Discerning The Call That Knocks on Your Door

At some point in your life, you begin to wonder if this is really all it has to offer, or perhaps there is a sense that you have gotten off track and are on a completely different road than you ever thought you would travel. Perhaps life has become tinged with a sense of smallness, a meaningless mundanity; access to the parts of you that still beat with wild wings and startle with wonder at the sound of mystery or at the stars in the sky seem locked away without a key. Or perhaps you have sought after the spiritual life, desiring an ascent that will take you high above and away from the pain and suffering of this world. But no matter how set apart you become, you still feel the snares of sorrow. And perhaps you may already be wise to the game of the conventional life, knowing that intentionality and centeredness is counter to the crazy consumption of our culture.  

And yet, there seems to be something calling to you from a deeper place, calling to you like the trees’ blood of which Rilke writes, to “sink back into the source of everything,” to “to out into your heart as onto a vast plain.”

You’ve recognized that there is a journey you must take that will take you down into the sacred, subterranean lands of your soulscape, a journey that will give you that key to recover the wild and precious parts of you.

The Call knocks on the status quo of your life, and stays knocking until you answer and open the door, surrendering to the invitation to cross the threshold, leave the home you know, and go on your own way towards that desire that showed up, cloaked as curiosity and questions. This knock at your door is an invitation to find the lost and scattered pieces of yourself.

Print by John Bauer 

Questions that I am often asked are, “How do I know if this is really The Call knocking on my door?”  “How do I know if this just isn’t a mood or a distraction from my responsibilities?” There are, fortunately, ways to tell. The great mythologist Joseph Campell who did extensive work around the idea of the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, notes four experiential qualities that accompany The Call.

First, if it is a true call, you will know that responding to it is, in fact, not an avoidance of responsibility, but rather a facing of something difficult; something unknown and frightening is summoning you. Ecopsychologist, author and wilderness guide, Bill Plotkin, describes this as “a compelling need to walk into the mouth of a whale, or out into the night and into a storm.” This isn’t an easy vacation away from your life. This isn't a trip to forget your cares. This is a profound sense that your one true life will only be found, be recovered, in the wilderness, and your survival now depends on the departure. 

Second, Campbell reminds us of the paradox that there is something strangely recognizable about this unknown journey. You have a deep sense of belonging to the journey and the wild edges to where it is taking you; you feel an uprising of ancient memories, the woven fabric of kin and familiarity, that covers you like a favorite cloak. This strange and sacred summons was made for you.

Third, you have an astonishing and incomprehensible sense that the season of life you have been living is suddenly over, whether you want it to or not. In the great myths and legends, this often is when the protagonist is chosen of the journey, instead of she choosing it. Recently I have been doing some personal work with the Slavic folk lore stories of the Baba Yaga. In one such tale, a born-of-a-bear giant named Ivan engages in a transformational journey with the Yaga. In this story there is the adventure that he chooses; however, his heroic transformation doesn’t occur until the part where the descent, The Call, chooses him. 

Fourth, The Call is almost always unexpected, and often unwanted. This is a disruption to life as you have known it, and who needs that when life is already busy, overwhelming and chaotic? However, this is a summons from the soul; a demanding can’t-shake-you command from your future self that you need this for your soul-survival and future flourishing.

Plotkin offers a fifth way to discern if The Call is a genuine. He asks that you imagine not acting on it and then noticing how you feel. “Imagine you are going to ignore The Call, or even laugh it off. How does that feel? Do you detect a building dread, a huge sadness, a guilt that comes from refusing a sacred invitation?” What if you don’t answer the door, or better yet, answer it and after saying, “No thank you,” close it, refusing the needs of your future self?  Another way to determine the validity of the call would be to say, “yes” and begin to take those first furtive steps onto the path that begins to suddenly manifest before each tentatively placed step. With each step that is taken, a sense of assurance is gained, a feeling of rightness grows.

If it is a true call, you may feel like your going out is actually a return towards your true home for the very first time. 

By Kay NiELSON "East of the sun and west of the moon" 1914

Know this though: while The Call’s knocking may never stop, you will become deaf to its solicitation over time. It is essential that you act on The Call as soon as you are ready as the window of opportunity may not remain open for long. It is a sacred aligning of serendipitous circumstance when you are at a place to both hear the knock, and open the door to it. You, however, must make the choice to walk out the door. 

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises. 
It is only a door.
~Adrienne Rich

---

Rainier Maria Rilke, from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 95-96.

Joseph Campell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), 55, 58. 

David Whyte, from “Sweet Darkness,” in The House of Belonging (Langely, WA: Many Rivers Press, 1997), 23. 

Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003), 57-58.

The Return: How Returning Home Requires An Open Door

For years I have been challenged with the notion that ultimately, the pilgrimage calls us to return home and live forward on behalf of something other and greater than ourselves. This idea that the road out actually causes us to be beholden to something back home is a critical aspect of the becoming that this rites of passage initiates.For our lives to truly reincorporate and reflect the stories of our journeys there must be effects behind and beyond our front doors; if there isn’t, the travels and travails of the road quickly get reduced to petty ramblings and narcissistic knock abouts.

Ultimately, the greatest influence we can have on ourselves, our families, and the world around us is to live out the wizened effects of our sacred journey on behalf of the Other and the Future. 

This notion’s simplicity allows for a focus of energy around a transformed state. When Joseph Campbell talks about a “wisdom and power to serve others” on account of our wayfaring, he is getting at a fundamental aspect of the gift of pilgrimage. We go out on these personal, intimate soul-adventures to connect to the sacred in fresh, inspired ways. However, if these encounters aren’t having a greater result on the world around us, they are worthless. I believe that by applying our gained wisdom on behalf of the Other and the Future, we are re-gifting our communities and the earth with our God-given wisdom developed on the journey.

Living on behalf of the Other and the Future is a scalable metaphor; that is, it may refer to simply anyone or anything other than yourself and decisions that impact the future. In broader, and more challenging terms, “the Other and the Future” is a way of embracing all of life, especially those that are without voice and marginalized in society, and intentionally orienting lifestyle decisions that will have flourishing outcomes on our earth, the more-than-human world, and future generations. As a result, our personal sacred journey is global in both scope and impact, and we are invited to transformative micro-practices that overhaul how we view our homes and home environments.

Our return home requires us to leave the door open to the wild world beyond its threshold, maintaining the now-understood posture and practice of interrelatedness and solidarity.

Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.

It comes down to this: Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. It is the emerging tension that results from the growing cracks of the shell of the status quo, which causes us to awaken to ourselves in the first place, that subsequently requires an exit, a departure from what we were taught within culture, society, and institutions. A threshold crossing emerges and forms with distinct clarity; here is a line we now know must be crossed, a line that reveals that there is more on the other side that will initiate a process of transformational becoming.

When we choose to respond to the Longing and the Call to leave the familiar behind in search of answers found in far-away places or even the more wilder edges of our lives, we are deploying our soul to interact and intervene with the surrounding environment-plants and people alike, the result of which is an energizing and heightened awareness of ourselves, of Others and the Spirit amidst it all. We are crossing into liminal lands, the territory of the inner-soul journey that demands an exterior embodiment of shifting sands of the inner soul-scape.

It comes down to this: Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking.

This kind of invited alertness requires us to depart, to leave and to walk (and walk away before we can walk back), to become intimate with the path upon which we tread, and others with whom we share it. The path that leads to the pilgrimage destination is critical for this process; for along this road, with no vehicular/insular walls to tune us out, we must tune in to the measured mode that invites contact, conversation and company. The structures we use to define who we are in ordinary life become irrelevant. Pilgrim space has no regard for class, race, or social/economic standing. There are no more random run-ins with strangers; there are no more lucky or misfortunate moments. 

In sacred travel when the pilgrim mood is awakened and engaged, every experience is potent and portends a deeper meaning; every contact attests to some greater plan. No encounter is without sacred significance. 

There are signs everywhere, if only we learn how to read them. Peculiar people turn into much-needed messengers.  The natural world speaks with candid revelation and simply profundity. This is a path transformed into grace; it is now a place where souls are nourished and renewed. With every step upon the pilgrim's path, that which has become cracked and undone begins to solvitur. Illumination and integration begin their great soul work. 

Pilgrimage Demands Your Presence

I facilitate pilgrimage journeys to Iona, Scotland and in the Pacific Northwest for individuals who respond to The Call to engage transformational travel as a means to recovering a sense of the sacred within themselves and the natural world.  Every retreat participant with whom I have worked has felt the deep uprooting that occurs when the call to go is upon them and are relieved and refreshed by this ancient practice and a profound place that demands action, questions and a quest for answers.

Iona provides all the trappings of a good pilgrimage: historical significance, a saintly presence, a continuous line of faithful heritage, and a requirement to travel there with intention.  Moreover, Iona is the historical birthplace of the Celtic Christian tradition and so by going here, I invite conversation and attentiveness to the numinous natural world that surrounds us, and of which we are fundamentally apart.  One of the key themes of this unique stream within the Christian faith is that nature is revelatory. 

The early Celtic church had a fundamental belief in the revelatory nature of the created world.  Every tree, blade of grass, and wild goose’s cry was imbued with the Spirit and spoke to the character of the Creator.  These “theophanies” –God showings—were expected and sought after as a way to understand the sacred mysteries.  The ninth century Irish teacher, John Scotus Eriugena believed that God was the ‘Life Force” within all things. 

“Therefore every visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany” ”

— John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon-The Division of Nature, 749D

The entire created world upholds something of the essence of the Creator.  Eriugena also taught that there are two primary ways in which the sacred is revealed–the Bible and creation: “Through the letters of Scripture and the species of creature…” mysteries of God are revealed.

The particularities of a place subsequently became both a sacred messenger and a storied record of divine encounters.  Many important religious sites in Celtic lands are notable because of the presence of standing crosses.  These great, free-standing, three-dimensional or ‘high’ crosses often stood in replacement of even more ancient pillar stones that stood to testify and link heaven to earth.  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 island of Iona is storied land, tilled with tales immortalizing meetings with angels, prayer practices, and marking the journeys of those who have come before.  Annie Dilland points out in “Teaching a Stone to Talk” that holy places have been disappearing rapidly since the Enlightenment, and our contemporary dislocatedness affirms this. “God used to rage at the Israelites for frequently sacred groves.  I wish I could find one…. Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy.”  However, Iona is sacred land and people make pilgrimage here to soak of these stories, hoping that something of this sacred soil will stick and have a profound impact on their personal lives.  And my hunch is that there are many more sacred sites all around us, even in our own urban neighborhoods, if only we would pay attention.  

The Celtic way of pilgrimage paid attention to place, understanding that God 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.”

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. 

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 awakening to the culture of a place when we pay attention to the potential of interactions with both the seen and unseen world.  And this is where I sense the profound gift Celtic spirituality and its propensity to journey have for our modern cities today.  This stream of spirituality both honors wandering and seeking out a new special place with the challenge to find renewal through an attachment to place.  This attachment to a place comes through knowing its stories and noticing its strangers as portals of profound meaning and connection.  However, this kind of noticing requires unplugging from our devices and engaging in our new 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 here, and the Creator who exists in and in between these places and its people.   

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.

Go. Deliberately.

“Since we are travelers and pilgrims in the world, let us ever ponder on the end of the road, that is our life, for the end of our roadway is our home.”

— St. Columba

There is a general unsettling that is upon people these days, an agitation that is exacerbated by the daily news of political and environmental climate change.  The traditional means and methods of creating and cultivating a spiritual practice that assuage this sense have gone stale. The weekly trek to church can be driven thoughtlessly as can the participation in the service’s rituals. It even seems, as the community that assembles for corporate worship are so compatible that carbon copies might seem a more appropriate categorization. 

Despite these long standing traditions, there is a need to go and seek wisdom beyond the pulpit and outside of the walls! Don’t vacillate as that will only result in inactivity and indecisiveness. Resolution and an intentional move to initiate the journey activates the sacred archetypes and commences the re-membering this pilgrimage is bound to produce. You do not need God’s presence when sitting on the couch undecided. 

Desperation for the divine ignites when you decide to go and commit to The Call.  This is when the enlivening veriditas energy begins to flow in and through you, and synchronicities start and happen all around you.

Each of us has a unique and particular soul, yet the Western world teaches us to feed and nurture this inner-life by the most conventional and traditional of means.  Pilgrimage, while as ancient as our bipedal designed bodies, is now seen as an unconventional expression in our culture. However, if we are going to give the soul the feeding it needs, we are going to need to go against the grain and go to where are souls are freed to search for, and re-discover the divine. This path of development and discovery ultimately is soul attunement, which integrates authentic expressions of our unique gifts and talents on behalf of a greater and common good as the result. 

The response to The Call, which requires a threshold crossing, a leaving of sorts, is an action that leads to transformation, most often fulfillment and freedom, an alignment of our individual soul with the Divine Soul and communion with all of creation. What might have started as a soft whispered call has now become a heart-throbbing desire to go and find the animus mundi--the Soul of the world! Pursue the wild place that makes your heart skip both with doubt and desire for here is where you will find your Answer covered in salty barnacles and cracked-leathered edges and God within the windswept moors and tangled trees.

Pilgrimage Awakens the Soul

“Isn’t it time that your drifting was consecrated into pilgrimage?  You have a mission.  You are needed.  The road that leads to nowhere has to be abandoned…. It is a road for joyful pilgrims intent on the recovery of passion. ”

— Alan Jones

Pilgrimage. What is it about this word that causes one’s emotions to stand on guard-both compelled and curiously cautious at the same time? Indeed, it is a loaded word, packed with ages of political and parochial themes. Even with the historical entrapping of this concept, there is a much more ancient restlessness that is deep within our collective consciousness to be on the move and to engage questions and the Answer in the rites of passage process. 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. 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.  Restlessness was in their blood as was the notion that it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  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. 

This is the stuff of rites and rituals. This is about growing to the edge of life as we know it and discovering that there is a world beyond that wild hedgerow that is drawing us into its feathers, fronds, and fur. Getting up and moving to the parameters of our life, to the absolute edges, is where we re-engage our senses and re-awaken our souls to our sacred meant-for-ness. 

I believe that what agitates people when they first engage the concept of pilgrimage is that it literally unsettles them. The domesticity that ties us down to the perceptions of our lives begins to untie and unravel as this seeker-path begins its work of instigating a longing and a calling to go beyond, to move through, to expand and re-discover the divine in this asperous, ancient process that involves an epic, wild exchange with the natural world. When you first hear of pilgrimage, whether it is the perspective or a place, it is as if something gets lodged within the soul like an irksome stone or that sense of evasive knowing of a lost thing that you just can’t quite remember…that sense stays with a now restless-you, and will call to you your entire life until The Longing and The Call has been courageously met and engaged with a knapsack in hand and boots on the feet, knowing that the road is a rite, the thing that will bring us to an authentic center and sense of the sacred.