Pilgrimage: A Profound Act of Listening
I absolutely believe that one might need to journey to a holy place on the other side of the planet to recover this renewal. And, sacred sites are also all around us, quietly remaining in the more wild edges of our frenetic lives, awaiting being noticed, remembered, attended. The pilgrimage process is one that can be engaged just as much at home as abroad and with just as much potential for transformation. It is the profound act of listening, which transforms the average elements of a place or even just your normal mid-week day, into a pilgrim's portal: a way of sensing and seeing that transmits the sacred to and through the greater community of things that surround us!
“If the journey you have chosen is indeed a pilgrimage, a soulful journey, it will be rigorous. Ancient wisdom suggests if you aren’t trembling as you approach the sacred, it isn’t the real thing. The sacred, in its various guises as holy ground, art, or knowledge, evokes emotion and commotion.”
After a season of absolute deconstruction in our lives (read more about that here) my husband started a new consultation business (Limen) that used the regenerative image of a pine cone as the logo. We were away to Whistler, B.C. with our family to discern next steps in this journey when we happened upon this new art installation along our favorite path. This is an example of how when we open ourselves up to the ARCHETYPAL circuit of the pilgrimage process, signs and symbols will begin to appear all around!
I remember sitting on the tarmac in Philadelphia awaiting our Atlantic departure to Glasgow in 2009 with a group of women from Seattle. We were on pilgrimage to Iona, so why should I have not been surprised that we were grounded for FOUR hours while the winds and rains of a Hurricane Bill whipped and roared around us, lightning lighting up the jet-black night outside our plane? What really brought the rigor close to heart was upon collecting our backpacks in Glasgow; is was evidently clear that our luggage was unable to be loaded on our flight during the storm, and also due to the extreme conditions, abandoned, not even covered against the torrential rains. My pack containing all my teaching materials for Iona was completely SOAKED, much of it rendered useless. All I could do was laugh knowing that I would cry my eyes out if I didn't. For indeed, what I was bearing witness to was the evidence of the pilgrimage stages being set in motion, this commotion being a clear marker that we were approaching the sacred!
The inevitable chaos that surrounds one’s journey to the place of their heart’s longing is set in place to distract and possibly even derail the most hope-filled plans. When one leaves on a pilgrimage, they are making an absolute commitment to a sojourn towards self-knowledge, which in Christian mystical tradition, is the understanding that knowledge of self and knowledge of God are one. And there are energies at play within and around us that are desperate to ensure that divine connection doesn't occur. This happens in the guise of uncertainties and doubts, details unwinding, or appearances that even the weather is commiserating against you!
The purpose of the pilgrimage is to ultimately make life more meaningful. It is regarded as the universal quest for the self.
Though the form of the path changes, one element remains the same: renewal of the soul. The essence of the sacred way is "tracing a sacred route of tests and trials, ordeals and obstacles, to arrive at a holy place and attempt to fathom the secrets of its power" (P.Cousineau). I absolutely believe that one might need to journey to a holy place on the other side of the planet to recover this renewal. And, sacred sites are also all around us, quietly remaining in the more wild edges of our frenetic lives, awaiting being noticed, remembered, attended. The pilgrimage process is one that can be engaged just as much at home as abroad and with just as much potential for transformation. It is the profound act of listening, which transforms the average elements of a place or even just your normal mid-week day, into a pilgrim's portal: a way of sensing and seeing that transmits the sacred to and through the greater community of things that surround us!
The way of the pilgrim is one of an inner-quiet, an inner ear attuned to the subtle sounds of the Spirit while on the sacred road.
Pilgrimage Demands Your Presence
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.
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” ”
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.
Iona: Getting There Well
The journey itself to Iona makes this place unique; it is long, quite complicated and even relatively uncomfortable for the urbanite who is accustomed to quick and easy travel. This distance provides the perfect pilgrimage process, for it truly requires a removal of oneself from all that is familiar and supplies a lengthy trek-full of obstacles, no doubt! Once there, one finds a sparsely populated island, with almost no cars and a large abbey, whose structure appears to have dropped from the heavens onto this topographically small and relatively insignificant place. Sheep outnumber the residents and the sunlight plays on the hillsides in the most magical ways. One senses almost immediately Iona is indeed a "thin space" – that brushing up against the Divine is inevitable.
The journey itself to Iona makes this place unique; it is long, quite complicated and even relatively uncomfortable for the urbanite who is accustomed to quick and easy travel. This distance provides the perfect pilgrimage process, for it truly requires a removal of oneself from all that is familiar and supplies a lengthy trek-full of obstacles, no doubt! Once there, one finds a sparsely populated island, with almost no cars and a large abbey, whose structure appears to have dropped from the heavens onto this topographically small and relatively insignificant place.
Sheep outnumber the residents and the sunlight plays on the hillsides in the most magical ways. One senses almost immediately Iona is indeed a "thin space" – that brushing up against the Divine is inevitable.
It takes time to get to Iona. To start your pilgrimage preparations, think about the itinerary in two parts: TRAVEL TO OBAN and OBAN TO IONA
By Train
Trains travel regularly from Edinburgh (Waverley Station) and Glasgow (Queen Street Station) to Oban. This spectacular journey (one of the top rail rides in the world!) takes approximately four hours and the train terminal in Oban is next to the ferry terminal for the Isle of Mull.
Rail Enquiries: Tel: 08457 484950. Scotrail (Trains)www.scotrail.co.uk
By Bus
Buses depart from Edinburgh (St. Andrew Square) and Glasgow (Buchanan Street Station) and go directly to the Station Road stop in Oban. The route takes approximately four hours-make sure to pack a snack!
Bus Enquiries: Tel: 08705 505050 or visit www.travelinescotland.comScottish Citylink (Coaches)www.citylink.co.uk
By Car
From Edinburgh take the M9 to Stirling, then the A84/A85 to Oban. From Glasgow take the A82 up the side of Loch Lomond to Crianlarich, then the A85 to Oban. If you are travelling from the north of Scotland the A82 will take you from Inverness to Fort William, then take the A828 to Oban.
Disabled Passengers
For assistance on the railway ring Scotrail (Tel: 0845 605 7021).
Recommended accommodations for your overnight in this seaside town
Oban Youth Hostel
www.syha.org.uk/hostels/highlands/oban.aspx
Harbour View Guest House
A lovely and affordable B&B in Oban within walking distance from the train and ferry.
Dilys McDougall at dilysmcdougall@aol.com
Tel: 011-44-1631-563-462 Harbour View Shore Street Oban, Argyll PA34 4LQ
Ferry Service to Mull
The ferry from Oban to Craignure on Mull takes forty minutes. Walk on passengers should arrive within an hours time of departure, and make sure to give yourself time to pick up a fresh seafood sandwich at a local fish monger booth near the ferry-delicious! Cars need to check in at least thirty minutes before departure and advanced tickets is strongly recommended during the summer season and public holidays.
Ferry enquiries: contact the ferry operators Caledonian MacBrayne (Tel: 08705 650000) or visit their website www.calmac.co.uk
Across Mull
Tour buses will pick up passengers in a lot just off of the ferry departure area and bring them to the ferry terminal at Fionnphort; these bus times generally coincide with the Mull and Iona ferries. There is a sweet little gift shop and restroom facilities to visit-if there is time before the bus departs!
It takes approximately one hour to drive across the Ross of Mull from Craignure to Fionnphort, where the ferry leaves for Iona. Visitors cars are NOT allowed on Iona, but there is free car parking at the Columba Centre in Fionnphort, minutes from the ferry terminal.
For bus enquiries: Tel: 01631 566809 or visit www.bowmanstours.co.uk orwww.travelinescotland.com or Tel: 01546 604695 or Email: public.transport@argyll-bute.gov.uk
Ferry to Iona
The bus will drop you off at Fionnphort. There is a ten minute passenger (walk-on only) ferry that crosses the Sound of Mull landing at the pier in the village of Iona. In the Winter some ferries need to be reserved the day before travel.
Telephone the CalMac Craignure office on: 01680 612343 or visit www.calmac.co.uk/destinations/iona.htm
Disabled Passengers
For assistance on the ferry ring your departure terminal: CalMac Oban (Tel: 01631 566688) or Craignure (Tel: 01680 612343).
You have arrived to Iona, the place that has called to you! Savor your arrival.