I have been told that seminary is supposed to be a place where one re-examines spirituality, life, and the general direction you've set your compass. This isn't entirely evident with the mountains of books and reading assignments, lengthy papers, and exams. It isn't necessarily in the process, but maybe in that brief space of bleary-eyed recognition that you are climbing a mountain that wasn't on the radar when you first started walking. It is those liminal, barely perceptible times when your exhaustion leads you to give up the inner dialogue and for a minute, things merge somehow. That sense of self, so defined, is allowed to play a little – to seek deeper or differently. It is the words we claim for ourselves, that can sometimes get in the way of who we are. Mother, stockbroker, Friend...those markers merge and change as we move across our lifescape. But, despite the changes that sweep through our life it is at the core of our refuge that we find the point of center - in that place that we can call ours. That spiritual, physical space that is home – that we often retreat when the seeking gets too difficult or wearing.
Some of us had a spot as a child that we would go when angry, sad, or maybe we just needed to be alone. When I was at my grand parent's house, I'd hide under Nana's dining room table and write poems or just random thoughts. Peeking through the white lace table cloth, I could perch just beyond the adult conversation and escape my siblings for a while. Sometimes people would lose track of me, and then think to peek under the table after I'd been out of sight too long.. I appreciated that separateness,yet closeness of my experience. At home, my escape was a bit more elaborate, I'd managed to turn my closet into a spaceship with the help of cutout pictures of planets. Stamps from the Publisher's sweepstakes junk mail were transformed into computer buttons, and I used my sleeping bag to make my getaway a little more comfortable. My mom may have thought it a little strange that her youngest was squirelling away in closets to write obscure and random poetry and hide from the world sometimes. But, I think she understood what many people do – I needed a place that was my own. As an adult, I vaguely remember that sense of alienation from my environment. A strong desire to mold and shape something that was uniquely mine.
Sometimes, our need for place and belonging is among others. It can be in community that a piece of ourself manifests, or maybe in different communities we have the ability to experience different realities of ourself. There is a reason why the sitcom Cheers held on for so many years. There is a strong identification to go where people know your name. I never understood the whole girls going to the bathroom together thing or even the bonding over football necessarily, but it isn't much different than how I wrap myself in the comfort of friends at a coffee shop. It is this need for connection, for placement that drives the human spirit to seek kinship. This not only has a bodily component but a spiritual dimension. There is that belonging that we look for within and without ourselves.
Many of us tried on different faces with different crowds when we were teenagers. Dating the bad boy or hanging out with people that pushed us a little. Though that time of trying on different hats, isn't relegated to pimply teenagehood though. Often after a large transition this can also trigger questions of identity. Experiencing the birth of a new child, job loss, a significant death, divorce, or even moving somewhere new can trigger feelings of personal and spiritual dislocation. One of the challenges around these sorts of life events is the lack of ritual around endings and beginnings in our society. Sometimes people are moving so fast, that an ending or a beginning will not even register. I wish someone had told me before the birth of my first son, that of course I would be happy about his arrival – but that it was normal to grieve the loss of my old life. It was a momentous time of change for me. Dealing with this imbalance can be tricky. William Bridges calls this the Neutral Zone in his book Transitions. Bridges says that in the old passage rituals, people were brought up and educated to know what to do in these natural but mysterious gaps in the lifetime. They learned to solicit the aid of dream figures, or spirit guides. They were instructed in symbolic modes of perception wherein the natural order became symbolic communication written for their enlightenment and guidance. Sometimes they learned to cultivate mental states in which heightened kinds of awareness were possible -by meditation, fasting, chanting, and sometimes with the aid of psychotropic substances. One can look to Carlos Castenada's books on the teachings of Don Juan for more modern references.
While these sorts of experiences can seem alien or mysterious, I have heard many accounts spiritual connection through dreams, out of body experiences, and omens. It doesn't necessarily take a mystical sojourn to the dessert nor take mind altering substances to tune into the sacred signs that are sign posts in our spiritual journey. In times of questioning, peoples of other times and places would often go out into unfamiliar wild spaces, into the deserts, into sacred caves for contemplation. There are accounts of Jesus, Buddha, and Moses who journeyed into the wilderness. Unless one counts the womb-like quality of a cozy Starbucks that is not often left to us in these times. One of the challenges of emptying ourselves and looking inward, is that the modern value for emptiness often symbolizes a “lack of”. Some see it as an absence, instead of a healthy process. There are ways to journey, besides a pilgrimage or a vacation. It can be as simple as creating a sacred space, where you honor yourself with quiet or meditative time. It could mean waking up 30 minutes before the rest of the family for some quiet, centering or a maybe go for a jog alone. In our process oriented and results valued society, these periods of searching and dislocation can seem pointless and frustrating. The question often comes up, can't I just hurry up and figure it out? Can't I speed up this whole self discovery thing? In my own frustrations I have found that these times can be excruciating, and go at the speed they will. But, these times are absolutely necessary to recharge, reorient. It is essential to go through this inward time to make ready for the next move forward in life. William Bridges says it is something akin to Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole, muttering“It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, 'Come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say, 'Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else – but, oh dear!” cried Alice with a sudden burst of tears, “I do wish they would put their heads down! I am so very tired of being all alone here!”
It is lonely, but it has been in those places of darkness and aloneness that we have been birthed and where traditionally people have gone to birth themselves anew. These are the spaces of transformation.
There are times, when being alone is not the option we want – nor necessarily the right choice at the time. Community is often what holds aloft, when we are riding rough currents. It is beloved community where we can let down defenses, and refresh ourselves. Being an extravert it is easy for me to want to seek out community before spending time alone, and in healthier times I'll review my motives before heading for noiser landscapes. My personal landscape changed dramatically when my mother passed only three weeks before I got married in 2000, I was 26 and hadn't a clue how to go forward. Though of course, I did. It was the noise of work and the company of friends that kept me moving, when I needed to do just that. It was probably six months before I was ready to confront those inner mysteries and questions of where this left me. Who was I, when not defining myself as the daughter or defining myself as the youngest or...? This was my personal wilderness journey. While I know there are stages of grief, for me it was a chaotic flow between numbness and inner connection. We all have our own mechanisms to reclaim ourselves and our feeling of placement, though the answers on how to do that are not always straightfoward.
I've been happy to learn that I haven't been alone in my stumbling efforts to wholeness and healing. For a Pastoral Care class, I've been reading Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure and Renewal on the Camino De Santiago by Kerry Egan. This book was written in the midst of her time at Harvard University Divinity School. I strongly identify with the source of Kerry's pilgrimage, as it was in response to the death of her father. Though she admits to not knowing it at the beginning of her sojourn. A year after her father died, Kerry Egan walked through the fields, mountains, and villages of Northern Spain to encounter ancient holy sites and “get away from it all”. She struggles woth what is means to act like and be a “real” pilgrim, sweating in the dust, and suffering the long road. She wrestles with whether it is merely a masochistic displaced sense of guilt or a deservingness of pain – her pilgramage seems to act as a physical representation of her purge of grief. The physical journey she embarks on is mirrored in her inward journey. As her anger manifests, she curses the heat and the bugs. As her anger purges, the peace that follows leaves those emotional spaces for transformation and new understanding of self. What is entirely human about this account of spiritual seeking is her reluctant understanding that there is no perfect way to reach that point of transition from grief to wholeness. There is no perfect pilgrim. She found the community of the other pilgrims often as healing as her own thoughts. In this community she found common struggle and was able to recognize personal truth in the mirror of others and her reactions to them. Kerry Egan cast the picture of the pilgrimage when she said,
” On pilgramage, the road itself is a microcosm of human life, shrunk down to five weeks or so. The first day, the twenty-some-odd miles over the Pyrenees, is birth. It's hard, but you end up in the beautiful Basque country, Navarra, lush green, moist and soft, overflowing with roses and mud. That is life. But then you cross a ridge and enter the meseta, the Spanish equivalent of Nebraska, but with no Dairy Queens. It is about 110 degrees every day, flat with few trees, covered in swaying wheat. There is no shade, no flowing water. You slug through this. The white straught chalky road stretches out in front of you, yellow wheat is all you can see on either side, blue sky with no clouds above, and the sun bakes and burns you. You cannot escape it. This is death. Then you reach another set of mountains. You climb over and descent into Galicia. It is even more beautiful than Navarra. Greener. Softer. With this really great white wine they serve in ceramic cups. You didn't think anything could be more beautiful than life, then you come here. And you appreciate it so much more, the green is so much greener, because you slugged through so much yellow brown wheat. The damp air is so much softer because your skin cracked in the dry sun. Your body is strong now; the blisters have become calluses and you can walk forever. You are so happy, so close to the end of the pilgrimage, but you never want this to end. This is the afterlife, Resurrection. But, first you have to get through death.”
So it is sometimes in the company of fellow pilgrims we find that ephemeral feeling of home. While ultimately, we enter and leave the world on our own steam – it is often in the deepening of relationship with others that we can reach truths larger than ourselves. It can be on the far reaches of the internet among forums, online games, and identity exploration on the fantastical frontiers of Second Life. We find it among friends, families, hobbiest, and sports.. It is in the healthy extension of our own strong core, that we can move out among the waves of other bodies of people. It is in our own personal understanding of self that we can grow stronger in communion with others. When we seek wholeness through others only, is when the balance tips. Just as the biblical reference of how a house on sand will fall, so will we without a strong foundation of self belonging.
While existing in community, how would you define your community wall? Do you define it close to yourself or is your boundary cast in a wider net. How do you regard those outside walls? Is your community wall a clear and concise border? If you've seen the movie Stardust or read the book by Neil Gaiman, you'll remember a town called Wall. It is a sleepy English town situated near an ancient wall. The villagers knew never to cross it, and put up guards to keep the boundary. The main character is a young man that knew this whole wall thing was a myth for the older generation. So to impress a girl he tricked the guard and leapt over it. The wall was in fact a boundary to another reality or world , if you will. When he leapt over the wall he found a landscape and experience entirely different from his own. He literally jumped over his community wall. Have you ever leapt over the forbidden line in the sand? It can be tempting to look outwards, as well as inwards. Sometimes being in a different space can certainly lend itself to wider experience, though it can be lost if we do it at the expence of jumping our inner walls.
Inner wall jumping can happen in pilgrimage, but also through stillness and spiritual practices . Contemplative Christianity, Buddhism, and meditation share the practice of self emptying. In emptying the excess information and overflow within us, we chisel closer to our personal truths. The 5th century Christian mystic know as Pseudo Dyonisius the Areoapogite he advocates letting go of naming and defining mystery to gain greater knowledge of a deity that defies base description. Pseudo Dyonisius believes that labels are distracting, and that the truth is found in the darkness of contemplation. This could be applied to ourselves as well. So often we are busy being parents, good listeners, social organizers, Religious education teachers, environmentalists, cat-lovers. We are so occupied by being the things we define or name ourselves as, rather than simply spending time just being ourselves. In a status oriented culture, it is easy to let our roles define us. It is the hard work to define yourself by simply being.
We carry within ourselve a spiritual and locational home, not unlike the turtle. The place of belonging and center keep us grounded in a chaotic reality. We are lifted by community. We are lifted by remembering that we can place those spiritual nests externally and internally. The lines are what we make them. Be kind to yourself in moments of transiton, when the old answers are simply not the right ones. There is no formula for seeking that new space of self, it is a pilgrimage that is neither perfect nor easily located on your car's GPS.
Joseph Campbell said:
We must be willing to get rid of
the life we've planned, so as to have
the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed
before the new one can come
In the cycle of endings and beginnings that we perpetually exist, we float in our body's home, like the ancient ocean of tides. Our identity cycles as the world cycles around us. It is in knowing our heart's compass and allowing ourselves the time to find it, that we can find the place we call our own.
