Arriving to Mystery

Photo Credit: Ryan Roth-Klinck

By Andrea Lingle

Honestly, if you look at the bones of pilgrimage, it is not terribly complicated. Prepare, journey, arrival, return, re-enter. This can’t possibly be all there is to it. That could describe any trip. 

Several weeks ago, my husband and I went to the beach. Several months ago, my husband and I picked dates, scrolled through ten thousand places to stay, booked one, left instructions for when and how much to feed the dogs, arranged for the kids to stay with my parents, and packed (almost) everything we needed. Grocery stores sell toothbrushes. Which is good. We put the address in the GPS, and followed the stripes across our state from the mountains to the edge of the ocean. We sat for hours between the life we lead and the all but infinite horizon. After forty-eight or so hours, we retraced our journey. We hauled the bags back into the house, emptied the suitcases, washed the sand out of our clothes, moisturized our sunburns, and resumed life between the wake up alarm and the go to sleep alarm. 

Was this a pilgrimage?

It wasn’t. It was a vacation. But why? Was I just on the wrong side of the water or could I have made those same motions, traveled to the same location, and managed to transform a vacation into a pilgrimage? 

This week we have taken up the idea of arrival. Showing up in such a way that travel becomes pilgrimage. On pilgrimage we must surrender to the road, the process, the space. We must give ourselves the great ridiculous gift of believing that we are met by something ultimate, and make the collected moments of the day a spiritual practice. 

I have a long-standing relationship with doubt. We go way back. Doubt has compelled me to search and study. It has led me to great towering stacks of words and long rambling walks along lakes and rivers and oceans. Doubt has not given me many answers. In fact, I am pretty sure that it has stripped me of the answers I thought I had, but it has left me with a great reverence for liturgy. Liturgy is simply the ordering of the words and actions of people around religious or spiritual practice. I believe that liturgy can house my doubt and my longing without too much squirming. Although they are not constrained to houses of worship, liturgical spaces mimic the architecture of a cathedral. Strong, soaring, spacious rooms with time enough for being. I consider liturgy to be a holy mystery: community rendered transcendent through spirit. As we long for pilgrimage, know this, arriving to liturgical spaces does not require a passport or an itinerary. Liturgical spaces require faith, structure, and showing up. 

The joining of a community, big or small, around the purpose of holy mutterings, transforms a space and a community into one of arrival.