather a lot--viz. Jesus. For Christians, it is absurd to think of love of God apart from love of neighbor, and some neighbors are closer than others, and have different kinds of claims on us.
HOWEVER, one of the challenging things about Ignatian spirituality is that we do bring the same dynamism of discernment and response—apostolic availability—to relationships as well. Established relationships that are not easy to leave behind command a greater fidelity than shallower relationships. In general, I’d suggest that the more essential a relationship is, the more important it is to ask first: “How might God be asking/inviting me to look at how this relationship can be fixed, perhaps by showing me acutely what’s not good now?” Even here, though, radical availability means that we are discerning through the lens of who and how God calls us to be, not merely making a prudential decision. And at some point in most close relationships, the question to be pondered becomes less, as the song says, “should I stay or should I go?” than “Why am I staying today?” A richer reflection drawing on previous consolation when desolate, and aware of the dangers of making important decisions in desolation—or consolation!
Ignatian availability isn’t the same as non-attachment. In fact, sometimes availability implies passionate attachment to projects or people, but only and insofar as they are part of a well-discerned response to the initiative of God and our perception of the needs of the others in our lives. Good love--great love--is a call from God to be available. "Is she available?" I hope so.

Tourism and Pilgrimage

2010-02-14T21:39:00.000-08:00

The current Christian Century has a nifty interview with travel maven Rick Steves in support of his new book, Travel as a Political Act. Along the way, he’s asked about the distinction between tourism and pilgrimage. He describes travel as like pilgrimage:

“The system encourages you to be a tourist, because the system is an economic engine. You are led to believe that you need to be a consumer, that you need a fancy hotel, that you need to take a fancy tour. You will go home having done some predictable things—just what the advertising told you would happen.

–snip–

You could go to Africa and take in all the finest golf courses and come home having learned nothing. Or you could go to Africa and drink tea with local people, help them out in different ways and gain empathy for them. You’d come home changed. That’s being a traveler. Travelers and pilgrims are people who are connecting, learning, challenging themselves and not doing what’s predictable.”

In the interview he also mentions Americans' ethnocentrism as a besetting sin. We downplay Jesus' option for the poor, and tend not to ask questions about structures of oppression. He suggests that this might be why Mother Teresa was beloved while Oscar Romero was assassinated--he asked the "why?", and she did not. (Or, in the words of the prophet Jackson Browne, "But if anyone should interfere with the business of why there ARE poor, they get the same as the rebel Jesus..") In sum, RIck Steves the Lutheran seems wholly formed in Catholic Social Teaching. Go Rick!

I think we've been pilgrims both in Spain and in Mexico City in Steves' sense. In Spain I suppose we were pretty predictable pilgrims, as pilgrims go. In Mexico City, though, we were engaged more in the kinds of questions that Steves points to--questions of structural sin, especially in the ways the US has affected Mexico. In Spain, a first-world nation like our own, there seemed less opportunity to ask quesitons of whole-nation issues than there was in Mexico. But of course, there are poor folk in Sppain too. Did we meet them on the camino? Not really--on the camino we were comfortable people temporarily uncomfortable by choice. There was solidarity, but not the same sort...

Writing into the silence: Journaling prayer

2010-02-12T08:40:00.000-08:00

Here's the question: if something is important enough to assign to our students, shouldn't we -- their professors -- do it as well?

The question has come up in two contexts of late, so it seems like something I ought to attend to.

The first context is the whole question of immersion: we require it of our students, because multiculturalism is a value that directs teaching and learning at our institutions. Doesn't it follow that professors should go too? And not as teachers, but as learners, experiencing what their students do -- along with them? My answer is a hearty "Yes!" I'm working with a subcommittee of my faculty to make it both possible and required of all faculty.

Doubtless related, the second context for the question is the class Lisa and I teach this semester on comparative spiritualities, Lutheran and Ignatian. Yes, it's one of the "deliverables" of our grant on pilgrimage, now taking on a life of its own. We also wanted the course to be a course not just ABOUT spiritual experience, but IN it.

So we asked students to keep a prayer journal, chronicling their life of prayer. We haven't given much direction to this -- Ignatius and Luther are far more directive! In short, we don't care how they pray, we just care that they pray.

That second context prompted the question we asked ourselves last week: "Gosh, shouldn't we be doing this as well?" And of course, the answer is another hearty "Yes!"

So I started mine. With pencil and glue stick, I started. I actually know a few things about how I need to journal. Journals, unlike books, get to be three-dimensional. They must have pockets and images, things that fold out and things that get tucked in. Because journals help me pay attention, anything that catches my attention gets imported.

But I've only kept journals for travel, for pilgrimage, for immersion. Never for prayer. I'll figure out what's different.

Here's what's the same: Journals function as a kind of retrospective map. They tell you where you've been, not where you're going. You can trace the trajectory of the past in any way you want, but ahead of you -- yet to come -- is only blank, beautiful pages.

It's a little scary, like medieval maps of the world, which depicted the "known" world in exquisite detail, then drifted off into a "terra incognita" populated by fearsome sea monsters. Another example: I was in East Berlin back before the Berlin Wall fell. I bought a map of the city, which showed the streets and tram lines in elaborate detail. But beyond the Wall there was -- nothing! No sign of West Berlin, no sign of the West at all.

That's both the invitation -- and fear! -- behind a journal. All the beautiful detail of what came before. All the blankness of what lies ahead. Depending on where your head is at the moment, keeping one can be either a challenge -- or a terror.

Here's all I know: those blank pages will soon be filled, with images as yet unseen, poems as yet undiscovered, and graces abundant.

Re-Entry reconsidered: What marks the way -- when there are no markers

2010-02-06T08:29:00.000-08:00

On the Camino to Santiago, we found our way forward by looking for yellow arrows. Hiking out of Pamplona on the first day was hardest. We made several wrong turns before we found them. We weren't used to looking.

Gradually we got our eyes accustomed to the logic of the arrows: where they would be, when they would be, how they'd be displayed. And we began seeing them everywhere.

In time, we found other "markers." Two fellow Camin-istas, one from California and the other from Australia, became markers: they walked our pace; they stopped as frequently as we did. Whenever I saw Linda and Nancy in some cafe or bar, I felt like I was on the right path. Or the English couple we kept running into -- always in cathedrals. Or the Irish couple we shared so many cafe con leches with. These were all markers.

So what marks the path when the Camino is over? That's the question I keep asking. One has surfaced in the last week: it's not a coincidence.

In July I will assume the Bernhard M. Christensen Chair at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. Former president of the College, Christensen was also a teacher and writer. It seemed fitting to find out what he'd written, and I set off for the library to search, emerging with a slim volume entitled, "The Inward Pilgrimage: An Introduction to Christian Spiritual Classics" (Augsburg Publishing House, 1976, 1996). The word "pilgrimage" stood out. Way out. Not a coincidence.

Inviting readers to "walk through the centuries in the company of good friends of God," Christensen introduces his own hiking companions. They cross the centuries: Augustine, the Desert Fathers, Thomas a Kempis, Martin Luther, St. Teresa of Avila, Brother Lawrence, John Bunyan, Soren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, along with the authors of the Russian spiritual classic "The Way of a Pilgrim" and medieval Italian stories that comprise "The Little Flowers of St. Francis." These are his "markers."

I'll have additional traveling companions. Thanks to the dear Lisa, I will add Ignatius Loyola to the group, for we collaborate this semester in a course on Lutheran and Ignatian spiritualities. Maybe that's how I can add to the rich Christensen legacy.

It feels like this is the right path.

Re-Entry II--Feral Life

2010-02-03T20:59:00.000-08:00

Yes, the question of re-entry is a tough one. Our last day in Mexico City, our group discussed what we would do, concretely, when we returned. I admit I was a tad annoyed. "I don't know yet," I huffed inwardly. "I need to process all this." Yet...yet...I returned to Berkeley a swift two weeks before classes were to start, with 2 syllabi not complete, students un-met, pre-semester meetings, then more meetings, taxes to do, etc. etc. People I hadn't seen that I was eager to be back in touch with. Old injured relationships that began to ache again when I returned to this context. My usual life swept over me with a powerful undertow. "I was in Mexico City? Who was I there, and how am I different now?"

Who was I there? Well, again I felt the tug of feral life, of knowing that all that I work to sustain here isn't necessary. Some of what I sustain here is very good, and some isn't so good. Feral life means, to me, to be pared down closer to what is actually necessary, and to be free to have or not to have the rest, or, more precisely, to be able to weigh its value. There is a tension between feral life and responsibility--I do not want to cede responsibility, professional or personal. That way lies infantilization. But to be able to let go of many of the tasks and roles that mark my daily life here is a nice reminder that I shouldn't just accept it all uncritically, and that I am not, when all is said and done, defined by what I do or don't do.

Feral life is a reminder of the importance of availability, the central dynamism of Ignatian spirituality. To be available is to be in a stance of readiness to respond to whatever God is calling us to, wherever, however. When Ignatius launched the Society of Jesus, he thought of availability literally, that his guys should be ready to travel wherever they were needed, right off, no hesitation. Later, though, with the founding of schools, the Jesuits couldn't be so flighty--in order that the Society as a whole be available to respond to the urgent need for good schools, some members' literal availability was curtailed.

Availability, fundamentally, is less about stuff you do than about who and how we love. People who are literally available all the time never form deep relationships, never carry important responsibility for others. To be thoroughgoingly available means that we must be ready to be called to have our literal availability curtailed for the deeper freedom to be with and for another. We cannot be truly available to respond to God if we have already marked out the parameters of our availability to human beings.

I suspect that good parents know this almost by instinct. To hold a newborn in your arms is to be overwhelmed by the drive to nurture and protect, to be available for whatever this phenomenally vulnerable little kid might need, forever. Availability of this deeper kind is manifested in commitment, not refusal of commitment.

Availability is, in part, willingness to have your heart broken, to have your imagination strained, to be willing to care for people even though your caring for them won't fix their problems. Immersion invites us to be available to a new set of stories, a new set of loves, a new piece of God's world to be joyful, grateful, and, sometimes tearful, for. I hope I am better at that.

Re-Entry All Over Again

2010-01-27T09:54:00.001-08:00

The American Friends of the Camino just accepted a piece I did on "Re-Entry" for its January newsletter. I wrote the piece months ago and barely remember what it's about.

The news prompted an even more urgent question: What is re-entry like this time, after our immersion in Mexico City?

The airports in both San Francisco and Mexico City are very much alike: sleek, steel, and impenetrable. The lines of SFO's new International Terminal, pictured above, look like an architect's drawing of galley ships, inverted over the passengers, counters, and shops. A week ago I stepped from the terminal onto BART. Within the hour, I left the platform for the upscale elegance of Rockridge's Market Hall, where the shops were sparkling and everyone was buying buying buying. It was a seamless transition from the world inside the airport to the world beyond. I relaxed immediately.

In Mexico City, there's more dissonance between the world inside the terminal and the world outside. Outside, a fortress mentality holds sway, with stucco walls on one side of a sidewalk and frantic traffic on the other. The stucco is pocked and faded; concertina wire curls around the tops of walls -- or broken shards of glass pressed into fresh concrete. Iron grills shield windows and doors from possible entry. Don't even think about re-entry.

We passed through miles and miles of this Riot Renaissance architecture, interrupted only by the occasional WalMart or OfficeMax. I remember thinking that these corporate imports from El Norte were the true home invaders. When we got to our residence, we entered a gated compound which required keys, codes, and phone numbers for access. All my defenses were on high alert. I started noticing everything: my life might depend on it.

Immersion is like that: all antennae are out, because your disorienation is so acute and your surroundings are so different -- and sometimes dangerous. In contrast, with pilgrimage, the monotony of walking for hours on end invites a different kind of attention. The outer landscape doesn't change much, because you're not moving that fast. Out of sheer boredom, you attend to an inner landscape. It's as if the antennae retract, focusing instead on the soul.

Yet, despite the difference, both pilgrimage and immersion pare things down to the essentials. On the Camino, we literally shed stuff, partly because we'd brought too much and partly because we discovered only by walking what we really needed. I returned to a house that seemed cluttered, a life that seemed unnecessarily complicated. I've been simplifying.

On immersion, we lived lower on the food chain that we'd been used to in the States. Juana, our dear cook, was a genius at figuring out exactly how much to prepare for us. Any leftovers appeared in puddings and soups. We always took public transportation, not wishing to add any more diesel fumes to the already polluted atmosphere.

Most impressive: we enjoyed the lavish hospitality of people who lived with a lot less than we did. We visited homes in the settlement community of La Estacion in Cuernavaca. For us, plastic chairs had been borrowed, cleaned, and arranged in a living room with a corrugated roof and wooden doors for walls. For us, dirt floors had been swept clean. We visited a campesino movement headquarters in downtown Mexico City. For us, there was free trade coffee, purified water, and all the sugar we could possibly want. Even at the compound in Mexico City, we ran into an unseasonably cold spell, chilling the unheated concrete block structures. For us, there were blankets -- and we were allowed to wear them everywhere to keep warm, at meals, listening to presentations, watching documentaries. Such rich generosity from people who had so much less: it marked all of us deeply.

I simplify, hoping that such generosity will fill the emptiness.

Walking the Camino in Mexico City

2010-01-19T07:50:00.000-08:00

Every morning we wake early to walk. We always hope to beat traffic, but that has proved a vain hope. A government that promotes car ownership has not built the highways they need to go on, and traffic is Mexico City is among the world´s worst.

Nonetheless, the wide boulevards of Avenida Insurgentes have become our urban Camino. We walk and talk, vigilant for turning cars, but happy simply to be moving around.

We notice things on these early morning walks. Street vendors, members of the informal economy, are setting up curbside braziers to heat coffee, tea, and atole, a sweet cornmilk drink, which I smuggled into Office Max this morning. Shopkeepers take advantage of a lull in sidewalk traffic to sweep, and they are busy dispensing with a night´s worth of leaves, trash, and cigarette butts. Clubs are just closing, and tired partygoers spill onto the streets in search of coffee and cabs.

We have gotten to know some of the people we regularly pass, the vendor of atole outside the monument to Obregon in one of the city's parks, the shopkeeper where I always buy gum, and cops regulating traffic at one of the more horrific intersections.

Part of the intentional learning in this trip has been to give us ample opportunity to look, nothing more and nothing less. Then, armed with new information, we go out and look again. Because we walk every morning, I am aware of how much more I am noticing.

After an introductory lecture on the Mexican labor force, I become adept at converting the minimum wage for a day´s work (55 pesos) into the prices I see in shopwindows. After information on the "informal economy," I pay particular attention to the street vendors, who they are, how they work, what they sell, and how they get here. After hearing about social situation among mestizas and indigenous peoples, I notice the color of the faces passing by me. I have spent a lot of time looking -- and then looking again.

Looking has been a huge part of this Camino. Along with listening, we have done little else -- and we really can do little else. We haven´t built schools; we can´t revoke NAFTA, the agreement that displaced so many people from farms into the city; we can´t end racism in Mexico any more than we can end it in our own country. But we look -- and look again.

My fervent prayer is that all this looking will lead to something, for in great ways and small, this Camino, like the one we made in September, is transformative. My deep conviction is that authentic action begins with looking and listening, then asking -- as Chris Street reminded us -- "What do you want me to do for you?" It is the question Jesus asked people before he healed them. He didn´t assume anything. He didn't presume that the blind man wanted to see or that the lame man wanted to walk again. He asked first: "What do you want me to do for you?" But he asked only because he first noticed. He looked first, then listened.

This has been the shape of our Camino in Mexico City, and it's a road every bit as sacred as the road to Santiago de Compostela we hiked in September. Consider this:
we finally learned the name of the barista at the neighborhood Starbuck´s every morning, as we load up on caffeine for the morning hike. His name is Santiago.

Not a coincidence!

Pilgrimage vs. Immersion 2

2010-01-18T08:03:00.000-08:00

I said in an earlier post that the differences between pilgrimage and immersion can be thought of as analogous to the difference between substance and accident in Aristotelian metaphysics. (I’d thought for a while that pilgrimage might be the apophatic form of what immersion does in a cataphatic mode, but I decided that wasn’t strong enough.) What is substantial to one is accidental to the other. The substantive change in pilgrimage is, I think, about a kind of self-understanding, usually of finitude and limits. Therefore, we come to value the others on the trail, those who feed us, those who shelter us, those who encourage us. Immersion is substantially about those connections—we are seeking true human empathetic solidarity with specific people. We don’t learn about a given culture merely to become better at being away from home, though that happens, or at dealing with discomfort or unease, though that can happen, too. We are dropped into a culture different from our own but that’s merely the circumstance of the offered grace. I am reminded of a prison chaplain who once described some volunteers as those who “get it” and those who don’t. Those who get it are those who engage the residents on a true human-human basis, as fellow travelers on the same road.

But that doesn’t mean that showing up is unimportant. In fact, it’s irreplaceable both to pilgrimage and immersion. More is going on than a mere change of venue. Partly, I think, this is because few of us are self-aware enough to know what our emotional and ethical reflexes will be in a given situation. To stay with the prison example, we don’t know how we will react to the razor wire, what we’ll feel when the door slams behind us locking us in. We don’t know how we’ll be able to be present to someone who’s been deemed dangerous enough to need to be locked away until we show up and try. On immersion, it’s important to show up to feel the air pollution causing your own cough, to smell the grossly polluted river where children play, to see the omnipresence of American big business. McDonald’s is the most effective new American missionary, spreading the good news of the Big Mac to all corners of the globe. It’s funny until you realize how the less visible presence of American trade policies cripple local farmers’ ability to compete. It’s crucial also to see the smiles on the kids’ faces, the joy of those you meet, to hear their anger at situations where it’s impossible to get ahead, even if you work 24 hours a day. To see everywhere people sweeping the streets in the morning, despite the air pollution and the graffiti.

Showing up doesn’t mean you’ll get it. The human heart can be tough enough (or fearful enough, or scarred enough) to no longer be moved by tenderness, by compassion, or even by pity, which can be the start of empathy (but often isn’t.) But showing up means that the opportunity that we will receive the grace offered to us is all around us, in the air we breathe, in the faces we see, in our own struggles with language where we are strangers, in the welcome we receive despite our verbal and social clumsiness, in the beauty of the land, in the richness of their own cultural heritage savaged by the Spaniards. It’s all around us, just as is the grace we seek.

On Dreaming and Waking....

2010-01-17T08:27:00.000-08:00

Altitude enhances the imagination: we have all been having vivid dreams. Mexico City is higher than Denver, the "Mile High" city, by about 2000 feet. You feel the altitude going up stairs; you notice it dodging traffic; you register it in dreams.

We take to comparing dreams at breakfast, vying with each other for the most fantastic plot. Lisa laments that her dreams don´t have plots, while for others sleep delivers whole epics. We tell our dreams, noticing how experiences from the day before have imprinted the unconscious.

The Achuar peoples, an indigenous tribe in Ecuador, take dreams seriously. They are expert in discerning their meaning. The Pachamama Alliance (www.pachamama.org) grew out of a persistent dream among the Achuar elders that revealed the modern world to be caught up in a trance -- with nightmarish consequences for all the world´s peoples. They interpreted the dream to mean that the way of the eagle and the way of the condor should merge, more specifically, more consumerist/materialist cultures like those of the North, should work with more spiritual cultures like theirs toward the common dream of a more sustainable way of life for all the world´s children. The fruit of this dreaming was a global movement dedicated to a world that is environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling.

So here´s the question: how do we make our way into this world? What is the Camino we are looking for? Where are its markers? On the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, there were clear signs pointing the way ahead: yellow arrows decorated corners, telephone poles, fences. Just when we needed one, a yellow arrow would appear. The yellow arrows guided us to Santiago.

What -- and who -- will guide us to the world we seek, where the way of the eagle and the way of the condor meet?

I don't think there is a map out there waiting to be discovered. We will find the path in the walking, guided by our fellow travelers. That´s why it is important to be here.

Or, in the words of Australian aborginal elder Lila Watson:
"If you are coming to help us,
you are wasting your time;
If you are coming because your liberation is bound up with our own,
then let us walk together."

Thinking Pilgrimage in the Midst of Immersion: Part II

2010-01-17T04:38:00.000-08:00

Bodies matter -- even and especially on immersion.

I appreciate Lisa for inviting Aristotle along, but his categories miss what is really going on here.

Sure, we have learned about the history of Mexico, the impact of globalization, the forced march from an agrarian to an industrialized society by transnational corporations and a government that courts them. We have learned these ideas in the faces of people we´ve met in shanty settlements, campesino organizations, and community centers. We have learned their vibrant spirituality of resistance in signs and slogans that proclaim: Zapata vive! Romero vive! A proclamation that deliberately echoes the Easter proclamation: Christ is living! And we have responded in kind: He is living indeed!

Yes, we have learned about this spirituality. But we also live it.

We live it when we refrain from using tap water to brush our teeth, using bottled water instead. We don´t want to suffer the low-grade intenstinal discomfort that affects most of the people living here.

We live it when we succumb to the popular turista, suffering a few days of diarrhea or the rumbly gut, as our group has come to call it. The people who live here simply get used to it.

We live it when we cough, our lungs protesting the diesel fumes that add to pollution throughout the urban areas. As he hacked his way through his talk, UNAM sociologist Ross Gandy told us last week: the air in Mexico City will kill you. We live it when we sit in traffic in a nation that adores cars, but hasn´t developed the infrastructure for everyone who owns one to drive it.

We live it when we take in the sickly sweet smell of sewage in the Cuernavaca neighborhood of San Anton, where activists had to form a coalition of federal, university, and municipal forces to get a sewage line built. The line will carry waste that had been dumped directly into the stream at the bottom of the ravine. San Anton still smells, because there are no activists upstream, and the neighborhoods there are still dumping.

Immersion forces us to live the spirituality of the people -- if only temporarily -- in hopes that that experience will be transformative. Immersion etches the realities of poverty on our bodies. In pilgrimage, our feet taught us the spirituality of the Camino. Immersion is a full-body experience. Once again, the body mentors the soul.

For the sad fact is this: we haven´t learned much we didn´t already know. We haven´t learned much we couldn´t have read at home drinking clean (relatively at least) tap water, using flush toilets that run into a city sewer main, and leaping into our cars for a long ride on the freeway when we couldn´t handle any more knowledge.

Information does not transform people. It is not the case that if we just knew what was going on, we would do something to change it. That was Plato´s conviction: if you know the good, you will do it. Plato was wrong. We know the good; we just look the other way.

It´s Paul who was right: "...for I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." (Romans 7:19)

The only way toward change is to rub people´s face in reality. The only way toward transformation is to tattoo reality to their bodies. That´s what immersion does. It etches life on people´s bodies, indelible markings, so that they will never forget.

I´m glad Aristotle is with us: he might learn something.

Pilgrimage and Immersion, Substance and Accidents

2010-01-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

I am beginning to think of the differences between pilgrimage and immersion in terms of Aristotelian epistemology, specifically, in terms of substance and accidents. While there are broad parallels between the two, what is substantial to one is merely accidental to the other, and vice versa.

On the camino, we were engaged in an opportunity for self-transformation through the difficulties of the trail. We came face to face with finitude, we wrestled with fatigue and pain, (I recall again Joan Baez’ lovely lyric about the “huddled hikers…and their personal acquaintance with pain,”) and we came to understand the power and the challenge of “step, then take another step, then step again,” to get further on the trail. The transformation can be expressed best, I think, in terms of self-knowledge, which included the knowledge that we needed others, especially those Spaniards who cared for us in hostels and restaurants, and our companions on the trail.

The center, though, the substance, was that self-transformation. It was profoundly spiritual, and for those of us of religious bent, our religion provided stories and frameworks in which to connect our new selves with the new selves of anyone meeting up with the living God. Pilgrims are useless people, really not offering much to the places we travel, except, perhaps, the witness of people looking steady-eyed (or bleary-eyed,) at our own finitude, our need for others, our dependence on the graces of body, companions, and surroundings. Our shared weaknesses, we discovered, became a foundation for community of a kind, though there were others who walked essentially solo. We all needed others, but the particulars of who and what we needed, was less significant. It was much more an individual transformation, though we learned about our need for others.

Finitude is accidental to immersion. It is no less true—we have (most of us,) limited language skills, we depend on those who care for us with food and shelter, we may experience some degree of physical struggle (though we haven’t, with the exception of those of us suffering from Montezuma’s revenge…) No, the substance of immersion is empathy, a holistic solidarity with a specific situation or group. If we leave Mexico without both an intellectual and a visceral care for those we’ve met, the genius of the culture and the struggles they face, and a sense of the role—too often shameful—of our nation and the Catholic Church in making those struggles more difficult, then we have failed to be open to the substantial grace of immersion.

I had a pretty clear grasp of how a pilgrim should return before I headed out on the camino. Returning from immersion is more difficult, less clear. That’s part of what an immersion should do, perhaps, is to call forth further discernment on the fundamental question of Christian faith—now what? Pilgrims come back more solid, immersion-experience people come back disturbed, less stable than before, since our friends are in radically unstable, dangerous places, which our own institutions have too often served to make worse.

Ray Plankey and God in All Things

2010-01-16T07:35:00.000-08:00

Ray Plankey is the founder of CCIDD, where we now have landed these past few days. Ray began his career as a rocket scientist, literally, working on the first ICBM’s back in the 1960’s. Responding to Pope John XXIII’s call for North Americans to be missionaries to Latin America, he decamped for Chile. Over time, he began to realize that the important dynamic of reverse mission was not being attended to. The standard (and spiritually dangerous!) notion that the norteamericanos “bring God” to the pagan masses in the south is simply not true. While the northerners may bring valuable education and insight, they also receive valuable education and insight—at least if they are paying attention.
This is a central dynamic in Ignatian spirituality, to “seek God in all things.” As a pilgrim spirituality, people of Ignatian bent continually look for what God has already been up to, especially in situations we might not have thought to check out before. When we’re doing this well, it makes us profoundly humble, as we perceive the vast variety of ways humanity has perceived and responded to the Holy One. God does play in 10,000 places.
But sometimes our religious formation militates against this insight. While people who experience themselves as forgiven, redeemed, and transformed in Christ rightly seek to share this experience with others, the older missionary tendency is to think that unless “God plays in 10,000 places, always exactly the same way,” that we betray our call. We then ignore our own blindnesses, and, historically and still, this is where Christians turn from the path of Christ to the path of the Conquistador. Not only might we not see what God is up to in a new place (or newly in a familiar place,) we might well destroy God’s handiwork in God’s own name. I cannot imagine that God looks benignly on such atrocity.
So Ray founded the CCIDD in the 1970's to foster experiential learning in the service of reverse mission, that the people who come here are open to the possibility of growing in empathy by meeting people, pay attention to what is happening within themselves as they encounter God in a new place, and be enabled to communicate this experience (along with knowledge of a more academic kind they also get here,) to others when they get home. Good system. I wonder how our churches would change if we thought of this as the norm for training clergy?
Ray says the Latin American Church has a prophetic message for the norteamericano Church. A prophet, by definition, is a person who communcates what's on God's mind to the people. First, of course, a prophet has to have some grasp of what God's up to. A humble prophet still speaks clearly and with conviction, but doesn't claim to possess the totality of God's self-communication. Yup--that's what the Church could use more of now. Humble prophets.

Finding Guadalupe in Cuernavaca

2010-01-14T18:13:00.000-08:00

We left Mexico City on Wednesday and head for Cuernavaca, a beautiful colonial city about 90 minutes away. Cuernavaca functions as a kind of escape valve for the City, and anyone who can afford to get away does. With some regularity.

Cortez had a palace here, a veritable fortress. His mistress, La Malinche, has a house here, expressing her own indigenous roots. But Cuernavaca is also home to 10,000 displaced campesinos, who squat on a piece of land that used to be a stop on the Union Pacific line, until cars and busses supplanted trains as the major transportation between Mexico City and Cuernavaca.

La Estacion is now their home, as they left the countryside they had farmed for generations. Crops that fed their families for generations no longer brought in enough to support their families. These family farms were bought up by corporations claiming to be the supermarkets of the world. The people who worked the land moved to the city trying to scrape together enough to feed their families. These are the families we visited in La Estacion.

In preparation for our visits to homes in the settlement, we were told simply to do nothing more -- and nothing less -- than listen. And the stories we heard. My family had come from Taxco, where they had farmed. When farming could no longer support the family, they came to La Estacion, following other members of their family. The father of the family worked in a mercado, and his hours were long. The mother worked in the home. Instead of raising her food, she struggled to buy rice, beans, and tortillas to keep the family fed.

As we talked with her, two children floated in and out of a living room covered with a corrugated tin roof. We asked what they wanted to be when they grew up: the girls was going to be a lawyer, her brother a fireman. We asked their mother what her hopes were: health and a good future for her children.

I looked around the living room as she spoke. There was a bed behind where we were sitting; behind a piece of cloth with Batman flying all over it was another bed. Behind a cardboard wall was the children`s room, and I could see toys on the dirt floor.

There was a crucifix in the living with a corpus on it, a magazine photo of an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The family was clearly Catholic; I tried to find the Guadalupe shrine, a customary presence.

I realize I was looking into her face.

Remembering Pilgrimage in the Midst of an Immersion....

2010-01-12T14:10:00.001-08:00

This afternoon, I rent computer time from the Office Max near the Lutheran Center in Mexico City, contributing to the transnational corporations that the leader of a campesino movement we met with this morning charged with exploitation. Next to me are three other members of our delegation. And across the street sits Lisa at a Starbucks, where there is free WiFi. We stop here every morning on one of our early morning hikes up Avenida Insurgentes into the heart of the city.

I am noticing....

On the first day of our program, Director of the ELCA Lutheran Center Kim Erno gave us the most important conversion rate. It wasn´t from dollars into pesos. It was from pesos to pesos, converting the required daily wage $55 (here the $ sign is used to signify pesos)/day into the prices of the goods we see in shop windows, the food we see in grocery stores. In the Office Max where I sit on the computer, there would not be much that $55 will buy. Maybe the box of rubber bands in the photo, but little else. Indeed, it would cost half a day´s wages to pay for the hour I will be on this computer.

I am noticing....

I am also trying to parse the similarities and differences between pilgrimage and immersion. This immersion in Mexico City is the follow-up to our pilgrimage to Santiago in September. We hypothesized that immersion is the post-modern version of the ancient practice of pilgrimage.

How does that hypothesis look now?

I have to say that pilgrimage is much more individual, immersion more communal. While I learned a lot about myself on pilgrimage, immersion makes me look long and hard at my country and its complicity in a global economy that has had devastating impact on Mexico. In language dear to my tradition, I have to ask how well we serve this place, our nearest neighbor? The answer is shockingly clear: not well at all.

At the campesino organization we visited this morning, leaders spelled out the consequences of trade agreements and privatization on a country that used to be able to feed its own people, but now cannot compete in a world market. Unemployment spikes, land is wrested from the people and put into corporate hands, fields that used to support a way of life become a tourist corridor. Mexico risks becoming a theme park that its own people will not be able to afford to visit.

That´s one difference: pilgrimage probes the individual soul, immersion exposes a more corporate or national psyche.

This leads to another comparison. In an earlier post, I examined how pilgrimage -- and any religious practice -- uses the body to mentor the soul. All of our best spiritual insights on pilgrimage came from our feet. One of the more humble body parts turns out to have lots to say about spirituality.

Immersion may be similar -- only the body part changes. Instead of registering insight through our feet, we are taking things in with the eyes. Moving around the city, we simply look. It looks pretty much like any bustling metropolis in the United States: Wall-Mart, 7-11, Office Max are here too. That´s part of the problem. Other international corporations masquerade under a Spanish name. And everywhere, even in the wealthiest neighborhoods of San Angel or Coyoacan, are the street vendors, representatives of an informal economy that is run by campesinos run off their land.

Of course, we talk about what we see, but looking comes first. After the lectures, we head back into the City, literally for a second look. We see more the second time around. Even more on the third.

We are all deeply moved, and the question haunts us: what will we do with all this new knowledge? What will change?

Immersion dumps you into another culture, demanding that you do nothing more -- and nothing less! -- than notice.

I am noticing....

Snapshots from a Sunday: Mexico City

2010-01-11T13:44:00.000-08:00

On Sunday we broke from a few days of intense presentation and reflection to see the City. When we surfaced from the Metro, we were right in front of the Palacio Nacional at the City´s Center. The fabled Zocalo of Mexico City, once a place for public gathering, is now occupied by a large ice-skating rink. I read about it in the New York Times, as a ´human interest´story, which largely recounted the rise in ER visits with broken bones docs had never seen before and the delight of citizens in this almost tropical clime to be able to ice-skate.

The article didn´t mention the fact that the skating rink took up all available space for public protest and organizing.

Not a coincidence.

We began the day with a detailed tour of Diego Rivera´s murals depicting the history of the Mexican peoples, from its pre-Hispanic origins to the mid-1950s, when Rivera became too ill to finish painting. Rivera was both artist and political activist -- and he let no ice-skating rinks get in his way. With passionate energy, he painted the life of the pre-Conquest peoples in Central America,the impact of the Conquest and subsequent colonialization. It´s a history told in images both vibrant and brutal, and it communicated that story to people who may not have been able to read. But could certainly look. By looking, they could see beyond the skating rinks.

And on Sunday, a lot of people were looking.

We finished the day at a small Catholic parish halfway up one of the surrounding mountains. The Parish of St. Peter the Martyr has been outspoken in support of campesino rights, so much so that the Lady of Guadalupe there could have been wearing a black ski mask like Sub-Commandante Marcos.

We were warmly welcomed to the Mass, on a day that commemorated the Feast Day of the Baptism of Jesus. The priest highlighted the divine words from heaven: you are my beloved child; with you I am well-pleased. And the sermon -- as much as I could understand of it --was all about love and water, both increasingly scarce resources in this benighted planet.

The waters of baptism were our common bond with these Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. We were invited to celebrate the meal of Jesus our Brother. In response, we sang for the congregation. In Lutheran style, four-part harmony.

We left in the gathering darkness of an unseasonably cold night. But before we left, the parish assistant, a woman who had led the singing, asked if we would oblige her with yet another song, Amazing Grace. She said it had been sung at her sister´s funeral in Texas -- and she loved the music. We sang our hearts out.

As we left, she thanked us with the following words:

You have come to us like the Wise Men from the East, and you have come to see the Christ child in the manger of Latin America. Take what you have seen back with you.

We will, we will.

And we will keep looking into that manger.

Guadalupe: A Virgen de la O

2010-01-08T12:32:00.000-08:00

I found another Virgen de la O: Our Lady of Guadalupe. The belt she wears signals this. Anyone indigenous would have understood this immediately. I, however, had to be told. The belt ties above her expanding waist, rather than around it. She is a Virgen de la O, her pregnancy hidden by a cloth that is filled with floral images.

As I mentioned earlier, we found her scattered throughout the surrounding neighborhoods. She can't be colonized by churches and structures; she won't submit to boundaries. She's as at home in a shoe store as on a street corner. She's wherever the people are; she gravitates to the periphery. In short, our Lady of Guadalupe has a great centrifugal force. She scatters well.

But she also has great centripetal pull as well. She draws people to places they would not otherwise inhabit. Earlier this week, on the feast day of the Epiphany, we found ourselves at the Basilica in Tepeyac, where Juan Diego encountered this Virgen de la O. The plaza in front of the basilica was huge -- and it was full of people. Some walked on their knees to see the Lupita; others were out for a family holiday, pushing grandmothers in wheelchairs and pulling tired kids. Photographs with the Guadalupe were available (for a modest fee). People in one of the adjoining chapels said a perpetual rosary. It was a place of enormous energy.

In the center of the square was a large manger scene -- Mexican style. Jesus rested on a pallet in the middle of a barnyard, complete with hens, roosters, and turkeys. Of course the obligatory lambs and shepherds were present, even a few angels, but inexplicably there was an elephant come to visit the Christ Child. Who knew?!

My favorite figure was one of the Magi, nearer the fence surrounding the entire scene. At his feet were pieces of paper, folded prayers thrown at his feet. There were about twenty of them around this single figure in the scene.

Two other images struck me. One was a rough wooden figure of a man, arms stretched out in blessing, next to a side door of the main cathedral. This simple piece stood out in the midst of more elaborate processional figures in baroque cases with gilt frames. A rack of ribbons fluttered in the breeze beside him. On one side of these brightly colored ribbons was the stamped name of one of the city parishes -- and more written prayers.

Close by was a painting of two men sitting with a blue ball at their feet. As I moved in on the piece, I realized the blue ball was the earth. A bird hovered above the men, and the figure on the left had both feet planted firmly on the earth, while the right had one foot on the earth, the other in the air. An image of the Trinity! Jesus was the one with his feet planted firmly on the ground.

And who presided over all of this? The beautiful Guadalupe, another image of the Virgen de la O.

Yes!

Mexico City -- and Epiphany´s Gifts

2010-01-05T15:35:00.000-08:00

I think this is my fifth trip to Mexico City, so I´ve been here quite literally a handful of times. Once was for an academic conference in 1985 on Justice and justification, held at the Lutheran Center. The second and third times bookended language school in Cuernavaca, and we stayed on the edge of Chapultepec Park, where we braved both altitude and pollution and went running every morning. Then I made a trip with another Diego Rivera afficionado, and we moved around the City to find all the murals we could find. By definition, this is art that doesn´t travel, and ours was a great way to focus travel in this bustling, world-class city. Now I´m here on an immersion trip.

I´ve been here as an academic, a tourist, and a culturalista. Now, I´m here as a pilgrim. Is there a difference?

I´m not presenting a paper, and I´m not consuming the sights, cultural, touristic, or gastronomic. I notice that I´ve slid into receptive mode. I´m simply letting this experience wash over me. After all, this isn´t a service learning trip, and we´re not building schools or working in an orphanage. We´re here to listen, to learn, and maybe above all, to look.

Here´s what I´ve seen, three vivid images.

We flew out on Mexicana, and I was seated next to a Mexican grandmother who was heading home to visit family. Like most academics, Lisa and I travel with books, articles, words of all kinds, and before the plane took off we were buried in them.

Yet of all the words we had spread out on the tray tables, the ones that caught my seatmate´s eye were the words in the painting above, which were on the cover of one of my books. Rogier van der Weyden´s painting of the baptism of Jesus features the painted words of God the Father as his Son was baptized: This is my beloved son, with whom I am well-pleased. Listen to him.

As we were served breakfast, she pointed to the painting. She knew what it was. But she couldn´t read the words. And she said to me in Spanish: I don´t know how to read. Unfortunately, I didn´t know how to translate them into Spanish very well. But we smiled in mutual recognition of an icon that transcended the language barrier.

Breakfast came: omelettes and refried beans. I ordered water; she washed hers down with a Tecate and promptly fell asleep.

Then this morning Lisa and I were up at dawn for an early morning walk before breakfast. It was about 45 degrees, and everyone was bundled up like it was below zero. It was chilly. But clearly for the Mexicanos, it was downright cold. Scarves covered the mouths of many people we passed -- which might have been protection against both the pollution and the cold.

Finally, this afternoon we walked around the neighboring San Angel area. Kim Erno, director of the Lutheran Center, pointed out a shrine to the Virgin at a gas station at the end of our street. Nuestra Señora de la Benzin! He got me looking, and I found shrines to the Virgin everywhere. There were three in a shrine on a street corner -- Nuestra Señora de la Esquina! One was the Guadalupe, the other was a Spanish virgin with light blue robes, a muted version of her Mexican sister. And the third was wearing bright indigenous traje, maybe recalling the Aztec goddess Tonantzin, who was the origin of the iconography of the Guadalupe.

Starting to count, we stopped when we reached 28. All of these shrines had been carefully tended and recently adorned for Christmas.

I find these shrines consoling: when you being to notice the Virgin, you realize she´s everywhere!

Keep your eyes open.

p.s. if you double click on the photo, you will see the whole photo. Sorry I couldn´t shrink it.

Education for -- what? More reflections on Luther and Ignatius

2009-12-30T07:57:00.000-08:00

We leave for Mexico City in less than a week, and this will be one of our stops: the city dump, a food source for too many of the city's poor. This exposure will be part of our education, and images like this will unsettle our first-world lives.

That's the task of immersion: disorientation.

Some recent travel gave me the experience to reflect on how immersion gets packaged in undergraduate, graduate, and -- in our case, faculty -- experiences. In mid-December I had the opportunity to visit the college that pioneered global immersion through its Center for Global Education (CGE), the Lutheran Augsburg College in downtown Minneapolis. Augsburg states its purpose boldly: "education for service." Contrast that with the mission of the Jesuit Santa Clara University, whose immersion program in El Salvador at the Casa de la Solidaridad Lisa and I will visit in March: "education for justice."

Education for service, education for justice: is there a difference?

I think there is, and it might play into some of the differences between Lutheran and Ignatian spiritualities.

First, Luther understood vocation as a place of one's calling, and he maintained that all positions in life -- brewer, baker, mother -- were important places where God calls people to serve, not just the places of monastery or abbey. It was an pointed correction to the late-medieval valorization of religious life, but it resulted in a somewhat static sense of vocation.

For Ignatius, calling is a path -- Ignatius even called himself as a "pilgrim." Vocation is more kinetic, more in motion. You're on the move, and you're looking for direction. Discernment is crucial.

But the distinction between educating for service and educating for justice comes out of a difference between static and kinetic notions of vocation.

Second -- and related, Luther's attention to place corresponds to an emphasis on context. After all, if you find yourself inhabiting a particular space, you have time to look around. Contextual analysis is crucial.

Ignatius' attention to path and motion allows for a bigger picture. Indeed, the emphasis on justice illumines the systems and structures in which particular places are located, analysis of which is both important and natural from that angle of vision.

The distinction between educating for service and educating for justice highlights a difference between contextual and systemic analysis, between understanding a specific setting and situating that setting in a bigger picture.

Finally, Luther's emphasis on service always has the neighbor as its focus. For Luther, all the world's a neighbor. He's adamant that we bear the face of Christ to the neighbor, that the neighbor bears the face of Christ to us. I wish sometimes the neighbor just bore the face of -- the neighbor. But that's another post. Nonetheless, there's a deeply personal thrust here.

The Ignatian push for justice, almost because of its systemic nature, is more encompassing, but also less personal. I'm always struck with how abstract the "preferential option for the poor" can sound, though that is not at all its intent. Lest the tag "impersonal" seem negative, remember how easily the personal obscures good judgment -- and you see the positive sides of this emphasis.

The difference between educating for service and educating for justice may also be marked by a difference between more personal and more impersonal approaches to poverty.

Of course, we need both angles of vision, Lutheran and Ignatian, for a fuller view. And while the typology above could be contested, I offer it as an heuristic tool to sort differing emphases in the two spiritualities. Each informs a personal and social ethic; each reminds us how closely woven are spirituality and ethics in these two figures -- and the traditions they shaped.

Again, I'm so lucky to have Lisa as a colleague in this venture: she's as thoroughly Ignatian as I am Lutheran. For better and for worse, we're "stuck" in these traditions, and we're often overly critical of our roots. I wind up defending Ignatius, and she'll wave the flag for Luther. So we remind each other of the gifts of the other's tradition. That's been a grace, as well as grist for good conversation!

We carried backpacks along the Camino; we'll carry our traditions with us in the next phases of the grant. Thanks to Kim Erno and Ariadna at the Lutheran Center in Mexico City for all their advance planning. We hope to connect with Anne Lutterman-Aguilar on the faculty of Augsburg's CGE in Cuernavaca. Anne is doing some terrific work on the phenomenology of vocation: the one being called, the one calling, and the one being served. And thanks to Doug Schuurman who elegantly unpacks the difference between vocation as path and as place in his book "Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life" (Eerdmans, 2004).

Happy New Year!

The "O"'s have it!

2009-12-24T06:49:00.000-08:00

I second Lisa's observation that the Advent/Christmas time is a seasonal pilgrimage. We make the pilgrimage in trips home, visits to family and friends, and we mark the time in visits to churches and holy sites.

We also make the pilgrimage in texts, as we contemplate the appointed readings for the season. The Advent lectionary is my favorite. Words of the prophets register longing and loss, anticipation and hope. They fall like sheer poetry on the ear, partly because of their familiarity but mostly because they rank as some of most lyrical writing in scripture.

As mentioned, we started our pilgrimage to Santiago in Pamplona, staying at a hotel on the tiny Plaza de la Virgin de la O. Although Lisa and I spent miles imagining what that "O" might have stood for, liturgical geographer Dan Johnson pointed us to a website that clarified our confusion: the Virgen de la O referred to the virgin celebrated in the "O" antiphons, a series of readings for seven days immediately preceding Christmas Eve.

I wasn't aware that these "O" antiphons had anything to do with the Virgin Mary. They name Christ in the many and various ways that the prophets anticipate him: as Wisdom from on High, Ruler of Might, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring from on high, Ruler of all nations, and finally, as Emmanuel. You'll recognize these as verses of the ancient Advent hymn, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel."

There's the O, but where's the Virgin?

That was the question I brought to these readings this year. And lo! reference to the virgin was somewhere in every one of the days' readings. The "O"s begin on December 17th, and this year's reading was the magnificent genealogy from Matthew's gospel, full of long and largely unpronounceable male names -- but interrupted by four women, most of whom were not "good Jewish girls." There's Tamar, who wrestled the justice she was due from her thoughtless father-in-law, Judah. There's Rahab, a Canaanite "prostitute," who nonetheless saved the young nation of the Hebrew peoples. There's "the wife of Uriah," Bathsheba, probably a Hittite like her husband. There's Ruth, the Moabite woman and wife of Boaz. Finally, there's Mary. These women are important breaks in the male lineage: they signal the good news is for all people.

Another of the readings for one of the "O" days comes from the gospel of Matthew, who echoes Isaiah (7:14), "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel" (Matthew 1:18-25). Then, there's the story of the barren wife of Manoah, who had no children -- and suddenly became pregnant with Samson (Judges 13). Other readings during the season of the "O"s tell the story of Elizabeth, a much older, childless woman who becomes pregant with a child who will grow up to be John the Baptist. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, makes appearance in another reading: another woman without any children, who suddenly finds herself pregnant. Mary's song in Luke's gospel, the Magnificat, is only a little less militaristic version of Hannah's song from 1 Samuel 2.

The readings prescribed for these final days before the birth of Christ celebrate unexpected and thoroughly momentous pregnancies that issue in powerful figures to both the Jewish and the Christian faiths.

But most of all these readings celebrate the women who bore them -- perhaps the only time in the church year we cheer them on.

Hallelujah!

A Seasonal Pilgrimage

2009-12-23T06:04:00.000-08:00

This time of year, of course, we note a famous pilgrimage without generally calling it such.

The Christmas story we celebrate begins with two crises: first the dangerous pregnancy of a very young girl, maybe 13 or 14 years old. Pregnant by--whom? An over-eager, insufficiently cautious finace? A Roman soldier committing another rape because he can? Or was it...God? Mary is vulnerable to Jewish law, and could be stoned to death for what would be assumed to be her transgression. The second crisis, nearly 9 months later, when the young couple heads to Bethlehem under pressure of the government's need to take a census. Now. Of all times. So, the story goes, Joseph and Mary head to Bethlehem.

Historicity? Doubtful at best. The Romans only counted their own in censuses. Even though there was a census in 6 b.c, they wouldn't bother to count the Jews. Second, not even the most bone-headed administrator would send people back to their birthplaces to be counted. It was only a little less stupid then than it would be now to do such a thing. The story of Jesus' birth in a cave in Bethlehem is most likely a fiction added later in order to fit his life story with Micah's prophecy of a savior's birth in Bethlehem.

Or...perhaps...remember who this girl is. When the angel told her she was to be pregnant by the Holy Spirit (if she consented,) first she argued with the angel on matters of biology. No sex, no baby, she said. When the angel said that wouldn't be a problem, she responded by echoing a great Hebrew Bible song of the triumph of the lowly over the powerful. To latch onto this song revealed Mary as something of a middle-school-age political firebrand. In this child, God would "cast down the mighty from their thrones." The rich would be "sent away empty." Mary was a girl with attitude.

It is possible that it was Mary herself who wanted to take the dangerous trip to Bethlehem. She was raised on scripture, and knew very well of Micah's prophecy. And her child, by God, would be that messiah. So she and Joseph saddled up and headed off. This is an act of some determination: 9 months pregnant, joints loosening in preparation for birth, ankles swollen, belly sore, unable to sleep anyway, she hops a donkey for a weeklong pilgrimage, a transformative journey to a holy place. Or she'd make it holy, anyway. Perhaps they intended to go stay for a week or two, get settled a little, but the very jostling of the trip brought on the birth a little early. But no, her water broke early, they found a stable, and Jesus arrived on his own schedule.

I've been focused on pilgrimage not as about the end but the walking, the step by step by step. The character of a pilgrim is in the walking. Here we have a young girl making her pilgrimage into the danger of giving birth without relatives to help (and where do you find a midwife in a strange town?) She did so, perhaps, in order to fulfill a minor prophet's whim, that this unimportant town might have some claim to fame. What do you suppose they chatted about on the road? What stories did they tell? What fears did they share? What hopes? Who did they meet on the way? Who was kind to them the nights they stayed en route to Bethlehem?

Another pilgrimage, another transformation, this time a transformation of all creation.

Luther and Ignatius: Reluctant colleagues?

2009-12-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

As part of our grant, Lisa and I will be teaching a course on comparative spiritualities, Lutheran and Ignatian. To prepare myself visually, I tried to find an image of Luther and Ignatius together. After all, they were roughly contemporary, one from the Basque country of Spain, the other from Germany. Theologically, they had lots in common.

1. Both focused on the person and work of Jesus Christ, though Ignatius gravitated to the life of Jesus, while Luther remained in awe of Christ, his righteousness, and how he conferred it freely upon humans.

2. Each discovered divine mystery in everyday life, something Ignatius called "finding God in all things," while Luther marveled on the infinite God capable of the most finite expression.

3. Finally, both emphasized vocation, or calling, though in Ignatian spirituality, one is called to a path or pilgrimage, which entailed ongoing discovery and discernment. For Luther, vocation was more static, God calls everyone to his or her place in life, even the most humble baker or brewer. Vocation was not just for those in religious life, nuns, monks, and priests.

If Luther and Ignatius could agree on all this good stuff, you'd' think there would be an image of them together, arms encircled, lifting a glass to the mystery.

This is all I could find: Pierre Le Gros' statue (c. 1695-1699)in the Ignatian Church of The Gesu in Rome, "Religion Overthrowing Heresy and Hatred." It's located near the tomb of Ignatius, who is buried underneath one of the world's largest slabs of lapis lazuli, an opulence he would have abhorred. That's as close as Ignatius gets to Luther.

Truth is the female figure, lashing out at the male heretics writhing in fear at her feet, while malevolent little angels tear out pages of books. We could easily imagine the men to be Luther and his Genevan counterpart, John Calvin. If that's the case, we can almost read the title of the books, Calvin's "Institutes" or Luther's polemical, provocative treatises.

Close in time to the invention of the printing press and a general uptick in literacy, the Reformation was all about words, words, words. Hymns, tracts, even bibles in the common language were suddenly widely available for dissemination, and the common people could read them.

The Catholic Counter-Reformation's protest was visual: baroque and rococco (baroque on steroids!) images of salvation, grace, and, as depicted here, damnation. Particularly to the Reformers.

How will we parse all this conflict in a class offered more than four hundred years later, when the similarities seem greater than the differences, particularly at a time when religions swing wildly between expressive individualism and fundamentalisms of left and right?

Maybe in the end, it doesn't matter. We'll take the wheat -- and leave the chaff behind.

Immersion and pilgrimage: Setting my face toward Mexico City

2009-12-03T10:50:00.000-08:00

Part two of this pilgrimage grant takes us to Mexico City, one of the world's largest cities. With six other students from Chicago and Berkeley, we'll be involved in a sixteen-day immersion in another culture. We'll learn a lot about Mexican culture, but the dominant culture we'll be immersed in is the culture of poverty.

I've been to Mexico City before several times. My initial visit was to an academic conference on "Justice and Justification" in 1985, and the dominant culture was the culture of the academy. To our cost, we had very little to do with our surroundings. I was in Mexico City again several years later, taking a break from language school in Cuernavaca. Then I was immersed in the culture of Polanco, a beautiful, upscale urban neighborhood bordering Chapultepec Park. I was immersed in the culture of some of the best art museums in the world.

This time will be different: we will be immersed in the culture of the poor.

Immersion and pilgrimage are alike in some ways -- and very different in others. I'm trying to count the ways.

1. Happily, we won't be walking! My feet are glad about that. Yet, because of the City's danger, our movement will be restricted. We'll reside in a gated community. It won't be safe to simply get up early and run around the stadium of the nearby uniersity, as I did during the academic conference. We'll have to watch out for one another. And that prompts me to wonder: how will I "watch out" for the people we'll be meeting, particularly when I return to El Norte? They live in the daily danger of poverty and hunger.

2. "You walk your own Camino," a fellow pilgrim counseled. He was right. Pilgrimage is solitary. In contrast, immersion happens in and with a group. Indeed, our first experience of immersion will be in the group with whom we're traveling. Scout camp was the last time any of us were herded around like we will be in Mexico City. Our behavior will revert to that chronological age: I'll be fifty-something going on fourteen! On the Camino you can act fifty-something going on fourteen -- and no one would be around to notice!

3. Pilgrims carry everything they need on their backs: each carries her own. Immersion, in contrast, creates a situation of interdependence. Between us, we'll need to cover our bases. For the fiercely independent among us, that will be hard. Interdependence, even dependence, though, is far more the reality of a global world, where what I buy, what I eat, what I wear affects people far away whose lives and livelihoods depend on unthinking habits of First Sorld consumers.

4. Like on the Camino, we'll be dependent upon the kindness of strangers, and like the Camino, they'll all be speaking Spanish. There the similarity ends. Our hosts this time will be sharing from scarcity, not abundance. They'll share what little they have -- and like the widow's cruse of oil, it will be enough.

5. As with pilgrimage, we'll need to prepare. But we'll need more than great, lightweight gear for this trek. We'll need openness, sensitivity, and simplicity in our backpacks. Indeed, for our next immersion trip in March to Santa Clara University's Casa de la Solidaridad in El Salvador, these three traits as listed as requirements. They come right after a qualifying GPA, language skills, and maturity. (www.scu.edu/casa)

6. Finally, as with pilgrimage, we'll go as beggars. There's nothing we can do or fix or change. We will simply need to be -- and be present. Like pilgrimage, immersion is about receptivity, not productivity. We'll go with empty hands -- and return with full hearts.

I don't expect this to be easy, but it needs to be done. Poverty is the reality of the majority of the world's population. We need to be there to experience it.

Then we need to let it change our lives in ways we cannot yet fathom.

Then comes the doing.

Back to Mary, the Virgen de la O

2009-11-22T10:09:00.000-08:00

It's called the Camino of St. James, and his relics allegedly rest in the crypt of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. But the route really belongs to Mary. We started our trek at the Hotel Eslava in Pamplona, located in a plaza abutting the western edge of Pamplona's fabled city walls. The plaza was dedicated to the Virgen de la O. Lisa and I entertained ourselves for hours trying to imagine what that "O" might stand for. I finally settled on the most mundane of meanings: "Oest" or "west," simply because that was the plaza's prospect.

Thanks to liturgical geographer Daniel Johnson for setting me straight and referring me to:
http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/questions/yq/yq239.html

The truth of the Virgen de la O is much more interesting. "O" refers to the "O" antiphons, a series of traditional monastic prayers used at the vespers during the last days of Advent. The prayers anticipate Christ as fulfilment of divine promise, as the answer to ancient longing:

December 17: O Wisdom from on high (O Sapientia)
December 18: O Lord of might (O Adonai)
December 19: O Root of Jesse (O Radix)
December 20: O Key of David (O Claves)
December 21: O Dayspring from on high (O Oriens)
December 22: O Ruler of all nations (O Rex gentium)
December 23: O Emmanuel (O Emmanuel)

You'll recognize the "O" antiphons as verses to the Advent carol "O come, O come, Emmanuel." Backwards the first letters of the Latin titles spell: "cras ero!" "Tomorrow I will be with you." And indeed, the "O" antiphons end the day before Christmas Eve, the night of Jesus' birth. Chanting these antiphons, medieval monks inserted themselves into the mystery of the incarnation. Let the carol play as the soundtrack to the icon above.

The Virgen de la O is the human side of that mystery. She appears pregnant, for it will erupt from her body. Imagine what must be going through her head. She was pregnant against her will; she was engaged to someone who was not the father of her child -- and knew it. According to law, she could be stoned. Indeed, we're told that Joseph intended to "dismiss her quietly" (Matthew 1:19) after the birth of the child, so as not to expose her to public disgrace. Despite the complacency of the image above, Mary must have been terrified.

Medieval Spanish piety gets this, for one of the most popular images along the Camino depicts Mary with seven swords coming out of her heart. This is a graphic depiction of the "seven sorrows." By all accounts, though, that's a very low estimate.

St. James gets to be a knight, slaying whomever the locals were afraid of. But Mary is closer to real life.

O Virgen de la Camino: we remember you in this season too -- and all for whom and with whom you stand!

UCA martyrs

2009-11-17T05:46:00.001-08:00

This post finds me in San Salvador, where, 20 years ago yesterday 6 Jesuits, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter were dragged out of their beds and shot to death. The Jesuits' "crime" was speaking out on behalf of the poor against the government. The women were their companeras just by being there, killed for being unwise enough to hang around with people with such a dangerous insurrectionist (resurrectionist?) message. A few days before we went to the place where Oscar Romero lived for a time, where his little Toyota still sits. Inside you see quotidian stuff--a robe, a razor, dental floss, books both scholarly (including, how "scandalous"--Hans Kung!)and popular.
This is a pilgrimage of sorts--the students leading our delegation are speaking of it as such, while, as Marty mentioned, I'm no longer certain what the word means. Our student leaders worked here as part of the Casa de Solidaridad, a study-abroad program that combines academics with service. This is a reunion for them, a time of poignancy as they see old friends, but also see that not much has chaged or seems likely to change. Our second day here we went to an area devastated by Hurricane Ida, and spoke with folks still digging out from the wreckage. Many lost everything, and if everything wasn't much to start with, does that make it better or worse to lose it all? The folks stood in line to get clean water, and whatever other aid would arrive that day. Yet they smiled and took the time to speak with strangers from abroad. And they try to clean, though how do you get ahead of the mud when the water available to clean is too polluted to be of much help? The line to which the water rose in shacks built by a river were over my head, now receded but leaving behind a record of mud and debris stuck to the walls.
We mustn’t miss the point.
Today at UCA groups of students are making lovely alfombras in the road (colored road salt is carefully piled in pictures, in the way of a mandala.) There are salt images of the Jesuits and the women, and also of the 4 American women slaughtered here earlier, three Maryknoll sisters and a lay woman, Jean Donovan. Romero is everywhere. In a room at UCA there are photo albums of the Jesuits’ quarters before and after the raid that destroyed them. There are graphic photos of their destroyed bodies. Carefully preserved are their bloodstained clothes, a bible stained with blood, grass from the rose garden where they were dumped, labeled with the names of each of the Jesuits. At the Romero site also were graphic photos of the bloody corpse, carried out to a pick-up truck to be rushed pointlessly to the hospital.
We mustn’t miss the point.
Their bloody deaths separate them from us, in the way that the dead are always separated, for a time at least, from the living. The temptation is to see the extraordinary only, the love that gets dragged out of bed and killed, kidnapped, raped, shot, on the road and dumped as the women were, joining the hundreds of ordinary Salvadorans who had no choice but to be caught in the savage vortex of power and oppression that ruled their world. The UCA martyrs, the churchwomen, Romero, are separated from the ordinary Salvadoran martyrs because they had a choice. Each of them was here, in one way or another, voluntarily.
But the point we must not miss, I think, is that neither the death nor the voluntariness is the core of what made them memorable, but the simple daily work they were involved in. The quotidian hassles of being university professors, of being workers on behalf of the poor, of organizing and speaking, trying to make sure the talk they’re to give sounds good, trying to stay ahead of the laundry, trying to make sure the car has gas, dealing with difficult colleagues in the church, the community, the school. Working when you’re tired, trying to be pleasant when you want to snap at someone who deserves it, trying to see the value in the mountain of quotidiana.
Sanctity isn’t in death. It’s in life. Solidarity isn’t in mere physical presence but more in taking on concerns as one’s own, in the midst of, along with, the wheat and chaff of our lives. To be a pilgrim isn’t in the arriving, it’s in the walking, the step by step by step. That’s what we share with them. That’s what we owe them.
We mustn’t miss the point.

"If everything's a 'pilgrimage' ....." Toward a definition

2009-11-15T17:07:00.000-08:00

My colleague, Lisa, is in El Salvador for a commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the martyrdom of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the Jesuit university in San Salvador. She promises to post on that, but finds herself with limited on-line access. In one of her brief notes, she verbally threw her hands up in despair: "I'm not sure I know what pilgrimage even means anymore...."

I feel the same way.

Actually, so did Geoffrey Chaucer, who lamented the popularity of pilgrimages at the beginning of "Caunterbury Tales." After a winter of being cooped up in tiny houses and rained upon, April found people chomping at the bit to get out. Pilgrimage was a good excuse. Read the opening of "Caunterbury Tales" again -- and remember that good old Geoffrey had a ready wit.

Seven centuries later, pilgrimage is everywhere: to Jane Austen's or George Washington's home -- even to Paris Hilton's MacMansion!, to The Holocaust Museum or to Auschwitz, to Gettysburg or Culloden. You can do "pilgrimage" past the homes of the stars in Malibu and Beverly Hills. With the spectre of the Paparazzi-Pilgrim out there, no wonder we're worried.

Should pilgrimage always involve physical exertion -- or is there something to inner, psycho-spiritual pilgrimages, whose "exertion" comes in the form of disciplined breathing, mantram repetition, or meditation? Must pilgrimage always be to a "religious" site -- and who's in charge of defining what counts as "religious" again, please? Can pilgrimage also embrace visits to places hallowed by sheer carnage, like the Twin Towers, or Auschwitz, or the beaches at Normandy?

Certainly, Lisa would be on "pilgrimage" at the moment, visiting the site of Salvadoran martyrs -- and behind them all the people who were killed in that awful war.

I like the broad definition Phil Cousineau offers in his book "The Art of Pilgrimage:" "a transformative journey to a sacred center" (xxiii). He outlines four components: mindful preparation, respect for the destination, attention to the path -- both its physical aspect and the people on it, and a focus that deepens as the journey continues. Intensity and intention mark pilgrimage -- and set it apart from mere tourism.

Pilgrim and tourist may share the same sites: I surely saw "tourists" along the Camino. At times, I was one of them! But I shifted back into "pilgrim" mode again, looking for depth, not breadth of impressions along the way. These four components are supplied by the pilgrim; they aren't inherent in the destination itself.

This may be different from Chaucer's pilgrims, for whom the journey may have been more religious obligation than "vision quest." More "religious" than "spiritual," as one of our comments suggested. But Cousineau's components work for today.

I'd only add a fifth component: on-going rumination at journey's end. I know that makes us sound like cows, but it's as important as "mindful preparation" before you even set out.

So onward -- and mooooooooooooo.

Always Coming Home: Going in Circles

2009-11-09T07:30:00.000-08:00

I'll borrow the title of Ursula Le Guin's luminous novel to start this posting. She writes across the genres of science fiction and fantasy, always to create heterocosms, literally "other worlds." In her books, she creates "other worlds" -- so that we can more sharply see our own. Reading her book "Always Coming Home," I was transported into a landscape suffused with the light and season of northern California, all projected into a very different time. Closing the book, I felt dumped back into my familiar. Home again -- but with a twist.

That's pilgrimage: you come home again. But with a twist. The point wasn't to get to Santiago; the point was to come home again -- with a twist.

In our post-pilgrimage postings, Lisa and I have been trying to figure out exactly what's altered. It seems like pilgrimage goes in a straight line: ours went from Pamplona to Santiago. But in fact, the real journey was from California to the Camino -- and back again. Something's different: we're trying to find its pulse.

Over the weekend, I joined a group of seasoned and potential pilgrims at a gathering of the American Friends of the Camino (http://www.americanpilgrims.com/). As I looked around the room, I had a sense of what's changed. Turning to the other Marty in the group, I said: "I came back speaking a language no one else understood. I could barely communicate. You all speak that language." Without identifying the difference, my comment expressed it.

In his presentation to the group in the afternoon, Phil Cousineau observed that "every great journey is a circle," and he cited Kierkegaard: "Life is lived forward, but understood backward." I flashed on the image of all those cairns, monuments of stones that pilgrims had picked up in the morning and set down somewhere later in the day. These displaced stones swarmed certain places along the way, monuments to the circle of pilgrimage. Spiritually and physically, the trek goes forward only by journeying back to pick up pieces of the past, turn them over, travel with them for a time -- and lay them down.

During the course of the long days of walking, we kept running into pieces of the past. We told lots of stories from our own pasts; we met people from all over the world. With many of them, we found some strange common connection: a city we'd loved, a rock band we'd followed, a person we knew. Each connection was charged with memory: uncanny -- and not a coincidence. Stones from the past, picked up again, and set down in a new configuration.

Indeed, during Kathy Gower's evocative slide show of her journey along the Camino d'Arles a few months before, she showed a picture of a fellow pilgrim she'd met along the way. The man and his dog rested by a stream. I looked more carefully: it was Richard and Alcabar, the American from Chicago we'd met as a hospitaler in Las Herrerias and then ran into as a pilgrim outside of Santiago. I burst out with his name, and Kathy grinned: "I'm glad you ran into Richard."

All I could say was: "I am too."

Le Guin put it more poetically: we're always coming home.

And thanks to Kathy Gower for the photo of Richard and Alcabar!

Practices: Calming....and Expressive!

2009-11-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

As it hovers over the crucified body of Christ, Giotto's angel is in anguish: full-face, full-body anguish. Pain registers in the eyes, the mouth, the arms rigid with grief, right into the twisted spine -- if an angel even has one. This is lamentation.

I hasten to call lamentation a practice, even a contemplative practice. It's not one directors of the soul and spirit turn to when they seek to help their clients find solace and reduce stress. It's not a mantra, a spiritual passage, or a pattern of steady, rhythmic breathing. In contrast to these calming practices, lamentation expresses suffering: it encourages the one suffering to give voice to that pain.

Fully a third of the psalms in the Hebrew scriptures are psalms of lament:

"Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts;/
all your waves and your billows have gone over me..../
I say to my God, my rock, 'Why have you forgotten me?/
Why must I walk around mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?'/
As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me,/
While they say to me continually, 'Where is your God?'" (Psalm 42:7, 9-10)

Lamentation puts anguish into words: it directs suffering to someone, because it counts on someone being there -- and there listening. Further, lamentation banks on the fact that rage will not break relationship. Finally -- and maybe this happens only sometimes -- the one lamenting falls into the arms of the one listening, the way someone who's cried himself dry or shouted herself hoarse finally falls into the arms of the friend who's been there all along, helplessly witnessing the pain.

Giotto's angel may not be there yet: it appears to be still in the raging stage.

But we need these expressive practices, because we can't be expected to show up before God or the Divine Mystery with only our positive feelings. If the psalms are any indication, God can handle the full-bore, full-body, full spectrum of human emotions.

Pilgrimage is an expressive practice. Last night at dinner a friend asked: "Did you pray a lot on the Camino?" I had to answer: "Not the way I thought I would." Pilgrimage revealed a different register of prayer, prayer that embraces curses, pain, even boredom.

I don't want to lose sight of these expressive practices. They count as contemplative practices, because they connect us in deep ways to the divine when we most need connection.

Someone's there, ready to catch us.

Hajj II: Hajj and Exodus

2009-10-31T20:02:00.001-07:00

Commentator Laura made an important point a few posts ago. We found the camino to be spiritual but not religious, and I wondered if it had always been so. Laura suggests I might have it backward--that in older times the camino may have been religious but not spiritual--in an age in which people were awash in religion, many, perhaps, hit the trail without a lot of what we'd call spiritual motivation--seeking or open to transformation, navigating major life decisions, etc. Some may have been seeking the "get out of Purgatory free!" card of the major pilgrimages, others may have been doing what was charged to them as a penance. And while for Marty and I, the camino marked a stark change in mode of transportation, Laura asks also to consider how pilgrims in the old days got to the trail in the first place--their travel to the starting point may well have been nearly as challenging as the pilgrimage itself.

The hajj is a pilgrimage in that it requires travel to a holy place, carries a deep religious and often spiritual resonance, is marked by ritual observances before and during the trip. Like traditional Christian pilgrims, but less so for moderns, the muslim community has expectations of hajjis--they are to have been changed in a way that serves as a model to others. It is physically a liminal experience, but not in the same way as the camino.

I'm thinking about another form of religious walk. After some preliminary sparring back-and-forth between Moses and Pharoah,involving frogs, locusts, and other annoyances, God gets serious. The Israelites ate supper dressed for travel. It's striking, really--the story get right up to where God tells the Israelites to get ready to go, then the narrative shifts to how Israel today is to celebrate Passover. The people are to be marked by the experience of the exodus.

But I'm interested in the wandering in the desert part. Was it a pilgrimage? Was it like a pilgrimage? Was it like the hajj or the camino, or is it something else?

Pilgrimage and Immigration: An outer edge of a contemplative practice

2009-10-31T14:43:00.000-07:00

At the end of October I had the privilege of participating in a conference on "Contemplative Practices in Action," organized by Thomas Plante, professor of psychology at Santa Clara University. The conference aired chapters for a book exploring how contemplative practices reduce stress and contribute to spiritual well-being. Participant-authors drew from religious traditions old (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) and new (Eknath Easwaran's Eight Point Program of Passage Meditation or EPP, use of a "mantram" or centering word). Sonny Manuel SJ and I co-authored a case study, drawing on a very particular form of stress, suffering, and working deep within a very particular religious tradition, Christianity.

Entitled "A Pilgrimage from Suffering to Solidarity: Walking the Path of Contemplative Practices," the contribution began with three characteristics of suffering: denial, isolation, and the need for control. We offered a practice addressing each dimension. Lamentation moves one from denial to acceptance; intercession invites suffering out of isolation into a place of communion; with pilgrimage one quite literally walks out of the need to control into a spirit of surrender.

In the course of our research, Sonny and I discovered "outer" edges of each practice. Not only does contemplation address individual need; it points toward solidarity. Advocacy is an outer edge of lamentation, as the one speaking out her own suffering discovers her words have given voice to others whom affliction has silenced. Accompaniment is the outer edge of intercession, as one asking for what he needs finds himself alongside others in similar or even greater need. Finally, pilgrimage points to immersion, the ability to simply surrender to another person or culture without judgment or distance.

Of course, we wrote the article before the actual experience of being on pilgrimage.

I confessed that to the group, explaining that I'd found a deep resonance between the practices of pilgrimage and centering prayer. Both share a similar trajectory: letting go of all excess baggage, a spirit of receptivity or dependence, and finally, the need to rest, whether in the Lord -- or on the nearest patch of dry grass!

As we concluded our presentation, Santa Clara political science professor Eric Hanson grabbed me and said: "Think about another outer edge of pilgrimage: immigration. Immigrants have the same experience. They've left everything behind; they are dependent on the kindness of strangers, the hospitality of residents. And they are in a strange, often hostile land, where they can't control anything."

Something deep clicked into place.

Thanks, Eric, for the insight. I invite you to check out the website he runs under the auspices of the Markkula Center at Santa Clara University:
http://www.scu.edu/ethics-center/world-affairs/

Thanks to Sonny, my co-author and fellow pilgrim in the strange (at least to me!) world of counseling psychology. Thanks to Tom for the invitation to be on the journey.

We still don't quite know where it's taking us.

Hajj I: Malcolm X

2009-10-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most significant religious pilgrimage in the modern era is the Muslim Hajj. All Muslims who are able are expected to make the Hajj at least once in their lifetime.

The thematic structure of the Hajj echoes events in the life of Abraham. The pilgrim is invited to offer to God the same radical "yes" to God that he did. The Hajj is a symbolic journey to God--indeed, the Hajji is to make the Hajj as though never to return. All one's earthly responsibilities are to be settled before leaving. Those who return are expected to be different, transformed by this encounter, by saying this radical "yes."

Pilgrims make the Hajj by the millions, setting off to Mecca from all corners of the world. While the physical challenges in terms of distance covered in the Hajj are minimal to those of the Camino, I suspect the event becomes difficult in one way the camino is not. The crowds themselves become a significant factor. Pilgrims are crowded together into a huge throng: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Hajj has a website with the message, "Be peaceful, orderly and kind. No crushing."

The first account I read of the Hajj was in The Autobiography of Malcom X. Malcolm went to the Hajj as a man deeply formed and scarred by his experience of the senseless racism in which he was immersed in America. His involvement with the Black Muslims reversed but did not fundamentally alter that race-centered world-view. The Hajj did:

"Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient holy land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all the other Prophets of the holy scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors....
There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white. America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. ....I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man - and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their “differences” in color." (Autobiography)

Malcolm's Hajj didn't end America's racism, of course. It did heal Malcolm's.

Pilgrimage and prayer: A extraordinary practice in ordinary time

2009-10-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

Of course, not everyone can go on pilgrimage. Not everyone has the time, the money, the inclination, the stamina -- or the enabling grant from the Lilly Endowment. How can we talk about our experience in ways others can relate to?

That question points to another: how can we find pilgrimage in everyday life? For of course, no one can be on pilgrimage forever. No one has the time, the money, the inclincation, the stamina -- and no foundation would ever fund it, even if they did.

How can we translate this experience into ordinary time -- for ourselves and for others?

Thanks to some illuminating conversations I had at Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota, I'm closer to a translation. This congregation commits itself to practicing their faith, and they've focused on centering prayer as a key practice that empowers disciples to become apostles, i.e., move from following Jesus to serving the world.

I'd been invited to speak about pilgrimage, another practice of the Christian faith and many of the world's religions. As I prepared for this community, I began to see the connections between pilgrimage and centering prayer.

First, both practices aim at emptying. I related stories of how we literally "shed stuff" across the top of Spain, building tiny altars of things we discovered we really didn't need: that extra shirt, a book we weren't going to read anyway, a cherished hairbrush that simply weighed too much. After days of pain-filled walking, I even let go the goal of reaching Santiago on foot! And that was ostensibly the reason for the entire trip. We learned to let go of everything -- and we learned it the hard way.

Centering prayer is the practice of letting go: you let go of distractions, worries, and those rat-wheels of anxiety that spin without ceasing. A kind of kenosis, or pouring out, centering prayers tips the soul like a pitcher -- and lets worry drain out.

Second, both practices focus on receiving. And in a world that rewards production -- produce more! better! more efficiently! -- that's supremely counter-cultural. Yet, as pilgrims we had to receive: we couldn't carry it all. We depended on others for food, shelter -- and, on that rainy day in Galicia, clothing. I'd lost my poncho; Lisa shredded hers. We needed industrial strength raingear -- and we found it one night in a hardware store in the gritty village of Palas de Rei. Pilgrimage accustoms people to begging; we became dependent on the kindness of strangers.

So too with centering prayer: it empties people so that they can be filled. They let go the spirits of anxiety, worry, and distraction, so that they can receive the Spirit. They become dependent on the kindness of divine mystery -- and there is nothing stranger, more wonderful, and more deeply familiar.

Finally, both practices invite people to rest. Lisa joked about our daily need for "horizontality," but moving from the vertical posture of hiking to simply lying down restored us immeasurably. We needed these pauses like we needed air to breath, water to drink -- and cafe con leche to begin the day!

Similarly, centering prayer invites pray-ers to rest in God. Sabbath is any time you lean into the Holy. Centering prayer is the practice of the presence of God. One way to move into this prayer is to simply sit with from Psalm 46:10, gradually letting the silence overtake the words:

"Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.
-------------."

And thanks to you dear people at Colonial for finding the correct reference!

Things I was Wrong About, Part II: Pain

2009-10-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

Before I get to my mistake, I want to get to one thing I'm finding was true. We found that one of the principal joys/graces of the camino was connecting with other pilgrims. We were all together the body of Christ on the road, sharing the joys (wine!) and pains (back-ache!) of incarnation with each other. Similarly, I suspect that pilgrims for centuries have sought contact with the holy--to touch the holy, one way or another. It might be finally coming to view "the bones of St. James," (or at least the box said to contain them,) by a process of walking that entailed imitatio Christi at least in the painfulness of the walking. (I hope that for many, the incarnate joys--wine! A tasty bocadilla!--were also understood to be part of imitatio Christi.) They were on the road with Christ, on the road to Christ (or at least to one of his pals,)imitating Christ. And one's sins, well, they drop away like the tiredness and the blisters as they heal.

However, on to my mistake. I underestimated the pain. I can admit only in retrospect (on the trail only after it was better,) that it shook me. I understand myself as strong--and I still think I am--but it really hurt, especially the first week or so, after the halcyon first day. I was surprised. I was comforted, in part, but the evident pain of my fellow pilgrims. Not schadenfreude, but solidarity.

I think the pain was important, but I'm still not sure how. In immersion experiences and service learning, pain is never intrinsic to the process. Exertion may or may not be part of the process--but it is not important. Social dislocation, yes, and we had some of that, though perhaps not as much as participants in a well-run immersion. Service learning often takes us out of our "comfort zone," likewise, but it is not painful, at least not physically.

One more similarity, though. Contemporary "immersers" of course also seek to be the body of Christ, but we do so not by imitation in suffering but by the practice of solidarity. We seek to be attentive to the body of Christ in the populations we visit (service is not intrinsic, and may be inimical to an immersion experience.) We seek to form some kind of connection in basic humanity. We did so on the camino in the solidarity of the limping--and even then, as Marty noted, hierarchies emerged--perhaps another echo of original sin.

There's more to the pain than its capacity to draw us together. Indeed, the first effect of pain is to threaten to isolate us each in our own bodies, as the painful part commands more and more attention. To a person with a bad tooth-ache, the world becomes that small but hugely painful spot. Depression and loneliness can do the same. Perhaps it is the vulnerability, but, more so, perhaps it is the self-doubt that is important, and then the key question--can I share my self-doubt with my fellows? (Medication for depression is said to dull the pain enough that the sufferer can begin to engage the world again.) Pain can also be a physically liminal experience that draws us to the edges of our capacities, to see if we're faithful enough to the journey and patient enough with ourselves to continue on at whatever pace we can, with whatever aids of Advil, good wine, and conversation are needed. After all, I think that all God really asks of us is to try to keep on, even if we have to stop for a while (like Eric the Lame did,) or if we go on but slowly, slowly. And when the pain eases, and we are strong again, that we be gentle with those who still suffer, because they are our community, too. "My father was a slave in Egypt."

Things I was Wrong About, Part I

2009-10-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

When Marty and I began talking about this project, I thought I had a fairly clear sense of what the camino would be like. We were setting out to compare "traditional" pilgrimage to immersion experiences and service learning. We wanted to do the camino as a benchmark, and basically I thought my sense of what pilgrimages like the camino are about would more or less be confirmed. And while I bought several camino books, I'd stayed away from them on grounds that things like the camino (as also, e.g., the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius,) should be experienced first, and only then read about.

Well, my understanding of the camino changed considerably in the walking.

I'd like to begin to 'fess up about some of the things I was wrong about in my intellectual noodling about pilgrimage. Some of these repeat themes picked up before, but now I begin to see them as lessons--or un-lessons, since these are things I was wrong about before we hit the road.

1. I expected more explicit religiosity among the pilgrims, and within myself. While many pilgrims doubtless had religious motivations for the trek, many more that we spoke to did not. I did meet one man wearing a two and a half-foot crucifix slung across his chest. He asked where the closest albergue was. I told him, but didn't pursue the conversation. Most of the churches we passed were closed, which contributed to this post-religious sense. The rare open churches tended to have a person sitting by the door stamping people's pilgrim credentials (the cards we carried to get stamped at the various towns,) and collecting donations. The few congregations we intersected at worship times tended to be a few elderly locals, an elderly priest, and a number of pilgrims. I don't know if the other pilgrims felt "fed" by these half-hearted services, but I did not, and didn't stay more than a few minutes. Marty had more patience for these than I did.
The churches are magnificent, and closed or nearly empty. The pilgrims are often motivated by a powerful spiritual purpose that is no longer, for most of them, expressed in the language of traditional Christianity. Immersions and the kind of non-walking pilgrimages that people go on tend to be much more explicitly religious--really, I think many times people who travel with religious motivation call their trips pilgrimages, even though those trips bear little resemblance to the camino and its ilk. Marty has written here about the incarnate spirituality of the trail that, even for us theological/religious types, was more about experiencing the walking of the day and the companionship of the road than praying across Spain. This may be a failing on our part, but if so, we seemed to share it with most of those we met.
The camino, like many people in the contemporary West, is spiritual but not religious. I am not certain, but I wonder if this has always been the case.

Next mistake--next post--pain.

De-mystifying pilgrimage: The pilgrims

2009-10-19T12:07:00.000-07:00

We all look so happy. We'd been walking through forests all morning, and we were on the down-slope of the third "summit." The hardest part of the day was behind us -- and it was not yet even noon. We knew San Juan de Ortega had a wonderful round chapel that Queen Isabella built in 1477 to celebrate a longed-for pregnancy. Every equinox the sun shines directly on a stone column inside with a sculpture of the Annunciation. Mary is pregnant, Isabella is pregnant, and the spherical chapel feels pregnant as well. We've just visited the chapel, and we're toasting all that fertility.

Pilgrimage is a great leveler. Regardless of background, economic status, education, profession, pilgrims literally share common ground. Everyone in this group made the steep ascent out of Villafranca that morning in the dark. No one slept well the night before, because all the hostels hugged a road that truckers plied all night in their big rigs. And the tiny lyrical villages were beginning to blur for all of us. To a woman, we longed for Burgos and the Big City.

There was also the common ground of gear talk, pilgrim lore, and finding internet access. We shared food, first-aid creams, and strategies for dealing with tired bodies. It didn't matter what you did for a living, how much it paid you, what your relationship status was, or how many initials came after your name. On pilgrimage everyone is just another body in motion. There's something marvelously democractizing about that.

But lest this sound too utopic, pilgrims quickly develop their own class distinctions. "Where did you start?" becomes a loaded question: hard-core hikers started in France at St. Jean Pied de Port and crossed the Pyrenees. They were hiking every step of the way, including the hot, dry Meseta. I took to confessing that we'd "only" started in Pamplona -- and taken the train from Burgos to Ponferrada.

Super-Pilgrims carry all their own gear -- including cooking utensils and Thermarest mattresses. Averaging about 18 miles/day, they'll be in Santiago weeks before we will, having walked every step of the way. They are always in the hostel by 1pm, having roused themselves long before dawn to begin walking.

Then there are the Plodders, who hike about 13 miles/day, occasionally stay in pensions or B&B's. You'll find them in cafes have that second cup of cafe con leche.

Then there are the Partiers, most easily identified by the distinguishing breakfast ritual, The Breakfast of Champions: a beer and bocadillo, that crisp round roll filled with slices of cheese and Spanish ham.

Then there are the Tourist Pilgrims, who carry only a small backpack with water and raingear, the rest having been taken by car to the next four-star hotel. I always envied how well turned-out this last group was, fresh clothes at dinner while we wore the only other shirt we still had left. Clean or not.

Lisa and I jumped class a lot, which was fun and introduced us to lots more people. We carried all our own gear, but no cooking utensils -- and we abandoned our sleeping bags in the other Villafranca. We were not hell-bent on Santiago: it had been around for centuries; it wasn't going anywhere. While we veered away from The Breakfast of Champions, we always lingered over that second cafe con leche. We did hostels a few times, but our grant allowed us to find B&B's most nights -- and snore-free sleeping was a blessing. And we did have a grant behind us, knowledge of which quickly spread around our circle of fellow-travelers. As in, "..but then YOU have a grant."

Despite the common ground, literal and figurative, pilgrims create distinctions among themselves. Even pilgrims figure out how to look up at others -- or down.

But hey! we're only human.

De-mystifying pilgrimage: The spirituality

2009-10-15T14:06:00.000-07:00

"I thought it would all be somehow more...spiritual," Lisa said as we chugged up the Claremont Canyon. We can't seem to stop walking, and this particular hike is quick, dirty, and close by.

She's right: I thought it would be more spiritual too. We thought we'd be walking the questions posed in John's gospel, pondering one question each day. There are some great ones, worthy of weighty consideration: "What are you looking for?" (1:38) "Do you want to be made well?" (5:6) "Do you also wish to go away?" (6:67) And Pilate's hauntingly cynical: "What is truth?" (18:38)

But the questions we were really interested in were questions like: "Was that the alarm?" (every morning -- without fail) "Should I be paying attention to this pain?" (at the beginning of every day) "Can we stop for a cafe con leche?" (about two hours into the day's hike) "Are we there yet?" (about two hours before the end of the day's hike -- again, without fail).

So much for John's questions. Ours were more immediate and more mundane.

I had the daily readings along, which I would usually read as we got into the rhythm of the day. As we did on Kilimanjaro, we'd speculate on what Jesus must really have said, had the evangelists not mis-quoted, mis-remembered, or simply edited his words.

But we spent lots more time making up stories about our fellow travelers than attending to the gospel's stories about Jesus.

So much for deep theological insight.

But we could tell you the phases of the moon along the trek, when first light comes, how the sun glints off the lantern of the Cathedral of Santiago. We could describe Tolkien-esque forests in Galicia and how the morning mists create islands of the hills surrounding O'Cebreiro. We now know how to get laundry done, where to find the laundromats, and what "auto-servicio" means: bring us your wretched refuse longing to be cleaned, drop it off, pick it up two hours later, and fold it. We could tell you about Spanish religious iconography: the Madonna de la leche, the Mater Dolorosa, and the crucified Christ -- discreetly wearing a skirt.

This is not the spirituality we anticipated; it's the spirituality we encountered. Is it real spirituality?

Here's what I know. First, the spirituality we met on the way was deeply embodied. As scholars we tend to live in our heads. We couldn't do that on pilgrimage. We tended to our feet instead -- quite literally. If they didn't work, there was no going forward.

I apologized to a dear friend and acclaimed historian for the "unscholarly" character of our blog postings. With a smile she replied: "On the contrary, you had quite a lot of footnotes." She was right: we wrote a lot about our feet.

Pilgrimage made me appreciate how we are "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14). It also made me understand the organic integrity of bodies -- and how powerful is the image of the "body of Christ." The apostle Paul spells it out for the smugly cosmopolitan Corinthians: "...there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you,' nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you.'" (1 Corinthians 12:20-21). An "inferior" member of the body became all-important: we had need of our feet.

Second, we came to honor the Sabbath -- whenever it fell. Lisa joked about the need for "horizontality," but rest restored us. Immeasurably. We'd fall into bed or onto a patch of grass, aching for an alternative to standing up. We made a pact to break for no less than thirty minutes -- unless it was pouring rain or a herd of cows ploughed into us. Sleep simply repaired us. And when we needed a "day off," we took it. Without apology.

Finally, we shook our independence -- at least a little. I counted on Lisa's unfailing good humor: nothing blunted her wit. Not fatigue, not rain, not blisters. I depended on the people we'd meet along the way: we cheered each other on. Then, we knew we had lots of good wishes and prayers behind us. We felt that support pushing our pilgrim butts forward. Thanks.

Not the spirituality we expected, perhaps, but the spirituality we were given. We scooped it up and let it pour over us.

Knights Templar

2009-10-13T09:50:00.001-07:00

Over and over along the camino we saw signs of the Knights Templar, usually their equal-armed red cross etched into the walls of a church. Ponferrada, our starting point for the second half of our trek, is the site of a Knights castle that we toured, feeling the presence of knight-ghosts.

I know very little about them--I'm reading a history now. Here's a thumbnail: the knights were a military order, founded to provide armed protection for pilgrims to the Holy Land. "Templar" refers of course to Solomon's Temple, their spiritual HQ. They made a name for themselves also in the Crusades, which, along with their support of pilgrims, made them, for a time, a popular cause to give money to: though their individual lives were quite austere, the order became very wealthy. The seal of the order shows two knights on one horse, symbolizing poverty solidarity (which may also have contributed to accusations of homosexuality in the ranks. Well, gee--an all-male society of guys who've sworn off female companionship, could that appeal to men attracted to men? Duh!)In fact, the rule forbade sharing horses. Bernard of Clairvaux, nephew of one of the founding Kinghts, was an effective advocate in their formal recognition in 1129.

Despite their military charism, realtively few were actually combatants. One non-military way they protected pilgrims was this: people starting out on pilgrimage could present cash to a local Templar spot, and get a letter of credit that could be cashed at another Templar spot down the road. Pilgrims were safer not carrying cash, (in fact, before this they were routinely killed for money,) and the Templars became an international banking system. With cash on hand, the Templars also began loaning money, including an unfortunate large loan to King Phillip IV of France.

Church and State colluded in trumped-up charges against the Kinghts. The Pope readily agreed to accuse them of heresy and other enormities, and on Friday, October the 13th, Philip orchestrated the arrest of Templars all over France (who repays debts to heretics?) Other arrests across Europe followed. Many were tortured into false confessions and burned at the stake. The last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in Paris, 1314.

In 2001, a parchment was found in the Vatican Archives that revealed that the Pope had absolved the Knights of all the charges of heresy--in 1308, 4 years before he disbanded them anyway. (And of course long before the burnings at the stake stopped.) Political pressures, you know--what's a Pope to do?

I can't help but think of the upcoming investigation of US women's apostolic religious orders in light of the history of the Templars. No Church-State collusion here--it's all inside the Church. And it feels all political. And, at least so far, no credible justification has been offered for their investigation. At least we don't burn people at the stake any more.

"You walk the Camino -- then the Camino walks you...."

2009-10-09T11:50:00.000-07:00

One of my friends asked for the address of the blog again: "I didn't know you were still posting," he said. He seemed surprised.

I'm surprised too. We've stopped walking, but the Camino isn't over. I rehearse the days' destinations like a mantra: Puente la Reina, Estella, Los Arcos, Viana. I wonder about our fellow pilgrims: how they are -- and where. I continue conversations started along the way.

So, the Camino continues.

One of the followers of this blog -- we call you dear people our cyber-Caministas! --put it powerfully: "You walk the Camino -- and then it walks you." That's exactly what's going on. That's why we can't shake the experience. Nor would we want to. We enjoy a great meal all over again by telling the stories. We resurrect the dead by remembering them, whether with tears or with laughter. And as we tell the stories, as we share the memories, we continue to learn from them. So it is with the Camino.

I shared dinner last night with a dear friend, whom I hadn't seen since the trip. Talking with her brought an insight out of a Camino story I'd told many times before, but never to her. She brought to light something I hadn't seen before; she showed me where to go with an insight.

On the Camino we looked for yellow arrows like the one in the photo above. Now we look to our friends for direction. They don't fail us, but the markings aren't bright yellow either. The way forward is more subtle, more nuanced.

The Camino continues.

So will this blog.

The Camino was the first of a three-stage project, each stage involving some form of pilgrimage. In January, 2010 we'll accompany a delegation of seminary students to the Lutheran Student Center in Mexico City, where they will do a two-week "cross-cultural" experience in one of the world's largest and most complex cities. Then, in March, 2010 we'll visit an on-going immersion program run by Santa Clara University at the Casa de la Solidaridad in El Salvador. Affiliated with the Jesuit university in San Salvador, the program starts in January. By March the students will be well into their semester, well-integrated into their community learning sites, and well on their way to processing the experience.

In stages two and three, we'll be particularly interested to see how these two immersion experiences work as post-modern versions of the ancient practice of pilgrimage.

Yes, the Camino continues. Thanks for being on the way with us.

Poor in Spirit

2009-10-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God." Matthew's first beatitude is a softer version of Luke's: "blessed are you who are poor." Luke is clear that he means material poverty--the matching "woe" refers to "you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort."

In Christian tradition too often we sentimentalize or soften material poverty. Real poverty is not when you don't own three Lexuses, ("lexi"?) Neither is it as seen in some interpretations of religous poverty in which they don't actually own this or that material good, but have full use of it. How absurd. "I don't own the villa." But if you can use the villa, isn't that pretty close to owning or co-owning it, except that there's no personal responsibility for its upkeep? After all, none of us takes our belongings with us when we die. We use them here, and leave them behind. The difference between this form of "evangelical" poverty and ownership is responsibility, not possession.

But those aren't real poverty. Real poverty is when you don't have what you NEED. When you can't feed the kids. When you can't pay the rent. Or when the struggle to do so is real and every-day and the outcome is uncertain. Real poverty often means living in dangerous situations, and enduring the daily indignities of disdain from the better-off. Analogously, what's poverty of spirit? When you don't have what you need. Sometimes I think of this as not having faith, not having hope. Depression might be a form of poverty of spirit. Isolation, loneliness. Despair. Joylessness. But in light of walking the camino, I have another idea, too.

Luke's Jesus says that the rich "have already received their comfort." In other words--they don't know that they need anything more. Their noses aren't rubbed in their need. To be poor in spirit, perhaps, means exactly to have our noses rubbed in our need--to recognize our radical self-insufficiency, spiritually and socially as well as materially, and to live in the real possibility of not having it met.

Both Luke and Matthew's Jesus says that the poor are blessed because theirs IS the kingdom of God. Not "you'll be paid off big-time in the afterlife." Now. The kingdom of God IS yours. Walking the camino we were continually faced by our need--for the fellowship of other pilgrims, for insight on dealing with blisters, sore muscles, and hurting backs. For cheerleading, for us and by us. We needed the hospitality of Spaniards not put off by scruffy travelers with poor command of Spanish. We needed the power of the path itself--the faith of centuries of seekers walking the same road in search of numberless different hopes. I needed Marty's good humor and story-telling, and shared my own. I've remarked before how tourists are far more solitary than pilgrims, who are far more communal. It's because pilgrims need, and know they need (or learn that pretty quickly, if they're paying attention at all.) Even though walking the camino feels like an accomplishment--and it is!--it is also a celebration of need. The kingdom of God is AMONG us. It's a kingdom of we who need.

Lest I be too sentimental myself, it is also true that there are those who are destroyed, physically, psychologically and socially by need. It is not automatic that the Kindgom of God is given to those who need. But the fault for that destruction is ours--for failing to be responsive to the needs of those who need as we need. The challenge of the camino is to need. One challenge of re-entry is to continue to need--and to try to respond. To continue to be that experience of the kingdom among us.

Lightening the Load: TMB

2009-10-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

At dinner my niece cuts off a too-graphic description of handling blisters along the Camino: "TMI!" She shoots me a look, and it's one that I know she's received in recent memory. She's a quick study. She's also right: this is not genteel dinner conversation. TMI! Too Much Information!

I file the insight away. What counted as appropriate table talk on pilgrimage doesn't work off the trail. Pilgrims are hungry for any miracle foot treatments -- and it's appropriate to impart them at any time of day or night. Normal people, however, are not. Chalk that up to the jolt of re-entry, about which Lisa wrote earlier.

There's another jolt of re-entry, one I want to attend to. Just as we shift conversation topics, so we find our needs altered. Again and again, I've run into the feeling of simply having too much stuff. After carrying everything on my back for four weeks, I come home to a house full of things I seem to have needed four weeks ago. They suddenly seem superfluous. TMS! Too Much Stuff! Or more pointedly: TMB! Too Much Baggage!

I read a book on Camino, tearing off chapters as I finished them. Wally Lamb's smart coming-of-age novel, "She's Come Undone," got filed in trash receptacles across the top of Spain. I took the daily lectionary readings, which lived in my back pocket, until I found the right place to leave them. Once it was on a cafe table in Villafranca del Bierzo -- and the waiter crossed the plaza to return them! During the first week, we'd systematically go through our backpacks to identify everything we'd brought that we didn't really need, arrange it into a tiny shrine in our hotel room -- and walk out the door, never to see it again.

For a while I looked for our discarded gear on people who'd pass us. Then I even stopped looking. The backpack in the photo above weighs about 18 pounds, down from about 24. I didn't even really need all of that.

Now, back in ordinary life and surrounded by normal people, it's easier to adjust my table talk than shake this feeling of simply having too much baggage. What can I get rid of? That's a negative way of asking the real question: what do I really need?

This winnowing process works on several levels. Possessions are the easiest to identify -- and deal with. But we also carry relationships. Some we should, and some we carry out of habit, familiarity, or inertia. Relationships too can become just extra "baggage." Finally, there's the baggage we bring into relationships. I'll confess: I come encumbered. How can I unburden excess possessions? How can I lighten relationships that have become onerous? How can I unburden myself? How can I be a lighter spirit, present in a more gracious way?

Finally, even more baggage: I'm a world-class worrier. I always have a Plan B in place, should Plan A fail. Moreover, I not only have the plan, I even have all the gear for Plan B. I even have gear for Plans C and D!

What usually happens, of course, is Plan Q. Which turns out to be better than anything I could have scripted -- and for which all the right "stuff" miraculously appears.

So how can I unburden myself in that way? I'm carrying about 25 pounds of possible outcomes and all the attendant frets that go with them.

TMB!

Re-entry

2009-10-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

I'd like to pick up Marty's great question of return--how do we return from pilgrimage. What changes, what remains the same? Like Marty, I miss the simplicity of the road (and the company!) As one of our companions remarked, the camino isn't easy, but it is simple. My feet are rapidly returning to their urban-wimpy pre-camino state, back from their road-ready, almost hoof-like condition at road's end. I'm a little embarrassed by that.

One question keeps at me, though. On pilgrimage, we were largely people receiving. We needed the townspeople to be offering meals, lodging, (showers!!) laundry. The injured needed doctors. In the past, of course, we'd have been begging our way--nowadays we pay. But still, without the daily labor of those whose livelihood is some form of hospitality, of giving, we'd never have made it. In order to be mobile, we needed the stability of others. They, in turn, needed the constant flow of pilgrims for their livelihood. There was a true symbiosis of pace.

Now I've returned to a basically stationary life. I sleep in the same town night after night. I know where things are, how to access the resources I need. Heck, I speak the local language here in California pretty well. I am not always receiving. But am I giving? I think one measure of the spiritual profit of pilgrimage is to be aware of the ways in which we are all always receiving, and to receive lightly and graciously. But no less, I think I need to focus also on how this affects my ability to practice the virtues of stability, of being the kind of resource that others need. Hospitality, not limited to the question of livelihood (I do not expect to open a hostel in Berkeley, though I've worked at shelters here in the past,) but the deeper hospitality of those who support the others who travel through our lives, perhaps only for a moment, a day, a short time. Will I help them on their way?

What is it like to be back? Footprints of Pilgrimage

2009-10-02T17:06:00.000-07:00

That's the question everyone asks. Some people want the nano-second response; others want more. As always, the answers vary depending on who's asking. But with the Camino, I have a hunch the answers will also alter with time.

Most obviously, it's just plain strange not to be walking. We teased our friends on the Camino about how hard it would be to shake pilgrim rituals. Like zombies we'd get up, pack up, and hit the road before daylight. While the spectre of Zombie-Pilgrims cracked us up in Santiago, back home in San Francisco, it's close to the truth. Several mornings, particularly as my body crawls back into this time zone, I've been up before dawn, in my boots as soon as my feet hit the floor, and first in line at Peet's Coffee in the village.

I also miss people, especially my excellent traveling companion, Lisa. I joked that we'd talk our way across the top of Spain --and we did! We made up stories, retold the plots of every book we'd recently read, and replayed all of our favorite movies. We literally talked for miles.

Then there was the easy camaraderie of the other pilgrims we met along the way. Some of them have names and stories of their own; others we came to know only by sight. Because the Camino attracts people from all over the world, we found ourselves using all the languages we knew -- and even a few we didn't. "Buen Camino!" became the universal greeting.

Pilgrim banter taught me the enormous value of "encouragement." In the Christian scriptures, the pastoral epistles constantly invite believers to "encourage one another" (e.g., Hebrews 3:13f.) It always seemed like filler to me.

The Camino taught me the importance of encouragement: stray conversation and simple greeting alike spurred us all on. I remember sitting with Lisa at an outdoor cafe in Viana, a tiny town in the eastern region of Navarre. The pilgrim route ran right past our cafe, and we spent the late afternoon cheering on everyone who passed by. We'd taken a "slow" day; they were walking on to the next big city. For that one night, we were the cheerleaders of the Camino.

And believe me! the favor got returned, repeated, recycled. Maybe I'll figure out how to do a little more cheerleading back on the home front.

A final, tentative answer to the question: what is it like to be back? Everything seems hopelessly and unnecessarily complicated. For weeks all I did was sleep, walk, eat -- and walk some more. Everything I needed was in my backpack. All I worried about was reaching the next village. Now there are schedules to coordinate, appointments to make, obligations to tend to, articles to write. I'm not complaining: this is life. My life -- and it delights me. But it's different.

Where are the footprints of the Camino in all of this? I find myself handling things with a lighter touch, a lot of humor, and a spirit of what-the-hellness. My computer screen has cataracts? Well, gosh: maybe I can move them around like a desktop icon. The contractor didn't show today? He'll come tomorrow. There's nothing for dinner? Bread and olive oil worked well enough on the road....

It's a welcome attitude. Here's hoping it outlasts the blisters.

Lyrics

2009-09-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

When on retreat, I've learned to pay attention to the songs that spring up in my mind. Very often, they're telling me or reminding me of something that hasn't yet percolated up to the upper levels of my awareness. Since my musical turf tends toward rock and folk, very often I find myself mentored by unlikely gurus--one retreat day I spent several hours pondering a tune by Tina Turner that wouldn't get out of my head.

On camino, it was Joan Baez' song "Blessed are" that kept springing to mind. (Along with the sound track to "Jungle Book," but that's a different post...)

Blessed are the one way ticket holders
on a one way street.
Blessed are the midnight riders
for in the shadow of God they sleep.
Blessed are the huddled hikers
staring out at falling rain,
wondering at the retribution
in their personal acquaintance with pain.
Blessed are the blood relations
of the young ones who have died,
who had not the time or patience
to carry on this earthly ride.
Rain will come and winds will blow,
wild deer die in the mountain snow.
Birds will beat at heaven's wall,
what comes to one must come to us all.

For you and I are one way ticket holders
on a one way street.
which lies across a golden valley
where the waters of joy and hope run deep.
So if you pass the parents weeping
of the young ones who have died,
take them to your warmth and keeping
for blessed are the tears they cried
and many were the years they tried.
Take them to that valley wide
and let their souls be pacified.
(© 1970, 1971 Chandos Music (ASCAP))

The connections of this song to our trek require no deep insight to catch--I think it was the sense of one-way-ness that first grabbed me. The arrows on the camino all point to Santiago. There's no going back--like life itself, there's a single direction, and we try to progress, slowly or quickly, alone or together, limping or sound. At the end of the day, pilgrims commiserate and rejoice together, we share information about the trail or the towns. ("Remember that labyrinth at the top of the hill?") Such is not merely what's on our minds--it is a kind of responsibility. The story of the camino is found not just in the walking, but in the story-telling, the pointing out of what caught a pilgrim's eye, or soul, that day. In this song it is mourning that we are called to share--but it is also true that the one-way street "lies across a golden valley, were the waters of joy and hope run deep." We do need to hear that sometimes.

"Oh beautiful, for pilgrim feet...."?!

2009-09-27T02:24:00.000-07:00

Believe me: they aren't! Clearly the author of "America the Beautiful," Katharine Lee Bates never went on pilgrimage. She didn't know what she was talking about. But she betrays a romanticized view of pilgrims and pilgrimage that we encountered on the road -- and in ourselves.

Like ooze from a blister, evenings quickly drained the romanticism out of us. Evenings often brought us to little villages whose only livelihood was the Camino. We could find little else going on. One town, Triacastela, had a listed population of about 90. That meant that when the three pilgrim hostels were full, the town's population more than doubled.

We sat one night on the main drag of Triacastela, writing postcards and watching people's feet. Most folks traded in their hiking boots for Crocs or flip-flops at night, so our view was unimpeded. As we observed them first-hand, pilgrim feet are not at all beautiful: they are bandaged, blistered, and wrapped in every manner of gauze. And the people attached to those feet were limping, leaning, and moving very slowly. A lot like us.

We packed sewing kits for potential wardrobe malfunctions; we used them on our feet. Both needle and thread: thread turns out to be cleverly helpful in keeping blisters drained. Applying the contents of a sewing kit to the feet, however, also invites infection, which could close down a pilgrimage. People walk through blisters; you can't walk through infection. That means a couple of days of topical and internal antibiotics. You toss a coin; you take your chances. Mutely offering a prayer to Nuestra Senora of Second Chances, we sewed our feet.

All the books tell hikers to break in their shoes. All the books tell hikers to pad the points of friction. All this we did. What the books didn't tell us -- at least not the ones I read -- is that everything I put in my pack would create a large sole-shaped pressure zone between my foot and the ground. Every ounce in the pack registered on the soles of my feet. I had to think about what I needed, ounce by precious ounce: my feet demanded it.

After a few days in Santiago, I ran into some fellow-travelers from an earlier stage of the Camino. "You look great!" someone said -- to me! But of course, she was right: I'd spent time that morning making up my face, not my feet. Dressing our feet became a necessary morning ritual. When we reached Santiago, we stopped. Our feet weren't carrying 20 pounds around all day, which lightened our load -- and our spirits. When I got to Santiago, I bought the Spanish pair of jeans I'd been fantasizing about for the last 100 miles. I did look great: I'd shifted from pilgrim to tourist with stunning speed.

Pilgrims don't look great: they look tired, weary, and stressed. Katharine Lee Bates gets the stress. She continues: "Whose stern impassioned stress/ A thoroughfare for freedom beat/ Across the wilderness!" But goodness! how purposeful pilgrims sound! In reality, we dawdle. I can't tell you how many times I packed and unpacked my frame during the course of a day. One friend told the story of a traveling companion who simply had to taste every blackberry bush she passed. This quickly became an ex-traveling companion: my friend went on ahead, leaving her behind to taste every berry in La Rioja. With all her companion's pauses, she simply couldn't get any forward momentum going.

Blackberry bushes aren't the only temptation. We so often saw people taking a break mid-morning for a bocadillo and a brew that we began calling this combination "The Breakfast of Champions." I won't even comment on the hordes of people standing outside the smoke-free zone of a hostel having a cigarette.

The reality of pilgrims and pilgrimage is pretty gritty. We're not Bates' beautiful and beautifully determined band of soldiers. We didn't march -- we writhed into Santiago, like some spineless, gelatinous mass. When we got there, we stank, we ached, we wanted nothing more spiritual than a shower. There's a big pot of incense that's often swung at the daily noon pilgrim Mass in the Santiago Cathedral, the butafumeiro. It's not there for decoration: it cuts the smell, it may even de-fumigate us all.

St. Augustine (d. 430) turned again and again to pilgrimage to describe the reality of the Christian church; he called the people in it pilgrims, peregrini. I used to hear "America the Beautiful" in the background whenever I read this. No more! Now I see that smelly, writhing mass that oozed into Santiago.

It's not pretty, but it comforts me.

It's a lot closer to the truth.

Saints -- and more saints

2009-09-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

As a cradle Lutheran, I didn't grow up with a robust spectrum of saints. Although Luther included the "Hail Mary" in his prayer book, he generally frowned on intercessors, advising his flock to intercede for and with each other. Good advice, but it leaves personal prayer a lot of distance to cover on its own -- and it leaves Lutheranism with a very weak grasp of the feminine.

Katy Luther reputedly made great beer, but apparently not good enough for Luther to beatify her. Very quietly, though, some of us already have. At the very least, she gets points for putting up with Luther's rants.

Perhaps that's why I've been moved by the presence of the Virgin along the Camino, particularly the Camino Frances, or the French route. Mary is everywhere: Nuestra Senora de la Vega, Santa Maria de las Estrellas, Santa Maria del Perdon, respectively, Our Lady of the Meadow, Mary of the Stars, Mary of Forgiveness. Indeed, our journey started in Pamplona at a hotel located on the mysterious plaza dedicated to the Virgen de la O. We entertained ourselves for hours imagining what that "O" might stand for.

At a Franciscan church in Santiago, we discovered the delightful Nuestra Senora de Valvanera, Our Lady of the Valley of Venus. My particular favorite is the Madonna de la Leche, the Virgin nursing an infant Jesus. Jesus either looks divinely disinterested or he hungrily reaches for the breast.

The images of Mary are as abundant as her names. The Mater Dolorosa, Our Lady of Sorrows, always wears a black triangular garb, and she often appears with seven swords piercing her heart. We often found her at the altar of a side chapel, the crucified and entombed Jesus lying below her. This was a kind of Pieta, all the more anguished because Mary reaches out for a dead child separated from her by the marble slab of an altar.

More often, though, we saw Mary as the Madonna, with Jesus on her lap. One of them was holding an apple, for historically Mary inaugurates a new creation. She represents the New Eve, just as Christ stands in as the New Adam: Nuestra Senora of Second Chances.

As she participates in the ordinary joys and sorrows of human life, Mary becomes a very plastic image. Perhaps she's everywhere, because she is closer to us than the rest of the Godhead. She's on our side.

Mary really is the Lady of the Camino. The route may be called the Camino of St. James, but Mary presides over the French route.

St. James plays a strange role. He's there -- and in equally fluid form, but the figure of James is more ambiguous. Sometimes he appears as the Pilgrim Saint, having been deputized by Christ to go to Galicia and turn all the Druids there into Christians. He had very modest luck and returned to Jerusalem, where he was promptly beheaded around 44 CE. Legend tells us that his disciples returned with his body to Galicia.

There James gets reincarnated as the Knight, and we found many images of Santiago Matamoros, James the Slayer of the Muslims. Historically, he could never have done this; Muhammed's death is a good six centuries after James'. But the Moors inhabited much of Spain in the early Middle Ages. Once Christian armies found victory marching into battle bearing the relics of James, religious iconography caught up. Who cares about history?! We found lots of images of James alive, well, and on horseback, beheading Muslims. At least, he knew something about beheading....

In the fifteenth century, the conquistadors brought James the Knight with them to the Americas as part of the Conquest. He took on another job description: slayer of the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayans, and anyone else who got in the way of the Spanish Empire. There are images of James alive and on horseback, this time killing the native peoples.

Those who weren't killed were Catholicized, but the saints of New Spain's Catholicism only thinly covered the already existing gods and goddesses of the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan religions. Native peoples adopted Catholic saints -- and then adapted them. In the Guadalupe, Mary takes on the traits of Tonantzin, Aztec goddess of the heavens. James the Knight takes on traits of Illapa, the Incan god of lightning, thunder, and rainstorms.

With nationalist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we find images of James the Slayer of the Spaniards, Santiago Mataespanois. The conquering saint takes the side of the conquered.

We studied the rich spectrum of saints affiliated with pilgrimage at the fine Museum of Pilgrimage in Santiago. Their images are powerfully labile, telling more about the people who revered them than the saints themselves.

But then, saints always do: they embody the deepest needs of the human heart, both its darkness and its beauty.

I am struck with these two saints and their images, one of carnage and conquest, the other of nurture and compassion. Despite the peace Jesus preached, lived, and simply was -- those hard teachings about loving the enemy -- we still want James to fight for us. But we will always need Mary to feed us and to share our tears.

I'll take Mary, Nuestra Senora del Camino -- the mysterious Virgen de la O.

The ends of the earth.....

2009-09-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

Medieval Christians believed that if the gospel was being preached in Finisterre, then the good news had "reached the ends of the earth." Finisterre is a peninsula that marks the westernmost part of continental Europe. I was at the westernmost part of Ireland visiting the cliffs of Moher, and there was a sign clinging to the windswept cliffs that said: "Next pub: Boston!" I looked for a similar sign at Finisterre -- "Next cerveceria: Boston!!!" But didn't find one.

The ancients put Finisterre on their maps painting nothing beyond it but oceans and leviathans. Beyond Finisterre was a realm of darkness. As the German tourist brochure we were reading put it: "Reich der Dunkelheit." The sun descended into this realm every night. Only a miracle brought it up in the morning.

We watched the sun set into the grey Atlantic last night on the rocky coast of Finisterre. A lighthouse guards the treacherous coastline, as well as launching the pilgrimage route that leads from Finisterre to Santiago.

There were lots of other pilgrims huddled in the rocks watching -- and when the sun set, we all cheered.

We were cheering the setting of the sun; we were cheering the sure knowledge that it would come up the next day; we were cheering the end of our various Caminos.

We were cheering miracles, old and new.

And yes, I caught sunrise the following morning, again with a bunch of tired pilgrims. And yes, we cheered then too.

Yay!

2009-09-21T12:37:00.001-07:00

We arrived in Santiago early this afternoon, found our digs for the night, and since then basically wandered the town. Santiago is a pretty big town, about 90,000, while the towns we have been wandering through have been mostly very small agricultural villages. Lots of wine country early on, a lot more dairy of late. One of the joys of the pilgrimage has been catching the sweet smell of silage on the morning breeze, as we walked in glorious rural Spain.

I think the 4 main emotions/virtues/passions or whatever you want to call them of the camino are these: persistence, joy, hope and fear. Persistence, clearly, was what kept us going when it was beginning to rain, or when we were in pain, or when it just seemed like a heck of a long way to the next stop. Somewhere along the road an Irish woman noted we were carrying our own gear and said "you are mighy women, aren't you?" We laughed--not so much mighty as persistent, patient, willing to take another step. Just like every other pilgrim who arrives at Santiago. Persistence makes this kind of thing happen.

Joy makes it worth doing. I've mentioned before how happy we've been at having clean laundry, but also little joys like a hot shower at the end of the day, a meal that's perfectly cooked, the strength of early morning that presages good for the day. Bigger joys include drinking in the lovely woods, like the Tolkien-esque forest we walked through in the early morning light today, or the neat rows of grape vines, a spectacular vista over a mountainside Faces--seeing folks we'd met and wondered about, hoped for, prayed for along the road.

Hope feeds persistence, and makes it happy. Hope is that we'll see a partucular fellow pilgrim again here in Santiago. (We've met people who've met people they knew from previous treks--hope like this can last years!)Hope at least that they made it. Many days we hoped that today's trek will be easier than yesterday's as we got stronger along the way. Usually they did. (One pilgrim told us that day three was hardest. We had a harder day 2 than 3, and some tought days after. But we hoped.) Hope that, despite the immediate physical awareness that the walking engendered, the subtler spiritual work of the camino was also being done. On hard days, there was little of complex thought, much less deep spiritual work going on, at least that I could sense in myself. But what did St. Paul say about "when you can't pray, the Spirit prays in you..."?

And fear came with us too. Fear that we'd have to stop for reasons big or small. Fear that the rain we ran into late in the trek would soak us and leave us vulnerable to hypothermia. Fear that we'd run into bedbugs again. Fear that this was really only a long hike, not a spiritual endeavor at all. Fear calls forth courage mediated by prudence. We got better rain gear after the first day it rained. We took reasonable anti-bedbug precautions. We trust that the Spirit will do the Spirit's work, if we show up honestly and try our best.

So we did. So we're here. Time to rest--with no alarm set for the morning. Thanks be to God for a rich and safe trip, for the wonderful people we've met, and for the support yove been to us.