Pilgrimage, the Third Part: Coming Home

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

July 2019, a Month of Pilgrimage

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

Pilgrimage, an Intentional Journey

The Haj, the holy journey, is a requirement of Islam. Trips to Israel have been part of the practice of many modern Jews, no matter where on the planet they live. Christians travel and establish altars at sites of signs and miracles all the time. And so, pilgrimage matters.

Pilgrimage is a pattern of religious and spiritual life in which and through which each step and every part has its import and place. There are no wasted steps on pilgrimage, for the intent is to meet God, and God surrounds us.

I have just returned from pilgrimage with my ministry partner Ian. The central portion of our journey was attending Wild Goose in North Carolina. Wild Goose, in its 11th year, is a giant outdoor festival of Christian worship, song, preaching, conversation, and workshops. The theology is generally liberal and progressive and the participants generally Southern and white.

There were aspects of Wild Goose which met the traditional expectations of a pilgrimage site: the presence of unexpected friends and inspiring messages, a focus on God, the getting outside of our comfort zones and assumptions. And it was certainly present in the conversations around me that for many, the travel there, the experience of Wild Goose, and the anticipated return was a pilgrimage.

And while I greatly enjoyed myself, again I found that it was the journey itself from which I truly learned. We paused along our route for conversations, connections, and cleaning-up and as much happened here than any “there” ever reached. It was a short conversation we had with a friend over lunch in Little Rock, AR that changed the course of the next six months of my life. As a small example of the impact of the little parts along the way…

Pilgrimage, or “Religious Road Trip” as named by a friend, isn’t just for the faith-based set anymore. Gene Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle names Pilgrimage as one of the activities done by secular activist communities as well. Here in the US, the site of the World Trade Center in New York was made an instant pilgrimage site by the events of September 11, 2001. 

We humans mark.

We mark dates and we mark places.

We mark impacts and we mark effects.

We mark leaders and we mark the fallen.

We mark battlegrounds and we mark treaty tables.

And so we become spiritual pilgrims, travelers along roads we may or may not know, and dancers in an ebb and flow, a movement of Spirit. Pilgrimage may be small or large. It may mimic a route or take that route specifically. It may be freeform or highly planned.

What is certain is that the journey is the thing itself, and upon this road, we meet God. In ourselves, in our companions, in creation and in the still small places we can only find when we leave.

Go with God, my friends.

Rev. Jessica Abell