Some Thoughts on Pilgrimage
A midweek musing
Please forgive the two month hiatus, life as has been a little chaotic but if you read the Hospitaler Chronicle you will see I am now established in Menlo Park and enjoying the Hospitality of the San Francisco Region of the Western Association, at least for a semester!
Some words gain very personal secondary meanings as we go through life. There is of course that primary meaning which is perhaps what is meant most commonly to most people when a word is used. There is also a kind of original meaning for some words, I think this happens a lot for us westerners as our languages are a kind of third story built upon older - in the case of English - French and old English meanings. Our French loan words are themselves built upon Latin, Greek and these in turn upon Indo European words. Much indeed can be gained by meditating on these various meanings and this is a theme I have taken up many times in these writings. Along with these various meanings comes the personal and ideosyncratic thoughts and feelings that some words gather.
I remember very distinctly when something I was doing was called going on pilgrimage. It was a striking description to me precisely because what I was doing seemed so at odds with the mental image I had. Pilgrimage always carried with it the image of someone walking a great distance in order to reverence a holy site. I however was on a plane flying over the ocean. Indeed I was on my way to Rome in the year of our Lord 2002 with a group of school mates but the modern convenience of it all seemed too easy for the difficult journeys described by the word pilgrimage.
Now twenty years later I find myself once again on a plane heading to Rome. My intention this time is to study Italian and familiarize myself with the city so as to ease my transition when I begin the Novitiate. Nevertheless there is pilgrimage this time too. I intend to offer many prayers at the churches, tombs, and holy sites throughout the Eternal City.
Why is it so helpful to leave ones home, to be inconvenienced in distance and resources to bring one closer to the eternal, the divine? I imagine the romans have that same problem I have had living in a place, never to visit or value to extraordinary - the little expressions of the heavenly city - precisely on account of seeing it every day. Certainly there is a kind of separation from the daily concerns that is helpful. It seems to me the common life of religious is meant to imitate this by removing these concerns from its members. Certainly for us who have take up the charism of the Knights Hospitallers part of pilgrimage is caring for others. So we establish hospitals in every place we find ourselves.
What else contributes to the experience of pilgrimage? How else might we recreate these elements at home and live, as it were, moving ever closer to the Kingdom of Heaven?