June 7 2007 Pilgrimage

Journal Entry

August 24, 2006, Davis CA- This trip is more of a pilgrimage than a vacation. For Nancy, it is an opportunity to revisit places she lived in the 1970’s, places she had left behind, hurriedly and unhappily, and not seen since. For David, it is a chance to set foot in a series of classic punk rock venues and music stores. For me, a quest for havens of sacred practice and true community. Katie’s part is something of a scribe, reporting each stage of our journey into her cell phone. To whom is she speaking?

Pilgrimage begins with a call, an allure, and intimation of bliss.
“Pilgrimage” is to “vacation” as “action” is to “motion;” as “word” is to “noise;” as “grace” is to “luck.”

We are driving through Santa Clara, searching for Nancy’s old apartment-complex. The locus of her memory resembles a dreamscape, crowded with random associations and scraps of memory, scrambled and buried under miles of gleaming new architecture and disguised on streets with unfamiliar names. In a Mexican restaurant painted bright yellow the gregarious owner provides confirmation of structures existing more than thirty years, including the one we are standing in, though not always Mexican, and not always bright yellow. Armed with such knowledge, we renew our search. Then a flash of recognition at a street sign: “Scott Boulevard!” We turn, then turn again, then proceed slowly. “Turn here!” she cries, into a cluster of shaded courtyards and adobe-style apartments with balconies and tile roofs where “my cat would escape and run across the rooftops.” A small swimming pool “where Jason would splash.” Jason the merest infant at the time.

Pilgrimage: from a jumble of disconnected images a pattern leaps out.
Ingredients: persistence; a willingness to endure the chaos, the disorientation; companions willing to accompany you in uncertainty, other eyes through which to see your own past; a capacity to connect with strangers; intuition; trust.

Unlike Islam, Christianity does not require pilgrimage. For Christians, pilgrimage is more of devotional extra, like Stations of the Cross. The Reformation condemned it as a relic of superstition and worse. But the pilgrim’s call seems irrepressible, inevitable, regardless of theology.

June 7, 2007. Day 4 of The Last Sabbatical.

In the end, of course, life itself is a pilgrimage, for “this world is not my home/ I’m only passing through.” Or, rather, it is either a pilgrimage toward some ultimate goal, or it is a vacation from oblivion; it is either an act of defiance and obedience, or it is a random motion taking place on a freak planet, a twitch unobserved on the lifeless skin of an unconscious cosmos. (Come to think of it, is not the cosmos itself a pilgrim, expanding toward ???)
Our life is either a word addressed in darkness to an unseen listener, or it is so much noise, percussion with no beat, dancing with no feet.
Is it grace or luck that I am here, writing these words? That you are there, reading them? Are you there?

It is the pilgrim’s task to discover.