Pilgrimage as Metaphor

Upon reflection, after the experience itself, it becomes perfectly clear to me that every journey we take as a conscious act is simply a metaphor for the larger fact of our own earthly pilgrimage as the “greatest journey of all.” We are making a sacred journey, called “Life-Pilgrimage” and because its so large, so intense, so all-encompassing it is all too easy to loose sight of the fact that it is the purpose for our existence here in space and time.

When you take a two-week plunge into another place, another culture, another history, another time, it intensifies the experience of what pilgrimage actually means. You leave home, the comfortable, the known, and you enter the unknown as a swiftly flowing stream of events over which you have very little control. You simply have to “move with the flow” of things and allow everything to unfold. You can stay rigidly tied to your set of personal expectations, or you can release yourself into the new and unexpected—allowing the new story of the adventure to open itself and carry you along.

In that state of openness what you see is that all journey, especially life itself, is a form of “intensification” – things become focused and intense. Things are no longer theoretical, it is this place, this moment, this time that brings you face to face with the realities of yourself. You real-ize existence; meaning, it becomes real inside of you. You internalize something. It becomes reified in-being… you are now carrying the experience within in a new way.

This was certainly true of our experience of the Middle East. It was no longer a theoretical construct, an abstraction. That place, that people, that culture is now inside of us. We carry it around, and it is real to us in a way that no reading about it abstractly or some theorectical teaching concerning it will ever encompass.

You see that’s what life is. We are already “on pilgrimage” here on earth … and we often forget that until we do something like “make a trip to the Middle East” – then we remember what is going on. So then, when we leave earth-experience, we will be carrying something precious and irreplaceable from this passageway. And it will even be more intense, more true and more real, if as we did these last weeks, “wake up,” reach out, take it as a conscious act, and make it our own.

As we journeyed together across these lands and days, I was powerfully reminded of “what the truth is” for all of us… and that wakefulness and attention to what is happening is an incredibly useful and precious element in the present pilgrimage called Life that we are each making.