As I laid out last week, July was a month of Pilgrimage. I traveled over 5,000 miles on 3 separate journeys, always with my ministry partner but with others who are of my communities as well. I have been a pilgrim at other times in my life. In the 90’s, I and 3 other adults guided our Youth Group in a Pilgrimage throughout Ireland. Both of my parents, and my mother-in-law, have died in my adulthood, and caring for them and tending to their deaths became Pilgrimages of a sort.
I regularly wove mini-Pilgrimages into the more normative Mission Trips with youth, a side trip to a special place or an exploration of a hidden park. I have walked labyrinths for decades, themselves used as a patterned replacement for a Pilgrimage journey one cannot take in whole. The practice has long been part of my spiritual rhythm.
But it has been a while since Pilgrimage hasn’t touched death in some way for me. Last year’s Pilgrimage with the Lakota Ride was a turning point in my grief over my mother’s death, as I poured tears out onto the ground outside our closing Inipi. Coming home was easier in a way I had never expected.
The third Pilgrimage of July, the trip to The Border in El Paso, TX was for a Moral Monday witness. But of course within only a few days from our action July 29th, scores at a Walmart in El Paso were killed and injured by a white nationalist act of terror on Aug 3rd. My own experience in Texas, and at the Border, was one of solidarity and witness, action and compassion. But again, here looms death at the edge of the thing.
Now I am home for a period. There is some travel in my near future but not an intentional journey, a Pilgrimage. This is the time for processing what has happened, what has been done and left undone, and to discern what patterns are emerging from walking these Pilgrim paths? While we return to the place from which we started on a Pilgrimage, we also never do. We are different. The place is different. And most importantly, something inside us SEES differently.
Something that I’m discovering as I walk around Denver post Pilgrimage time is that these recent patterns are already forming new routes through my thoughts, in what I scheme, and for what I search. Instead of my previous time trapped in a fugue state of painful memory, upon upcoming anniversaries I will follow a path relit on Pilgrimage, and be intentional about my healing and spiritual health.
I’m also running into patterns established by the public nature of Pilgrimage. By that I mean “people” know we went. They know we went on Pilgrimage. They know we did something with the Lakota. They know we went to The Border. There is a desire to hear about the experience, it seems. Part of coming home is framing the story, discerning the salient portions and narratives, sketches and vignettes.
Pilgrimage is back in my life now. No more putting that aside, it is too fruitful a spiritual discipline and practice. I have no idea what the #LessonsFromTheRoad will be as I reflect on this time, what it opened up for me, or where this path will lead. But I know I am grateful to be home.
Rev. Jessica Abell