Traveling at Home, Traveling Within

August 5, 2001

Summer, for me, always brings thoughts of travel to faraway places. Increasingly, as I grow older, I find myself beset by wanderlust. My dream of an ideal retirement has become a small pop-up camper, just big enough, towed behind the family car, to places I have never been before, or even to places that I know well, or at least think I do. For as poet, essayist, and novelist Wendell Berry writes in a poem entitled “Traveling at Home,”

Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.

All places, we might say, are unknown places, awaiting our discovery or rediscovery.

Speaking of Wendell Berry, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to his native Kentucky River valley earlier this summer. I have been a big fan of his for a number of years now, and I have always wanted to go to the place which has served as the setting and inspiration for his writings. It did not disappoint.

The northeastern part of Kentucky where Berry hails from, around the tiny village of Port Royal, is a feast for the eye. For those of us who nostalgically yearn for a return to our rural American roots and for a respite from the modern, urbanized reality of most of our lives, this beautiful rolling land of farms and deep river valley is a salve for the soul. The roads in that part of the country generally follow the ridge tops or the creek and river bottoms, winding every which way, so that one had better watch where he is going (an apt metaphor on the journey of life) and offering views of a land which must have seemed like heaven-on-earth to the first settlers, and to the native inhabitants before the white man’s arrival there. To some, it still does.

While in Kentucky, I made another pilgrimage, to the Abbey of Gethsemani in the town of that name where the Trappist monk Thomas Merton lived and worked for most of his life. It was there, in that isolated part of rural, central Kentucky, in a place that most of us would find circumscribed at best and penal at worst, that Merton wrote his autobiographical The Seven Story Mountain and other spiritual classics that have become an inspiration to Catholics and non-Catholics alike around the world. I could not get over the idea of one of the greatest religious writers of our time existing and thriving in such an ordinary and unlikely and out-of-the-way place,-- but perhaps that says something about the quality of genius and about my own lack of imagination, not to mention my own paucity of faith.

En route to Kentucky, my traveling companion (John Mercer) and I made another brief pilgrimage, to the ancient site of the great Serpent Mound in south central Ohio. This wonderful ancient effigy mound, one-eighth-of-a-mile long and in the perfect shape of a slithering, open-mouthed serpent--ready to strike?--holds its mysterious purpose intact; but a visit to its beautiful and peaceful setting, on a high river-side plateau overlooking the splendid rolling countryside around it, suggests at least one good reason for the original attraction of this particular place on earth.

These kinds of journeys of discovery have become a ritual for me in recent years, and have taken me to such disparate places as the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and the tiny village of Ujszekely in Transylvania in Romania. Pilgrimage is, after all, one of the most common of religious rituals, found in all of the world’s religious traditions, great or small. Whether it is the vastly-thronged Hadj to Mecca, which every Muslim is encouraged to make at least once-in-a-lifetime, or the lonely vision quest of the Lakota to the paha sapa of the Black Hills, all peoples and all religions at all times have, or have had, their sacred places of pilgrimage where one goes for renewal, for inspiration, for self-discovery, even for the scenery or to be just a part of the madding crowd. Read Chaucer.

Of course, it was a our fellow-New Englander, Henry David Thoreau, who pointed out that one need not even leave home to embark on a true pilgrimage. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” he wrote famously, and only partly tongue-in-cheek. Indeed, the whole of his masterpiece Walden is about pilgrimage: a pilgrimage that takes place wholly within a few miles of the friendly shores of Walden Pond, but mostly, of course, within the writer’s own mind or soul. For Thoreau, Walden becomes the axis mundi, the sacred center of the world, which is located, he reminds us, wherever we happen to be. And so, he builds his cabin there.

A pilgrimage need not take us any place more exotic than on our own, interior journey, as Theresa of Avila suggested in her spiritual classic The Interior Castle. Not only can we travel at home, but we can also travel within, and it is the journey within which is the most important journey of all. As Melville reminds us,

. . . it is not down on any map:
true places never are.

In recent weeks I have been taking that interior journey, following sometimes in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark’s “Corps of Discovery” in Stephen Ambrose’s wonderful book Undaunted Courage; or retracing from my study the terrible scenes of “America’s forgotten conflict” in Eric Shultz’s and Michael Tougias’ King Philip’s War, a war which took place literally in our own neighborhood; and boning-up on the history of that part of Eastern, Central, or South-eastern Europe (take your pick) collectively known as “the Balkans,” in preparation for a return visit next year to the roots of Unitarianism in far-off Transylvania, “the land beyond the forest.”

While I may have known it intellectually all along, I am only now, after a number of such pilgrimages, real and only imagined, beginning to understand it experientially: it is the journey that counts, not the destination. This is true not only of traveling, of course, but of life itself. As Emily Dickinson wrote,

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,--
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep eternity.

As I have grown older I have come more and more to realize that the journey is the goal. We will never reach the final destination we yearn for in this lifetime, nor, I am skeptical enough to believe, in any kind of life hereafter. It is the going that matters, and it always has been, whether that going is focused without, on some exotic, familiar, or far-off place, or whether it is only an excursion into our own, deepest and most inward places. As Dickinson wrote in another poem,

. . . instead of getting to heaven at last, I’m going all along!

That the journey is the goal is clearly evidenced in all of the world’s religious traditions, but our human tendency is to deny this reality in favor of the illusion of some final stopping or resting place. There is no resting place! The fundamental human failing of wishing for one has been the cause of wars, and rumors of wars. But wishing will not make it so: it is the ideal shadow of some unachievable Truth, the absolutist’s dream, the fundamentalist’s literally imagined text. This denial, this failing is the ultimate victory of image over substance, of myth over reality, and it is the cause of most of the problems that afflict us.

The journey is the goal. If only we could accept that it is so! It is no less true in the area of social justice. Where the fanatic sees an ultimate cure for whatever ails the body politic, an ultimate mending for the doubtless torn and sundered social fabric, the realist sees what the biblical writer saw, that “The poor you have always with you.” Not meaning that we should throw up our hands, or worse, that we should sit on them, or even that there is no cure, but that it is the struggle to make a better world that really counts; though we may never achieve the perfect world envisioned in our loftiest dreams, we can make a difference. Does the God who asks us to “love mercy” expect anything more? The fanatic, on the other hand, is always ready to kill to effect a cure, and therein lies the fallacy of many a utopian scheme of social improvement, and of most religious claims to truth.

Our duty, if I may use that unpopular and out-dated word, is in the doing. We may not save a single soul. We will not solve the world’s problems in our lifetimes; we will not discover the Truth during them, either, though we may well catch glimpses of it. As the Taoists remind us, the Tao that can be understood is not the Tao. Truth, once codified, is no longer truth. The letter killeth, but the spirit shall set you free.

And for the spiritual pilgrim, too, it is the setting forth that matters, not the destination. As anyone who travels knows, it is usually when we reach what we thought to be our destination that the journey actually begins. That journey is the one that leads us into the remote borderlands of what Thomas Merton called “our own, truest selves, the selves we were meant to be.” It is the journey into the self that each of us must make, or refuse to make, during this lifetime. The choice is always ours.

The beauty of it is, once you have accepted that the journey is the goal, you can desist from all vain striving, you can relax into the reality that we are incomplete and that we shall remain incomplete.

Do not despair that you have not yet found “the Truth and the Way.” True believers will tell you that it is one of any number of saviors or messiahs, ideas or philosophies, but do not believe them, for they have already missed the mark, which is the literal meaning of “sin.”

More and more, I am finding that the journey is enough. Indeed, it is often better than the reality I hoped I would find. Besides, places I thought I knew I find that I do not know at all. As Wendell Berry continues in his poem,

. . .it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

This must be what the novelist Thomas Wolfe meant by his claim that “you can’t go home again.” At least, you can’t go home to the same place, for it and you have changed. It’s inevitable that we should want to return the same way we came, but we cannot do so.

If we are lucky, we will come to understand this: that where we are, wherever that happens to be, is where we are truly meant to be. As Emerson wrote in “Heroism,”

But here we are; that is a great fact, and,
if we tarry a little, we may come to learn
that here is best.

We are all on the way, but none of us knows where he or she is heading. May we, in our wandering, find that conviction that here, where we find ourselves on this once-only-day of our lives, is the best place we can be. May the journey carry us onward to unknown places of heart and mind and spirit, and finally to the conviction that wherever we are is home. So be it. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock