Summer is often a time for travel. In my former world of professional youth ministry, it is full of mission trips, vacation bible schools, overnight camps, beach trips, and conferences. But now I work in the world of a faith-based NGO, political advocacy, and the Spirituality Collective. I pastor a small alternative religious community that will never have a traditional youth group. Summers are again mine to consider and use for different ministry.
Last summer, my ministry partner Ian and I were honored to join a Lakota horse ride for a time of pilgrimage. It was short and intense and full of unexpected insights and connections. That journey in August 2018 turned my heart back towards Pilgrimage as a spiritual discipline, something I have had in my life in the past.
Pilgrimage is very different from Mission or Education or even Formation as a religious action. Pilgrimage will include some set destination and routes but also requires flexibility and adaptation as the Spirit moves. Pilgrimage will provide some encounter with the Divine but this may not always be recognized as such immediately. Pilgrimage may begin with a query, quest, or quandary but is never about those things alone, and awaiting resolution will sabotage the journey. Pilgrimage holds within it the ability for great change and transformation but nothing is certain without vulnerability and openness.
July became a month of pilgrimage, as I began to discuss in last week’s blog post about the first of three journeys taken. The longest pilgrimage was first, the journey to and from Wild Goose that Ian and I took on our own.
July 2019, a month of Pilgrimage
Beloved Community (w WildGoose) 7/8-7/16 3,200
Feeding the Ride 7/24 350
Moral Monday @ the Borderlands 7/27-7/29 1,600
For our second and third pilgrimage, we invited others to join us. Mid-month, we returned to the Tipi Raisers Lakota Ride for a single evening. The friend we brought on this Pilgrimage is an amazing chef and a practicing Muslim, and he prepared the meal. The food was abundant and excellently made, flavorful and filling. We were all three accepted and embraced into the Ride community when we arrived. We shared sustenance and challenges together that night as a group, and we three were given many gifts of love and trust. And art.
At the end of July, a member of Living Waters Night Church, my community in Denver, joined us on Pilgrimage to the US Border in El Paso, TX. We were heeding the call put out by the Repairers of the Breach and Rev. Dr. William Barber of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign to stand witness there. We arrived in Texas on the anniversary of my father’s death, and so there was a personal element that brought both a sadness and a buoyancy to that day.
We three, along with hundreds of others, attended the Faith Gathering at an El Paso church and then participated in the direct action on Monday. Rev. Dr. Barber and others founded the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina as a way for people of faith to stand witness for or against public policy affecting the poor, the vulnerable, and prisoners and others with little or no voice.
There was plenty of opportunity for things to go awry, as there always is on Pilgrimage. Chaos and the Spirit work well together, but without the naming of this, and the open and full embrace of Spirit, Chaos can turn angry, and divisive, and entitled. And when one is at the Border, on the edge of things, the potential for what pagan author Starhawk calls the Good World and the Bad World to become fluid increases wildly.
But we were wrapped in love and prophecy, in action and clarity of purpose. We were there to stand witness in solidarity with those doing the work on the ground, day to day. Because that is always where the work must be focused. Our faith in action is site specific. And so we journey. And we return.
For there is always more before us, on the road and at home. And Pilgrimage is our route within and well as without.
Go with God, my friends.
Rev. Jessica Abell