Coming Home
All Theme XXII Photos taken on Madeline Island, WI
By Andrea Lingle
From the Iona Abbey Worship Book:
God guide your feet and minds today;
may you travel safely
and mind companions on the way.
God be in your hands and hearts today
when you wave goodbye
and prepare to welcome others.
God be in your lives
as you travel on
and at your homecoming.
God be with you always,
constant companion,
guardian, friend and guide.
May God’s blessing be ours
on our pilgrim way,
all the nights and days
of our journey home.
Behind you stretches a series of footprints. They have brought you here, now. This here and this now, to which you have been pressing. You have come to this altar, with the patience and discipline of a pilgrim. On this journey, you have written, six inches at a time, from your heart to your shoes. You might have gotten angry or frustrated or sad as you wrote. You might have laughed. You might have smiled wryly at the ways your gentle, fierce heart led you. You have been so brave to come this far, but there is one more hurdle you will have to face. It is what Alexander John Shaia calls the turn around point.
Before you is the altar towards which all your energy has been turned, and beyond that is a yet un-walked path.
Shaia teaches that every pilgrimage has a turn around place, and it is in the returning home and the reentry to regular life that you find that the work of pilgrimage takes place. But, you sigh, we didn’t get to go anywhere. We never get to go anywhere anymore. Do you believe that you have been changed by these weeks of writing? Do you believe you could be?
I want to tell you something. Come in very close so I don’t have to say it too loudly. (Writing practice keeps me willing to believe in the Divine no matter how Hidden the Divine is.) Please be careful with this. It is very hard for me to admit because I am afraid you might laugh at me. I am afraid that you might consider me irrational. I am nervous that I am ascribing mystery to what I do not know and risking my Divine experience being an artifact of my own ignorance.
But I am feeling a tiny bit brave today. Enough for A Little Pilgrimage. Writing practice, as mundane as it is, just a roller ball and ink, just paper and loosely contained scribbles, just prompts that are more or less shots in the dark loops me into a deep well of mystery that seems to run all the way back to those hidden moments under the wings of Spirit.
Here is an infinite source of wonder. Here changes and does not change. It can mean my brown leather glider that I bought off of Craigslist in 2008, or it can mean in the weedy garden bed under the porch steps where I scattered several packets of wildflower seeds…just on the off chance they might take a notion to grow. Here can be written over and over and over again. You will never write the same six inches because you are not the same person here as you were there.
The goal of any pilgrimage is here. Perhaps there is a certain place you have been intending to go, a transformation you have been hoping to achieve, a longing you would like to resolve; pilgrimage is a wonderful way to get a step closer to that. But what happens when you get there, to where you intended to go? A place is just a place. A transformed me is still me. A resolved hurt can leave a scar. Here refuses to be constrained to a particular place or goal. Here always goes ahead, calling you forward into a deeper understanding. Into unrelenting, unresolved grace.
Here are the final writing prompts for this pilgrimage. Here is an instructional video about how to use them.
Place your string on the ground and write what you see in those six inches
Fold your string in half, point the ends to you and the apex away from you, now write: When I return…
Lay your string in a window, put your eye on one end of the string and sight down the length of the string so that the focus of your vision is down the length of the string, now write: There is a world just out of view…
Weave your string under and over the fingers in your writing hand. Now write: I can’t let go of…
Lay your string across a threshold of a window or a door. Now write: Beyond this place…
Lay your string across a threshold of a window or a door. Now write: Within this place…
Put your string away. It has done its work. You have done its work. Now write: Thank you, dearest string, for showing me…
May you be blessed on this tiny way!