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The
Power of Pilgrimage
by Gregg Levoy |
"When your ship, long moored in harbour, gives you the illusion of
being a house....put out to sea! Save your boat's journeying soul, and
your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may." ~Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara
Lake Superior is an inland sea. In terms of sheer size it is the
largest lake on the planet, more than 1200 miles around, and one of the
most volatile, capable of whipping itself into a frenzy of 30-foot seas,
and famous for its shipwrecks. It is also one of the coldest. For most of
the year, the water temperature is in the mid 30's, about as cold as
water can be without turning into something else. During the
hand test, Ann Linnea found that she could hold her hand in the water for only nine
seconds.
Kayaking around the lake would be the most dangerous thing she ever
did.
The idea first came up five years earlier, when Ann and Paul
Treuer, a longtime friend, bought a couple of used kayaks and after their first
exhilarating runs on the lake, he said, "I bet we could kayak around
this whole lake," to which she replied, "Yeah, right."
Nothing would have come of it, except that that little seed happened
to drop into fertile soil: "the part of me," said Ann, a former Forest
Service naturalist and marathoner, "that always wanted to do one long
wilderness adventure." It was further nourished by the part of her that,
as she said, "knew that I was approaching the end of some kind of life
cycle, the life my parents lived, the life I thought I was raised to
live: wife, mother, home, good citizen. I wondered, is this the fullness
of what I can be doing? I wanted to reset the course of my life, to come
to clarity about what the gift is I'm supposed to return to the world,
and I thought the trip could teach me." 
"My purpose was to find a purpose, to find the deepest courage in
myself, to look for the extraordinary growth, not just the ordinary,
day-to-day growth, which is certainly valid, but it was the kind of
incremental journeying my whole life had been about. I wanted to step
outside of that, to really open the door wide, which is why I liked the
symbolism of Lake Superior. It was so wide I couldn't see across it,
couldn't see what was on the other side, and that was just the magnitude
of change I was inviting. To grow beyond the expectations we're raised
with is a radical act, but one I felt was necessary to claiming my full
self."
"The question that I brought with me on the trip, and kept asking over
and over, was 'Am I doing the most I possibly can with my life?'"
The Quest in Question
Questioning is at the heart of spiritual journeying, of literally
leaving home for a time to go on a pilgrimage, retreat or vision quest,
of removing ourselves from the duties and dramas, the relationships and
roles that bombard us with messages that may be distracting or irrelevant
or even destructive to an emerging or affirmative sense of self, and that
interfere with our asking for responses to our burning questions--Who
am I? What matters? What is my gift? What is my purpose? To whom do I
belong? What can I believe in? What on Earth am I doing?
In taking a spiritual journey, we're calling on God rather than the
other way around. We're "crying for a vision" as the Oglala Sioux holy
man Black Elk called it, the one that may reveal our true vocation, our
real name, our purpose. But simply taking up a bedroll and hitting the
road won't generally suffice to alert the forces of enlightenment, which
require more than just moving around. Whether we make a pilgrimage to the
Ganges or Graceland, maintaining a spirit of observance and
self-reflection is key. We must be intent on spending time searching for
soul, moving toward something that represents to us an
ideal--truth, beauty, love, perspective, strength, serenity, transcendence, sacredness.
Without this intention, our pilgrimages are only vacations, our
vision quests are struck blind, our retreats are not also advances. We're
merely tourists and window-shoppers. Perhaps we're even escapees, people
in flight rather than in quest.
In taking a proverbial walkabout, in leaving home and the
distracting fusillade of activities that often keeps us from ourselves,
what is in the background becomes foreground, what is overlooked has the
chance to get looked over, what is waiting in the wings is given an
entrance cue. We ask for a vision or a calling, and the faith and
intestinal fortitude to follow it. Spiritual journeying, whether we walk
around a holy mountain, kayak around a lake, or sit in a single place on
a five-day meditation retreat, is about interior or exterior movement
toward the deep self. A geographical journey is symbolic of an inner
journey for which we long.
Pilgrims, says theologian Richard
Niebuhr, "are persons in motion, passing through territories not their own, seeking.....completion or
clarity; a goal to which only the spirit¹s compass points the way."
Sometimes that motion is religious and sometimes secular. Sometimes we
design our own journeys and sometimes we follow in the paths of those we
revere: pacing the garden where Jesus paced, sitting beneath the tree
where Buddha saw the light, praying in the chapel where Merton prayed,
visiting the house where Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet,
walking the same streets of a village in Mexico or a shtetl in Russia that your own
grandfather once walked.
Sometimes we journey with the body, on a bicycle trip through the
Holy Lands or a kayak trip around a Great Lake, and sometimes with the
mind, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell did early in his life by holing
himself up in a cabin for five years and doing nothing but reading, which
the Hindus called ynana yoga, the search for enlightenment through
knowledge and the mind.
Our approach depends on our primary way of experiencing the Spirit.
Sometimes we make the journey entirely in private, in solitary retreat or
solo vision quest in the wilderness, and other times in crowds, like the
great pilgrimages to Mecca, Benares, Rome, Jerusalem, and Compostela in
Spain, which more than anything resemble enormous migrations.
The trip Ann and Paul eventually took in the summer of 1992 was, as
Ann described it, "a self-designed midlife rite of passage, which I chose
to make rather than it choosing me, and I chose an arena in which I was
the most skilled, comfortable and inspired." She chose kayaking because
"I learn best by using my body, by moving until I have insight." She
chose a wilderness trip because "all my life I have sought wild
places for good counsel." And she chose Lake Superior because
"it was really important to me that the journey take place in my own backyard, rather
than someplace exotic."
Rites of Passage
In Hindi and Sanskrit, the word for a pilgrim-site means a ford, a
crossing-place, a point of transit, and people seem most inclined to take
spiritual journeys--as Ann did--at just such points in their own
lives, points during which those burning questions often arise. These
journeys are indeed rites of passage, rituals we enact to help us cross
over into maturity and ascendance of one kind or another--from
ignorance to wisdom, sleep to awakening, woundedness to wholeness, from
being lost to finding our way.
Spiritual journeys follow what Robert Atkinson in The Gift of
Stories calls the "sacred pattern," the same three-fold progression of
separation-initiation-return as rites of passage and heroic myths; the
same process of surrender-struggle-recovery common to 12-step programs;
the same architecture of beginning-middle-end as story-telling. We open a
door, step across a threshold, and return through it from the other side.
We leave an old life behind, experience a life transition up close and
receive its thorny wisdom, and then head home and hope to follow through
on whatever we learned.
Rites of passage, however, celebrate not so much the separation or
the return but the passage, the initiation, the processional of a single
spirit toward transcendence, the revelation of the sacred to the
initiate. The psychologist Carl Jung felt that the process of
individuation--the work of becoming yourself as distinct from the furry
warmth of the herd--is the result of a series of such initiations, all
of which begin with an act of separation from the status quo, and thus
separation anxiety.
The experience of the holy, however, says author Sam Keen, always
involves trembling. Quakers quake, Shakers shake, holy-rollers roll,
dervishes whirl, prophets stand knock-kneed before God. Spiritual
journeys are formidable because, like all rites of passage, they
necessitate that we leave our old selves behind for a time, leave the
trappings of identity and status, and move to a place where no-one knows
who we are, or cares.
On the day they were planning to leave from
Ann's home in Duluth,
Minnesota, they stood by the shores of Gitchee Gumee, as the Ojibway
Indians once called the lake, and considered the judiciousness of
starting out in 30-mile-per-hour winds, four-to-seven-foot waves, and a
small craft advisory for crafts such as Ann's 17-foot sea kayak, Grace.
They'd managed worse storms, but they worried about the message such a
departure might send to their already fretting families: that they would
be taking unnecessary chances.
Her parents were slightly aghast that she could leave her children,
a third-grader and a sixth-grader, for the whole summer. Her husband
couldn't understand why she had to be gone so long (over two months). One
friend wanted to know if they had really considered the dangers, and
another pointed out that if no woman had ever circumnavigated the lake,
there must be a good reason.
"There weren't many people who said,
'Oh, that's really a great idea.' In fact, there were none. It was very tough being on the receiving
end of not only my own doubts, but everyone else's. It's really hard to
stand in your own truth when everybody around you is telling you
'Why don't you just keep things the way they are?'"
They did postpone their trip a few days, hoping for better weather,
and meanwhile suffered "the disappointment of remaining put when one is
ready to leave." When the weather didn't break after several days, they
decided to head out anyway. The forecast, according to their weather-band
radios: strong winds, low clouds and fog, four-to-seven-foot surf, and a
small craft advisory, which, though they didn't know it then, would
become the weary refrain for much of the trip--the coldest and wettest
summer in a century.
Going in Circles
Although modest, the currents that move around Lake Superior do so
in a counter-clockwise direction, and Ann and Paul were heading
clockwise, against the currents, because they wanted to hit the wildest
stretch of the lake, the north side, early in the trip, because
"it just felt right," and because it was symbolic: it was following a very
ancient pilgrimage tradition, that of circumambulating a holy site in a
clockwise direction.
At a deep level, we all associate journeying with circularity. We
buy round-trip tickets, whether our actual trajectory there and back is
circular or not. It's as if we recognize that every journey is
essentially a journey toward ourselves, a circling around some mysterious
core of life that we can only glimpse while moving, just as it's easier
to see through a screen while moving your head back and forth. Every
trip, then, and especially one undertaken with sacred intention, is the
enactment of a pilgrimage, a mirroring of the planets that wheel around
the sun, the clock's arms swinging around time's center, dancers carrying
their streamers around the maypole, oxen turning around a well, drawing
up water.
Even the word pilgrimage, in some languages, refers to this
circling. The expression for it in Tibetan, for example, is
"to turn around the place," a place that is often referred to as a
"center." The word hajj, the journey to Mecca that every Muslim must make at least once
in his or her life, comes from an old Semitic word meaning
"to go around, to go in a circle." Whether it be around a person, a shrine, a temple, a lake, a mountain, a
country, or even, as some have done, around the world, a simple
mathematical principle defines the purpose of circumambulation: by
drawing the circle, we define the center. By circling the lake, Ann was
turning around the axis of her one desire: to locate her own center and
to know it from all sides. The circle, Carl Jung once said, is the classic symbol for wholeness, or
God, and the circular path an analog for the way toward it. We are always
being drawn toward it, says June Singer, and yet "to fly straight into it
would be like a moth darting into a flame or the Earth hurtling itself
into the center of the sun," or a kayaker taking a hard right and heading
straight for the center of Lake Superior. So we maintain an orbital
tension, close enough to feel the heat, but not so close we burn our
wings. We can do no better, said the poet Rainer Maria
Rilke:
"I am circling around God, around the ancient tower
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song."
And yet, because we have the image of wholeness imprinted on our
souls, a deep impression where the ancient tower once stood, we are, in a
sense, always at the center, always in Benares, dipped in the Ganges,
always in Jerusalem, wailing at the wall, slipping notes to God, touching
our remembered glory.
At one point during Ann's voyage, she glimpsed the center. One
evening about a third of the way into the trip, she stumbled onto the
ruins of an old stone altar, a miniature Stonehenge, whose rocks were
stacked ten feet high on a narrow terrace above the shore. In the
presence of the indigenous, she saw a vision of her own life that she
described as "fleeting, like a deer startled at the edge of a clearing
who quickly disappears into the safety of brush. But I know I saw
it." It
was an image of herself as "finally able to embrace spirituality in
everything I did." Or rather, re-embrace.
There was a time in her life when she had an unabashed relationship
to what she calls "spirit." In junior high school, she once wrote a
vocational paper about being a missionary, and her parents told her
"don't get so carried away with the religious
stuff," a comment she
unfortunately took deeply to heart. She got the message that if the
passion she had for spirit was to be accepted, it would have to be
tempered. "It wasn't until I went around the lake that I returned to
that
pure passion for a spirit-filled life, and felt encouraged to follow
it."
What that meant was, among other things, taking a step away from the
institutions where she had taught for many years, schools and
environmental education centers. "I always had to be very careful about
how I presented ideas about spirituality. But I was really ready to bring
spiritual presence--meditation and prayer, open discussion of spirit and
mystery--into my work in a way that was uninhibited. That was probably
the biggest truth I discovered on the trip: that I wanted to have the
courage to make spirit be at the foremost of everything I
did."
Thomas Merton once said that here is a hope built into our
psychology that we may somehow find our way back to
"the source and center of religion, the place of revelation and
renewal." Ann Linnea's
grueling pilgrimage in the wilderness, a journey of more than 1200 miles
and 65 days, long stretches of which were spent entirely alone when she
and Paul decided on different routes, and the daily practices of
journaling, prayer, ritual and asking for dreams, enabled her to find
the coordinates of her own center, to find her way back to her
deepest
courage, the courage to "live beyond a focus on safety and
security," to
reset the course of her life.
Re-entry
Ann's pilgrimage also set her on course for a difficult period of
transition once she returned home and had to try and translate the level
of physical courage she learned on the trip into the emotional courage
she'd need to make the changes. The toast she made with Paul on the last
day of the trip, with a bottle of Kahlua passed between them, was most
appropriate: "To a good trip and a fine friend, and for the courage to
deal with all that lies ahead," part of which was the realization that,
as she put it, "the most vulnerable time for new truth in our lives is
immediately after its discovery."
The next day, in flat, calm seas, they returned to 26 people waiting
on the beach in welcome, and quickly realized that they had made no
provisions for the transition back. Paul, for instance, began teaching at
the university within two days of returning, a culture-shock of no mean
proportions. Ann, who had "no intention of simply slipping back into my
old routines, "wished she had talked more with her family and helped them
understand "that I'm going to come back tremendously changed, and not to
expect me to go back to business as usual. I also wish
I'd called a
circle of friends to meet with me every few weeks in those first months,
to give me a chance to share what I'd learned, and help me
re-enter."
Part of re-entering involved dealing with a few basic physical
matters and brushing up on some lapsed social skills. Her sense of
hearing had become so keen that all phone ringers had to be set to mute
for weeks. Her sense of smell was so acute that she
couldn't walk down
the street without being besieged by the smell of the
neighbors' garbage
cans. And she had virtually no ability to engage in small talk.
"The inevitable question, 'Did you have a nice trip?' left me dumbfounded,
unable to speak. I was really out of sync with people."
Another part of re-entering involved what she hoped would be the
reform of her marriage of 22 years, which she described as
"unemotional,
businesslike and efficient." Her intention on returning, she says,
"was
to work hard to strengthen my family and marriage, to try and include
more emotion, more spirit and passion. But clearly there
wasn't room for
that. What I needed was not what he needed, or
wanted."
Nine months after the end of the trip, Ann took off her wedding
ring, which didn't come off easily, and said to her husband,
"It feels to
me that we're moving into a different kind of relationship here, and
it's
not about a traditional marriage." After another nine months of working
hard to make the transition from marriage partners to friends who wanted
to continue raising their children together, and of unravelling some of
their entwined roots, Ann and the children moved to Whidbey Island in
Washington state, and Ann co-founded, with a friend, a seminar and
teaching business called PeerSpirit, whose motto, fittingly, is
"in
service to the circle," and whose three guiding principles are that
leadership rotates, responsibility is shared, and ultimate reliance is on
spirit.
Ann's experience in making the transition back home is instructive
of a critical phase of spiritual journeying---the return---in particular
the fact that while you were out there circling around the ancient tower,
those you left behind were doing the dishes, feeding the baby, and going
to work as usual. In other words, they were not on retreat, so they
can't
possibly know what you've seen or heard or felt, and they want to know,
or maybe they don't. Either way, it's important to be sensitive to this
on returning to the Ordinary World.
While away from it, you've been removed from many of the normal laws
of human exchange and conduct, the imperatives of time and obligation,
sometimes the comforts of home. You've been on the road, in the wilds,
under a spell, deep in the tropics of meditation. You've climbed a
mountain, slept out under the stars, breathed rarified air.
You've been
accountable to no one, worn the same clothes for four days on end, and
had the bathroom all to yourself.
Re-entry is a sort of decompression, and like returning from a deep
sea dive, it's best handled slowly. If you move too fast, you endanger
yourself, and your experience. In fact, it's one of the simplest ways to
sabotage a spiritual journey. A good rule of thumb is this: whatever
promises you made to yourself during the journey, whatever insights you
gained and intentions you set, you will need to defend them against the
tendency of life to level all uprisings, to stomp enthusiasm and optimism
and hope and certainly rebellion back into low relief. After big openings
often come big closings. After highs, lows. After breakthroughs,
breakdowns. As the Buddhists say: after enlightenment, the laundry.
So post a guardian at the gate, some part of you
who's job
description is to gently but firmly remind you when you're in danger of
undermining the purpose of your journey.
Orpheus would be a suitable choice of sentry, and his story is
instructive here. Orpheus, whose lyre, it is said, moved even the stones
to follow him, lost his wife Eurydice to the bite of a snake. Bereaved,
he went to the underworld and tried to persuade Hades to let her return
to life.
His music and lyrics were so beautiful that all punishments were
suspended for the day. Tantalus forgot his thirst.
Prometheus' liver was
given a rest. Sisyphus just sat on his rock and listened. Hades finally
relented and granted Orpheus' wish, but on the condition that while
leading her to the upper-world, he not look back at her until they had
passed the portals of the under-world. But just as he reached the outlet,
Orpheus, in a moment of forgetfulness or doubt that Eurydice was still
following him, looked back, and she instantly disappeared.
If you forget that you have changed while on your journey, that you
come back followed by another whose spirit you sought, that you made
promises that must be kept, and that there are conditions to your
transformation, you¹ll jeopardize your mission. Know that your vision
will follow you back and must be incorporated into your life, and the
lives of those you know. The best way to communicate your experience to
others is not to talk about it, but to live it.
©
Gregg Levoy.
2000.
Gregg Levoy is the author of "Callings: Finding and Following An
Authentic Life" (Random House 1998)--a selection of the Book of the
Month Club, Quality Paperback Books, and One Spirit Book Club--as well
as "This Business of Writing" (Writer's Digest Books). His articles and
essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post,
Psychology Today, Omni , Unity Magazine, and others. A former adjunct
professor of journalism at the University of New Mexico, he currently
lives in Tucson, Arizona and travels extensively conducting Callings
workshops. His website is
www.gregglevoy.com.
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