Waymarkers: Categories of Inspiration

As I have more opportunities to teach and accompany others on their soul-formation path, I am often asked what are the areas that have most influenced my work and Waymarkers’ offerings. As I was clearing out my office recently, I came upon a writing project and drawing that aimed to get at three primary categories of inspiration and influence. I created this in October 2015 and it is amazing to see how these categories continue to shape and form my thinking and my work! I am also incredibly happy to see that my thinking, theologies, and theories (in short, my praxis) continue to emerge and evolve!

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I am using the concept of a Venn Diagram as represented by a Celtic Trinity Knot to describe my three primary passions (and ways of seeing the Divine at work in the world), their intersections, and ultimately, what they reveal about myself in relationship to the Sacred. Following are my core thoughts related to each trisection.

Placemaking/Theology of Land

Theologian Walter Brueggeman states that “…land be handled always as a gift not to be presumed upon and land be managed as an arena for justice and freedom.” And, it is true that those historically denied justice and freedom, power, place and voice, could see the arena of a wooded landscape as an absolute threat. Walter Brueggeman’s hermeneutic of Israel, provides understanding that, “Israel experienced the bitterness of landlessness, being totally exposed and helpless, victimized by anything that happened to be threatening. However, also as Israel, we take up a new identity vis-a-vis the land. It is important to be very clear about what the land is, how it addresses us, what it expects of us, and how we shall shape our faith and admit our identity in relation to it.

How do communities work on creating meaningful places that invert political and capitalistic powers on behalf of the other and the future?

Our neighborhoods are never singular communities, but are actually a mesh of myriad overlapping networks. We all belong to many different communities, from the diffuse (i.e. a professional association, or an online message board), to the intimate (i.e. a family, or a group of friends). In consideration of the paramount impact of how a landscape informs an individual and how they connect to the other in their community, there is an emerging theory called “Placemaking” that aims to create a balance of uses in public spaces that serve the many communities at once; in this way a landscape can serve as a therapeutic response to the needs of a neighborhood. A single place can’t do everything at once, so “Placemaking” prompts us to look for convenient and clever ways to make limited space serve multiple functions. De Botton and Armstrong (2013) have suggested that by balancing ones need with those of the people by which one lives, one finds their place, literally and figuratively, within a community of neighbors. By inviting the presence of a place to participate in the lives of communities for a common good, there is an acknowledgment of something profound and beyond human-limitations that is unleashed: God is revealed as intimately involved and present within the neighborhood and neighborwood!

Celtic Christianity

The great Celtic teacher John Scotus Eriugena taught that God speaks to us through two sacred texts, two books if you will. One is the book of scripture…the other is the book of creation, vast as the cosmos. Just as the Sacred speaks to us through the written words of scripture, so to does Spirit speak to us through the wild elements of creation. The natural world—the creatures within it and the elements that form it—then are a living sacred text we can learn to read and interpret.

Just as we prayerfully ponder the words of the Bible in Christian practice and as other traditions study their sacred texts, and even as we engage our sacred imagination in the practice of Midrash, so we are invited to listen to the life of creation as an ongoing, living utterance of God. This way of "reading" requires seeing the soil as a sacred story, and realizing that many of the narratives that have been told within the reverential spheres are ones that separate us from the reality of the biosphere.

Influenced by the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament and the mysticsm of John’s Gospel, Celtic spirituality sees creation not simply as a gift, but as a self-giving of God whose image is to be found deep within all living things. Sin may obscure God’s living presence, but never erases it. The divine voice can be heard speaking through all created things.

EcoPsych/EcoTheology

Author and psychologist Bill Plotkin believes that the way towards a collective societal shift towards wholeness and sustainability will be to progress from our current “egocentric societies (materialistic, anthropocentric, competition based, class stratified, violence prone, and unsustainable) to soulcentric ones (imaginative, ecocentric, cooperation based, just, compassionate and sustainable).” Plotkin draws from the collective academy of cultural thought provocateurs ranging from Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to imagine how to cultivate more mature human individuals to inform an evolution into a more mature human society. He believes that nature has always provided and still provides the best template for human maturation. Plotkin unpacks this further:

“…every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild world, and that the conscious discovery and cultivation of that relationship is at the core of true adulthood. In contemporary society, we think of maturity simply in terms of hard work and practical responsibilities. I believe, in contrast, that true adulthood is rooted in transpersonal experience—in a mystic affiliation with nature, experienced as sacred calling—that is then embodied in soul-infused work and mature responsibilities. This mystical affiliation is the very core of maturity, and it is precisely what mainstream Western society has overlooked—or actively suppressed and expelled.”

Western civilization has buried most traces of the mystical roots of maturity, yet this knowledge has been at the heart of every indigenous tradition known. In this light, we see that our self-imposed exile from an honoring relationship with creation has stunted God’s design for human development, and even a proper revelation of God. Creation is imbued with the wisdom and presence of the Sacred, and to stifle and ignore the inherent value of the created order, stifles the very voice of Wisdom in our lives. Our way into the future requires new cultural forms of the old ways of being in relationship with the earth. As urban-dense living becomes the increasing norm for countries around the world, re-imagining how urban greenspaces provides the opportunity for a relationship with the wild world becomes critical. The health of our psyche, and the planet, depends on it.

Center

The challenge of loving and caring for one another well in the 21st century requires one to recover a primordial sense of the vast mystery of God and apply that energy to paying attention to the earth. Our love of neighbor needs to be extended to the greater community of things on this planet and our neighborhood needs to considerably broaden to include our universe as well. Historically anthropocentric views have concerned Christians with the redemption of this world alone, and have disconnected the very nature of a connected, covenantal God with the diversity of his inherently good creation. Nobel Peace Prize two-time nominee Ervin Lazlo (2011) attests that “seeing ourselves as separate from the world fuels selfish and irresponsible tendencies: we are only responsible for ourselves, and not for ‘foreigners,’ ‘competitors,’ and ‘others’” (p. 117). In bringing the care of the earth into the folds of reconciliation, there is acknowledgement that human-centric modern history has caused great harm to marginal people groups, and environmental injustice to a host of living beings on this planet, as well as a severe disconnect from the goodness with which the earth was designed. By engaging in restorative acts of reconciliation with the planet, there is an openness to the endowed goodness of creation and the intention that it was created to participate in the whole person and health of a community.

In returning to a grand sense of awe before the God of the Universe, God’s relationship is placed with humanity into the context of billions and billions of galaxies. This profound placement of the Great Mystery has immediate effects on how we engage and encounter the other and all living things. “The experience of our connection with each other and the universe would inspire solidarity among people and empathy with all life on earth” (Lazlo, 2011, p. 124). Leonardo Boff would call this the “socio-cosmic,” where mountains, plants, rivers, animals, and the atmosphere become the new citizens who share in the human banquet, while humans share in the cosmic banquet. Only then will there be ecological justice and peace on planet earth. In embracing the world. we shall be embracing God.

Being Rooted: Where Hope Turns Into Knowledge

The deepening darkness of this season demands an answer for how we hope. Where do we find the winged imagination for a perception of lengthening light? For what have you hoped, and where is that placed? Is hope amorphous, without shape and form, or does it take on the color of a local landscape? I believe that much of hope is rooted in an intrinsic understanding that, “We are, where we are.”  “I am where I am.”  Simple sounding, yes, but this is really quite profound and lays the foundational groundwork for a rewilding vision of re-membering our hope, our selves, back into the deep and wise mysteries that are made evident through the cycles of our precious planet and our cosmic neighborhood. This kind of re-membering requires a connection with and within the natural world; to be exposed to, and experience, the integral ecology of which we are a part. 

This is the process of developing an understanding that our particular place helps us know who we are, where we are, and to an extent, why we are. And this particular place-or bioregion- becomes what historian and theologian Thomas Berry called a primary referent. It becomes the lens through which we make decisions on behalf of our community. It provides a critical placement through which all of life is lived, including institutions, establishments, communities and neighborhoods.  

Berry identifies this concept of a primary referent through the story of when he was twelve years old his family moved to the edge of town. Down from the new home was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. He writes in his essay, “The Meadow Across the Creek": 

“It was an early afternoon in May when I first looked down over the scene and saw the meadow. The field was covered with lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my life at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember.

It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in an otherwise clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do. Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet, as the years pass, this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes that I have given my efforts to, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life.”

This early experience, what Berry refers to as a primary referent, became his normative lens. Whatever preserved and enhanced this meadow in its natural, biodiverse cycles was good; what was opposed to this meadow or negated it was not good. His life orientation was that simple and pervasive. It applied in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion and whatever.

The more a person is invited to be in the presence of, and reflect upon, the infinite number of interrelated activities and relationships occurring in our natural environments, the more mysterious it all becomes; the more meaning a person finds in the early flowering of the Indian Plum, the more awestruck a person might be in simply walking within and through the simple patch of Cheasty Greenspace's urban forest.  It is none of the majesty of Mt. Rainier or Mt. Olympus, none of the immensity of the Salish Sea; yet in the Cheasty woods, a greenspace that has been transformed into a greenPLACE, the magnificence of life as celebration and connection is manifested and witnessed. 

Space becomes place that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke attention and care.

And so the slow and laborious work of changing the narrative of this particular stand of trees from one of separation into connection began. There was a deeply held hope that this land could be where children are. The place of children—where the play, where they inhabit, where they are—is one of the most potent indicators of how urban life is conceived and practiced. But there was also deep hope that as a result of coming alongside of these woods in solidarity, the children of our neighborhood would know this urban forest as their primary referent; that the interrelated health and well-being of this place would inform their own wellness and the general health of the city. Communion with the woods would be their own rewilding. 

And now, before the weather turns, the children know in what seasonal direction it is going because of signs in the forest.  They know when a red tailed hawk is about, as they’ve learned the signaling raucous calls of the crows; they then can turn their face upwards in time to witness the soaring, awe-inspiring flight and hear its exhilirating screech.  They know the unique sound of the wind in various trees. They get anxious if life gets too busy and they cannot escape into this local hinterland to play and be.  They removed blackberry and ivy.  And as they began to dig up the invasive roots, they began to plant their own.  Hundreds upon hundreds of trees have been planted alongside their sense of belonging. They now have feelings that spur action anticipating how governmental deregulation may impact the seasonal spring that flows through Cheasty’s snowberry meadow.  Mahatma Gandhi once said, “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”   

Because they know this place, because they now can identify so thoroughly with it, they know themselves and their web of interrelated relationships more fully. French mystic Simone Weil once said,

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

They are, where they are.  We are, where we are.  You are, where you are.

This embedded relationship with a wilderness place is where hope resides. From here is where the imagination springs. An imagination that sees the connection between the health of a place and the health of a person, of a people, of a neighborhood. Here we come to know again the patterns and rhythms of the natural world, foundational ways of being. An remembered vision for how the health of an urban forest participates and forms the health of its surrounding biosphere-its ecology, its biodiversity, of which humanity is a part, cracks the light of hope into these winter-solsticing days.   

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REFLECTION

What is your meadow experience?  Reflect on a place that perhaps is your primary referent. It would be a place that at one time provided a profound sense of awe and wonder, and in some significant way, formed who you are. You became apart of this place as much as it became a part of you. 

Rewilding & Journeying with Nature: A Conversation with Pilgrim Podcast

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with friend and fellow-guide, Lacy Clark Ellman, host of Pilgrim Podcast about our shared appreciation for seeing life through a pilgrim's lens and how the natural world avails itself to us as a sacred guide as we make our journey. In our conversation I share my thoughts around rewilding as a spiritual practice and a process of remembering our meant for interconnectedness with all of creation. If you are curious about the Rewilding Retreats I facilitate, I invite you to take a seat! Pour yourself a cup of tea and listen in for an hour. There is a sacred voice on the ancient side of remembrance that awaits you and is calling you forward toward the wild edges of your life!

>>LISTEN HERE!<<

The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place through Permanence

The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place Through permanence 

I am thrilled to be preparing to deliver a paper at William & Mary College next week at their annual symposia on Pilgrimage Studies. In many aspects, this opportunity feels very much like a pilgrimage journey in and of itself. A couple years ago I received an invitation to submit a proposal for this particular academic gathering, which very much felt like the call, the requisite summons of any meaningful pilgrimage. However, life circumstances prevented the manifestation of that opportunity until now. And so I have the opportunity to seek the wisdom gained these past couple years as I have journeyed through the descent, the time of darkness and disintegration that occurs when a journey is truly leaving its indelible mark on you, and prepare for my arrival. 

In this setting my claim will be my belief that the act of pilgrimage is a practice of profound place-making. Using Uri Shulevitz's children's book, The Treasure as my primary text, I argue that pilgrimage doesn't set our longing heart in the direction of far-off sacred spaces to find resurrection within a celestial kingdom; rather, it roots us even deeper into our homescapes as the return requires creating meaningful places for the community to connect. While the journey is indeed important to return to a posture of collective provision within one's community, it is critical to note that that within this story (and very much like in our own lives), the protagonist Isaac could not have even made the journey without a deep knowledge of, and connection to, his place. Because he knows where he is, he is able to get to where he needs to go, and ultimately, to return.

We too must know our local landscapes well enough so that when it is time fulfill the call of a dream, we know how to navigate the land and engage with strangers in such a way as to not get lost. Engaging in regular practices of listening in place, where you unplug from your device and hear (really hear), and see (really see) the people and places that surround you and create the fabric of your home-land provides the most elemental conditions for co-creating places that provide for deep and meaningful community connection. For these are the very places and people who will receive the boon of your journey, the great gift that is given in exchange for the courage to respond to the call. Your community will receive the gift of your permanence.

If you do not have this book in your library, I encourage you to get yourself a copy. It is simple, delightful, and profound. And I hope your own copy of The Treasure, along with the following abstract for my paper, will inspire how your journeys will ultimately root you deeper into your neighborhoods.

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Abstract: The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place through Permanence

While the practice of pilgrimage is undergoing a resurgence, church authorities haven’t always been enthusiastic.Critics, like Jerome, thought it ludicrous that prayers offered in one place could be more effective than prayers offered elsewhere: “Nothing is lacking to your faith though you have not seen Jerusalem.”However, what if in the very leaving of our houses to engage the Divine, we actually return back to it not only more connected to our Sacred Source, but also more invested in our place on this planet through a commitment to faithful permanence?

Uri Shulevitz’s Caldecott Honor awarded book, The Treasure (1978) provides the archetypal stages of pilgrimage in a condensed child-friendly, but enormously profound, way.However, what makes this story unique, and its great gift to us as readers and practicers of pilgrimage, is the invitation to see that the true treasure for which we are seeking on pilgrimage is always back at home, in both a literal and metaphorical sense.Isaac, Shulevitz’s primary character discovers that the treasure about which he has dreamt, and for which he has searched, resides in the essence of his home: underneath his hearth-place.This finding compels him to invest further in his community through sharing his treasure with others near and far. 

By looking at the ancient practice of pilgrimage through the lens of The Treasure, we can gain new insight on how this practice actually encourages one to become more rooted and connected to personal home-scapes: the neighborhood, local communities, and regional ecosystems.Patterns of narcissistic consumption of places and relationships have resulted in transitory lifestyles.Impermanence—a result of the provisional value of things accorded by the evanescence of social media—is valued over the tenacity required to remain. Isaac embodies the sort of rootedness, which is an outcome of the journey, that can effectively transform an ambiguous and meaningless space into one of deep meaning and wisdom.

The difference between a space and a place is the difference between a house and a home.Isaac leaves his house seeking; he returns to find his treasure has always been there and testifies to that wisdom by building a place of public worship; a place of deep and significant meaning that invites others in his community to be welcomed, to return, and to tell others about the wisdom encountered there.This is a true place, a home created and maintained by the initial dream to journey away-from.

In Isaac’s initial poverty, one can find themes of how impoverished the Western world is in our normative independence and isolation.Soul-less technology, especially screens and social media, further this distance from ourselves and one another.Through the journeying out to the places that call to us from our deepest dreams and psyches, connection with others is found.This connection and sharing of dreams is what can spur the return back to whence we came, rediscover meaning, and re-engage in practices that powerfully connect people to one another and their place.

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The Treasure: How Pilgrimage Cultivates a Connection to Place through Permanence

Uri Shulevitz’s Caldecott Honor awarded book, The Treasure (1978) provides the archetypal stages of pilgrimage in a condensed child-friendly, but enormously profound, way.  However, what makes this story unique, and its great gift to us as readers and practitioners of pilgrimage, is the invitation to see that the true treasure for which we are seeking on pilgrimage is always back at home, in both a literal and metaphorical sense.  Isaac, Shulevitz’s primary character discovers that the treasure about which he has dreamt, and for which he has searched, resides in the essence of his home: underneath his hearth-place.  This finding compels him to invest further in his community through sharing his treasure with others near and far through the practice of profound place-making, which requires a commitment to permanence.  I invite you into this story, which will also be looked at through the lens of Celtic Christian pilgrimage and place-making, of which I am familiar and practiced.

I believe that the pilgrimage journey, especially when engaged as a daily practice, can foster a connection to our physical places in an age when place is secondary to the modern nomadic pace.

This is the story of Isaac, a poor man who goes to bed every night lonesome and with hunger pains. However, while his belly is empty, his dream life is full. He repeatedly has a dream where a voice tells him to travel to the capital city to discover a treasure under the bridge near the Royal Palace.  The journey that commences requires a deep knowledge of his local landscape, an abiding trust in fellow humanity, and ultimately a sense of communal imagination that relies on both the dream and what is needed to deepen one’s experience of home.

place-making can be understood as a form of contemplative practice in that it can be the result of the integrative themes fastened to a pilgrimage journey: geography, stranger, and imagination. 

In an age of chronic and widespread displacement, the work of place-making—the discovery and cultivation of a sense of place—has gained new significance and meaning.  I propose that ultimately place-making can be understood as a form of contemplative practice in that it can be the result of the integrative themes fastened to a pilgrimage journey: geography, stranger, and imagination.  The deep knowledge and engagement of these three categories invites one to live more fully into their homescapes, more integrated within local communities, and ultimately, participate in providing transformative and flourishing aspects to local life.

Isaac’s journey to the city can tell us about the significance of place within the contemplative practice of pilgrimage. A journey through various topographies and encounters with others are requisite to understanding the call upon his life. It is here within the capital city gates, encountering a stranger at the site where his dreams told him to go, that everything is made clear for Isaac. This illumination and clarity was without question a profound experience of place. I would also call it an experience of homecoming, a sense of having arrived home within one’s self after a significant effort and journey searching for it. 

What is place-making and how does it shape a framework for pilgrimage and result in a sense of permanence? Anthropologist Keith Basso, who has worked on mapping the place-names of the Western Apache people near Cibeque, Arizona, for over thirty years, describes place-making as a “retrospective world-building,” a form of cultural activity that is a “ universal tool of the historical imagination.” In the Western Apache world, places and place-names are dense with meaning, holding and embodying the entire history of the people. To say the name of a place, to tell a story about a place is to waken a memory, conjure up everything that ever happened there, and make it present again to the community. This is more than mere reminiscence; remembering what happened in a given place becomes woven into the personal and collective identity of the people. “What people make of their places,” Basso suggests, “is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth…. We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine.”[1]

Isaac’s experience can help us grapple with the growing concerns about the significance of place, considering in particular the widespread sense of displacement or disconnection that has come to characterize the contemporary urban experience within the Western world.

Movement and travel is fundamental to the human experience.  A general arc from hunter/gatherer societies to today’s human populations underscores that there is an inherent desire to move.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Hebrew God is often portrayed as a traveler showing up to deliver divine guidance.[2]  The journey upon which the traveler embarks subsequently becomes sacred as well.  This holy hegira underlays the constant travels and wanderings of many ancient Celtic Christians as well.  Restlessness was in their blood as was the notion that it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive.[3]  This lens of hope presented a perspective that the road was a rite; that the path provided prescient knowledge and insight to their journey towards divine revelation.  Isaac’s departure relied on the land as a liturgy, a sacred script that would prove his dream’s call. He is able to move through this wild landscape because it is known, much like the details of a familiar story.

The particularities of a place become both a sacred messenger and a storied record of divine encounters.  Like the sacred lands of the Western Apache, religious sites in Celtic lands are known by meaningful name and also by the presence of standing crosses, communal land-markers of ancient stories of significance.  This was a primal way of place-making.  By naming a place through the placement of stone, or more notably, through tale-saturated titles, the Celtic people affirmed how important the natural world was to their experience with the numinous.  Sacred legends associated with landscapes abound in Celtic country, and are often the narratives that bring people back to and into nature. 

The geographies of Isaac’s surrounding home-scape shaped him. From the dust of the village paths to the surrounding forests and mountains, he lived in such a way that the interweaving of these ground-scapes became spiritual directors, forming in him a sacred imagination for what was needed in his community.

Writing about the power of the imagination in an essay on the civil war, Wendell Berry emphasizes that “the particularizing force of imagination is a force of justice…Imagination, amply living in a place, brings what we want and what we have ever closer to being the same…If imagination is to have a real worth, to us, it needs to have a practical, economic effect. It needs to establish us in our places with a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves. I think the highest earthly result of imagination is local adaptation.”

Isaac has the imagination to create something that would practically deepen the experience of other’s living within his community because he has lived there a long time. He has listened, and responded to the silence of what wasn’t there. His deep knowledge and relationship with the surrounding forests and mountains is beyond basic map-knowledge, these are places with which he is so familiar that he can navigate known routes from his village, to the city, and back again with a felt sense, and a confidence in his greater community that the accepted rides from a stranger are welcomed gifts from the guidance that is manifesting his dream. He isn’t lost in his landscape; he is home within it and this connection is one hard to come by when one’s primary senses are attuned to technological devices that prevent one from really seeing and really hearing from the geography that surrounds one’s lodging. For it can only truly be just that, an anywhere-space where one simply resides, a shallow rootedness that can easily be transplanted since the surrounding storied geography was never tapped, never learned, never adapted and assimilated, never penetrating the person behind the screen who somehow still manages to walk upon a sidewalk.

Isaac shows us what is an “experiential place sense,” the imaginative, affective response to a place that allows it to become significant for a person or community. When one sees more of a place, (these are the bits and pieces: birds and benches, angles and alleys, weeds and woods) because of one’s experiential sense of it, it allows us to plunge into a posture of permanence because we are enabled to gauge the true significance of what we gaze upon. This kind of seeing is akin to what the early Christians meant when they spoke of theoria, that was a way of seeing into the heart of reality that sometimes revealed the very face of the divine. Or like what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins meant when he spoke of “inscape,” the luminous, utterly singular texture of a thing that emerges with blazing clarity when a person actually looks upon that thing with care and sensitivity.

Pilgrimage requires all senses as it depends on our sensory selves to receive and transmit divine messages in the here and now. It is nigh impossible to have an I/Thou encounter based on particularity and receive its sacred import if podcasts and screens overwhelm our sensing selves.

This capacity is often grown by practicing the pace and posture of pilgrimage so that when we return home we are able to “see into” all that is there and all that is yet missing.

The Celtic way of pilgrimage paid attention to place, understanding that the sacred was revealed through the natural world and even through the hospitality of the stranger.  When we travel with a pilgrim’s pace, we embrace the perspective and values of the divine.  Charles Foster holds that a journey will challenge you to engage critical aspects of the divine through:

“…life on the edges; indiscriminate and costly hospitality; solidarity with the marginalized (most of the nomad’s time is spent outside main centers and in the company of peripheral people); intimate relationships with humans and the environment; a new view at every step; and the loosest possible hold on possessions.”[4]

This was a way of living, of moving, and of arriving to a place that required radical engagement.  It entreats the individual to live into communion with the seasons, the elements, the natural world and other humans.  The journey becomes the medium by which meaning is made and relationships are maintained.  While participants of a pilgrimage often intend to go at it alone, studies have repeatedly noted the importance of social interactions along the journey. Isaac’s acceptance of offered rides by strangers while en route to the city speaks to how we co-create meaning and movement together with others. Pilgrimage demands we pay attention, sensing messages for our inner journey through the faces with whom we share the sidewalk, as well as the environment that surrounds us. 

We awaken to the culture of a place when we pay attention to the potential of interactions with both the seen and unseen world. 

This kind of noticing requires unplugging from our devices and engaging in our places with our senses.  It means tapping into the collective memory of a place through our bodies.  The smells, sights and sounds of a place will reveal much about its stories—stories that induce knowledge and love of the land, the culture that co-habitates there, and the Creator who exists in and in between these places and its people.  

Dreams are holy and contain sacred power as they project the location or echoing dimensions of a pilgrimage site—they can be portals of deeper connection to ourselves, our community, and the divine. Isaac’s dream repeatedly visited him, placing upon him a call to make a connection between his deepest desire, his geography, and the resulting imagination to create something on behalf of the common good.  What makes Isaac’s particular experience unique and profound, is that while his dream, his call, demanded an answer of going, he did not travel to a distant center of worship.

The trajectory of his transformational travel didn’t lead him to a shrine, temple, or sacred grove; rather, it led him out to the city, to a particular bridge, to be laughed at by the captain of the guards: “You poor fellow,” he said, “what a pity you wore your shoes out for a dream! Listen, if I believed a dream I once had, I would go right now to the city you came from, and I’d look for a treasure under the stone in the house of a fellow named Isaac.” Isaac turns and retraces his steps back home, accepting kind offers from strangers, walking through forests and back over mountains. Ultimately, the treasure is found within Isaac’s home, a metaphor for the divine that is deepest within each of us.

To uncover this sacred treasure has the potential to transform our neighborhoods and communities as the boon isn’t meant to fund or create more self-serving interests or even create more global thinking.

The recovered treasure co-creates places that deepen community connection to place, one another, and the opportunity to experience awe and wonder locally.

Isaac’s pilgrimage journey awakens in him an imagination for something more, a storied aspect of his community that would be on behalf of the common good, something that would create connection, and provide a place to experience awe and wonder, critical aspects of a happy and whole human life. This imagination is tinged with gratitude, an essential quality that will ensure that one’s imagination doesn’t serve the ego, but rather, the eco—the whole house, the whole ecology of a place, the inscape—the inside knowledge of the interrelated dynamics for living together.  If we are all to live together well in our places, we must create and know the stories of our interrelatedness.

With the treasure that is the result of his journey, he taps into the wisdom that has sat underneath his hearth, the heart of his home, waiting to be found, recognized, and its power used to imagine and create a place that would help to shape the identity of those who inhabited Isaac’s neighborhood.

A true pilgrimage practice becomes a way of being in the world, ultimately one that is insatiably curious for connection to the divine through others and the natural world.  This sort of pace is also slow growing, like the rootedness of a tree.  Our journey towards revelation and meaning should lead us to plant roots, roots that connect to our local ecologies and transform our neighborhood economies.  In this way, pilgrimage becomes a practice of creating a deep and abiding sense of home. 

Bringing back the boon of a pilgrimage is a requisite final stage of the journey. The Return demands a communal impact for the whole experience to be fully realized as a transformative event. Isaac’s treasure doesn’t spur him towards a rootless and fancy-free lifestyle. He invests what he has found as a result of his searching into his community, imagining and creating a culture of place and collective belonging, which produces deep roots and a sense of permanence.

With the security gained through Isaac’s found treasure, he sends a portion off to his sacred guide (the Captain of the Guards—-see the recurring theme? gratitude) and then he creates.  This act of imagination is a doubling down—a commitment to his homescape through the creation of something that didn’t before exist. He has listened deeply to his landscape and strangers and heard the silence of what is not there—an act that is not possible through impermanence and light, non-localized living.

Isaac builds a house of prayer, and presumably based on its size and amount of seating, this is not a private altar. This is a place for his neighbors to gather, to come together, to experience in community wonder, wisdomawe, gratitude, thanksgiving. This is a place that will profoundly impact the collective memory of what it means to live in this village. The wisdom gained through Isaac’s journey now marks the character of this place, and is memorialized with an inscription: “Sometimes one must travel far to discover what is near.” 

Like the Celtic standing stones, this house of prayer becomes a marker, a sacred story of the wisdom found there. Like the Apache, the people’s prayers that are offered here will soak into the soil, creating memories in this place, providing a depth that demands staying, knowing, and being together.

In Isaac’s initial poverty, one can find themes of how impoverished the Western world is in our normative independence and isolation.  Through the journeying out to the places that call to us from our deepest dreams and psyches, connection with others is found.  This connection and sharing of dreams is what can spur the return back to whence we came, rediscover meaning, and re-engage in imaginative practices that powerfully connect people to one another and their place.

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Reflection

How are you practicing presence and permanence in your neighborhood?

Do you know the names of landmarks and landscapes in your community?

Test this knowledge without the use of map-skills (no Google maps either!). What names do you know? Do you know their sacred stories?

Learn the ancient, indigenous names of places in your region, and the stories that accompany these names. 

Practice your own place-naming based on the memories you have co-created in your community. 

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            [1]  Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 5, 7.  

            [2]  Genesis 12:1, 4; Exodus 34:23 for examples of Hebrew bible text where God proclaims the Hebrew people a pilgrimage people.

            [3]  Ian Bradley, The Celtic Way (London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd., 2003), 80.

            [4]  Charles Foster, The Sacred Journey (Nashville, NT: Thomas Nelson, 2010), xiv.