Travel as Pilgrimage

"Our ordinary life is a pilgrimage, but in order for it to be a pilgrimage we have to take that step of openness."

--Kesaya Noda

"Pilgrim: one who journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion."

--Oxford English Dictionary

Even if we had accomplished nothing on the building project--which I am happy to report was not the case!--I suspect that the true meaning of our visit in Transylvania was in the intangibles: in new life experiences, new worlds discovered, and new friends made.

Those intangibles are, of necessity, impossible to predict. That is part of the reason that we travel, or ought to: it is to experience something fresh and different, to put ourselves in the way of new situations and ideas and people, to see things we have perhaps never seen, and perhaps never expected to see. It is to open ourselves to the unknown.

All of us who went to Transylvania, I believe, even those of us returning for a second or even a third time, were searching for something deeper and more meaningful in our lives. I, of course, desperately hoped that the others' experiences in Transylvania would match my own, and that they would fall in love as I had fallen in love, and that the trip would not prove to be a disappointment.

But I needn't have worried! Not only did we accomplish more work than expected (at least by our work foreman, Max Russell), but also we made memories and friends for a lifetime. We experienced village life first-hand, attended worship together, worked together, sang together, and celebrated together. We picnicked in the Transylvanian hills overlooking the village, danced in a sidewalk cafe in the medieval city of Segesvar, ate and drank and opened our hearts to one another. One of the most moving moments for me personally came when our former organist and music director, Barbara Owen, got the little 1815 church organ to play for the first time in many years. There was hardly a dry eye in the church. It mattered little that we don't speak the same language, or that we live half a world apart.

This, after all, is the real purpose of international partnership: to take us outside of our own culture, both religious and national; to introduce us to new people and experiences and landscapes; and, if we are lucky, to enable us to see in new and clearer ways.

In the post-September 11 world, I believe that this kind of experience is more crucial than ever before. It is more important than ever that we overcome our ethno- and religious-centrism and our provincialism and find out what the rest of the world is saying, thinking, doing, and worrying about. Many people in the world, including our Partner Church friends, are mostly worried about getting through another day.

Sadly, however, many people are choosing to travel less these days, or to travel only at home; to live by their fears, and not by their hopes. How can we expect to understand the world if we are only willing to listen to our own voices?

It is only by stepping outside of our usual routines and surroundings and relationships that we become aware of just how thin and stunted our existences may have become. When we are forced by circumstance or language to stand on our own two feet, to recall who we are in the attempt to communicate it to someone we have just met, only then do we begin to get back in touch with our own truest, deepest selves.

This is also the truest meaning and purpose of the religious life, and it explains the universality and popularity of pilgrimage as a religious ritual. All over the world, and in every religious tradition, people engage in the rite of pilgrimage as a way of getting outside of themselves and of discovering the sacred. As Andrew Rasamen writes in "Pilgrimage: Paths to the Center,"

Pilgrims separate themselves from their ordinary world and extend for a time the state of mind and heart they bring to their home church or temple. If they are attuned to their purpose, every action or event has significance.

I believe that those of us in the so-called "Transylvania 9" were on a pilgrimage. It was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Unitarianism, of course: the place where religious toleration was born in the 1500's, the birthplace of Francis David, the founder of Transylvanian Unitarianism, and the home of the only Unitarian king in history, King John Sigismund. Perhaps "pilgrimage" sounds a little over-serious and heavy, but I happen to believe that any travel undertaken with an open mind and heart is a pilgrimage. (And in case you think that a pilgrimage has to be pious or boring, just pick up a copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.)

One can be a pilgrim without even knowing why. Writing in a recent issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin ["An Unlikely Pilgrim Finds His Way to Santiago"], John Spalding writes of his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela,

So why did I walk to Santiago? In the end, I'm not sure I know. I can no better explain the purpose of the [road] than I can the purpose of life. Its meaning is irreducible. . . . The very act of undertaking the pilgrimage--in all the hardships and weirdness, its thrills and unexpected pleasures--may well be the only justification for it there is. And maybe that's plenty.

He said he always knew he was going to go on the pilgrimage, because it had lasted for centuries, it was a tradition, and because of that he knew there was value in it. He didn't know what the value was, but he knew that if he went he would find it.

Most important, however, according to Andrew Rasamen, is that "beyond any physical pilgrimage, there is an inner journey that is even more important." It is this inner journey that most interests me, and it is mainly for this experience that I travel.

Of course, it is quite possible to travel without being affected by the experience at all. Some people travel as if they were in a bubble; they never really participate or interact with the people they meet, or enter into the life of the places they visit. They avoid the food as much as the water, in a manner of speaking. It is quite possible to spend time in a foreign country and hardly realize that you have left home.

Of course, pilgrimage does require some intentionality; as the quotation on your orders of service reminds us, "Our ordinary life is a pilgrimage, but in order for it to be a pilgrimage we have to take that step of openness." The openness must be both to people and to places. I have heard many people say that the prairie is "boring," but I believe this is only because they have never opened themselves fully enough to the experience of "prairie-ness."

I consider every road-trip I take to be a pilgrimage. My visits in recent years to the Black Hills of South Dakota, Shiprock, New Mexico, the Oregon Trail in Nebraska, the Kentucky River Valley, and Civil War battlegrounds have all taught me something and led me further along the journey into myself, as did my recent visits to Freiburg, Germany and Colmar, France.

And it is not only the things we see or the places we visit, but the people whom we meet, that make it a pilgrimage. It is the experience of seeing new things, but also of seeing anew.

My son Ben recently told me of an encounter he had on his way to the Bonoroo concert in Tennessee earlier this summer. He had stopped to use the men's room in a service area. An elderly southern gentleman asked him where he was from and where he was going. Discovering that Ben was from the north, the man asked him if he had ever been to Gettysburg, because that was where he and a busload of southern war veterans were heading. "I guess they want us southern boys to see the scene of our greatest defeat. My great grandfather fought there." Ben, who has been to Gettysburg several times, and has had to listen to my interminable lectures on the role his ancestors played in the great battle, told the man that he had indeed visited the battlefield, and what an interesting and beautiful and solemn place it is, and that he, too, had an ancestor who fought at Gettysburg, and died there. They spent half an hour in friendly conversation about the battle of Gettysburg, the descendent of Yankees and the descendent of Confederates. And so a trip to a rock concert became an accidental pilgrimage of sorts. Or was it an accident?

And what of those of us not fortunate enough to be able to travel to faraway and exotic places? Henry David Thoreau has left us a wonderful record of a pilgrimage in which he never left the friendly environs of Concord, Massachusetts. "I have traveled widely in Concord," he famously said, and we know that it is true because he has left us Walden. Thoreau showed us that the center of the universe is wherever we happen to be, if only we would "wake up" to an "infinite expectation of the dawn." He said,

. . .only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

For Thoreau, Walden Pond was transformed into what poet T. S. Eliot would later call "the still point of the turning world," the place where time and space became one and sacred, the mystic moment and the cosmic center. It is here, now, he tried to tell us, right under our noses, but most of us have still not gotten the message.

Pilgrimage reminds us of this truth, if we will take the opportunity that it offers. In its universality, it offers a way through the terrible divisions which separate us on this little round planet. The world cries out for us to wake up and to expand our vision of life's possibilities. Perhaps our fate demands it.

It is good to be together, and to know that we are not alone. May our travels, whether near or far, whether outside or within, open us to receive those glimpses of the divine which occur in every time, place, and person. And may those glimpses help us past "the many causes of despair which life inevitably brings to us all" [Paul Carnes]. So may it be. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock