Pilgrimage as metaphor

Among the oldest things human beings do is leave home and walk somewhere set apart. To approach the unknown. To address the mystery. They do this in every climate, in every century, in every tradition the species has produced. They do it for reasons that do not finally resolve into any one explanation. They want to see the place where something happened. They want to be where others have been who were also seeking. They want to put the body on a road. They want to be unmade by the going and remade by the arriving. The motivations vary. The shape does not. A person packs less than they thought they would need, leaves the ground on which their ordinary life is built, and walks. This journey is analogous to the sacramental journey we just described.

This is not a religious practice in the narrow sense. It is a human practice. The traditions offered to us thus far have given it myriad form, but the impulse is older than the forms.

The previous essays turned on the daily inward form of the Syllabus, the embodied marked moment of ritual, and the sacrament that opens the doors of perception. Pilgrimage is the religious life given a geography. An architecture. It is what happens when the seeker is willing not only to set aside an ordinary moment but to set aside an ordinary place — to leave the streets, the rooms, the routines in which the personality self has been quietly maintaining its idea of itself, and to walk on ground that does not belong to that set of ideas.

The long human inheritance

Wherever human beings have lived in serious relation to what is beneath the material world, they have known that certain ground holds the holy in a particular concentration. They have known that walking toward such ground is one of the things a soul may need to do. The traditions hold the record.

The Camino de Santiago — closer to home for most who will read this — has carried pilgrims across northern Spain for more than a thousand years, ending at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela where the bones of the apostle James are said to rest. The route is several hundred miles of walking, depending on which trail is taken. Pilgrims arrive at the cathedral having shed weight, blisters, certainties, as well as a few illusions. Many of them are not Catholic. Many of them are not religious at all by any name they would themselves use. They walk anyway. The Camino has continued to receive them through centuries of secularization, war, and the modern dissolution of religious form, and it has continued to do its work on them. What the road takes from the walker is roughly proportionate to what the walker brought; what is given in return cannot easily be named in advance. Many who have walked it report afterward that the conversation with what is beneath ordinary life began somewhere on the third or fourth week, when the body had given up on the resistance and the mind had given up on the chatter and what was left was the road and the rhythm of the foot.

The Hajj — required at least once in a lifetime of every able Muslim — gathers some two million pilgrims each year to Mecca, where the rites are performed in a sequence that has been kept, in its essentials, since the seventh century. The pilgrims wear the simplest white cloth, the ihram, which dissolves rank and wealth and origin into a single visible commonality. They circle the Kaaba. They walk between Safa and Marwah. They stand in the plain at Arafat and pray. The form is intricate; the underlying logic is ancient. The seeker leaves home, joins a crowd of strangers no longer distinguishable from one another, and performs together what cannot be performed alone. Whatever else is happening on the Hajj, the personality self is being made smaller in it. That is part of what a pilgrimage is for.

In Varanasi — the city the Hindu tradition holds to be among the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth, the city of Shiva, set on the western bank of the Ganges — pilgrims have come for thousands of years to bathe in the river at dawn and, for some, to die within the city's ghats. The teaching held there is that the river itself is sacred, that the city itself is sacred, that the geography is not a metaphor for the encounter but the place in which the encounter is reliably available. Pilgrims come to Varanasi to release the residue of long lifetimes. Some come to die there because the tradition holds that to die in Varanasi is to be released from the long cycle of return. The numbers passing through have never substantially diminished. The Ganges itself is older than any of the doctrines built around it, and the pilgrims have known this in some unspoken way for as long as they have been walking down to its waters.

These three are not exhaustive. The Buddhist circuit through the four sacred sites of the Buddha's life. The Jewish ascent to Jerusalem at the great festivals. The Christian pilgrimages to Lourdes, Fátima, Iona, Walsingham, the holy mountains. The Indigenous traditions, in which pilgrimage often takes the form of a return — to the river, to the mountain, to the ground where the ancestors' work was done — rather than a journey to a single distant destination. They differ in form. They share a logic.

What the walking does

The walking is not incidental. It is not the inconvenience that must be tolerated to reach the destination. The walking is part of the form. It often presents as somewhat of an ordeal to be overcome.

The body, asked to move at the pace of a human foot for hours and days at a time, begins to live at a tempo the personality self cannot sustain. The mind that races through ordinary life cannot race through a four-week walk. The mind tires of its own commentary somewhere around the second week. The body does not tire, exactly — it adjusts. What is left, when both have settled, is a kind of attention the seeker may not have known was available. The road becomes the practice. The breath becomes the practice. The next mile becomes the practice. There is nowhere to be that is not where the foot is now.

Pilgrimage, then, can be a form of the making of room — performed in geography rather than in silence. The Syllabus makes room within thought. Ritual makes room within marked time. The pilgrimage makes room by removing the seeker from the rooms in which the personality self has been at home and turning the body into a country in which the personality self has nothing to hold onto. The ordeal is accepted. The overcoming is the transformation.

This is why pilgrimage is rarely comfortable. The blisters, the heat, the tiredness, the food that is not the food of home, the bed that is not the bed of home, the body that begins to ache in places it has not previously had occasion to ache — none of this is incidental either. The discomfort is part of what the form does. It strips. It reveals. It takes from the seeker the cushions on which the ordinary self has been sitting, and offers in their place a body simpler and more present than the one that left home.

The destination

The destination of a pilgrimage is real — the cathedral, the river, the Kaaba, the mountain — and the seeker is right to want to arrive at it. But the destination is not the whole of what the pilgrimage is. It is, more precisely, the place where what the road has been doing all along becomes briefly visible to the walker. The cathedral is not what changed the pilgrim. The road did. The cathedral is where the pilgrim stands and recognizes that the road did.

This is the same shape as the sacramental encounter described in the previous essay. The seeker has been carried, by the form, to a place from which something can be seen that was not previously visible. The window opens. The room is filled with light. What is seen cannot be unseen. The destination of a pilgrimage is one of the places in which this opening reliably happens — not because the geography contains the opening, but because so many before have arrived seeking the same, and the place has been, as it were, well-worn into the right shape.

The return

A pilgrimage is not finished at the destination. It is finished at the door of one's own house, opened by a person who is no longer quite the same as the one who left.

This is one of the parts of pilgrimage that the modern travel imagination most often misses. The trip is not the pilgrimage. The trip and the return are the pilgrimage. What is changed by the going is the country one was already living in. The kitchen looks different. The faces of the people one had been living among look different. The work one had been doing looks different — sometimes confirmed, sometimes called into question, often both at once. What is seen on the road and at the destination is then carried back into the ordinary geography, which is the only geography in which most of life will continue to be lived, and the ordinary geography is thereby changed. This is the deepest gift of the form. The pilgrimage does not lift the seeker out of ordinary life. It returns the seeker to it transformed.

The company on the road

A pilgrim is rarely alone, even when walking alone. The road has been walked by many before, and is being walked now by many alongside. The Camino at any given week holds thousands of pilgrims at various stages of the route. The Hajj holds two million in a single rite. Even a small pilgrimage to a local shrine usually finds the seeker in a slow stream of others arriving from other directions, on the same day, for the same reason.

Within the Ekstaeses pilgrimage, this universal company takes a particular shape. The seeker is accompanied by an officiant who has walked this same road many times — not only the ritual itself, but also the year of the Syllabus that prepares for it, undertaken over and over across a long practice life. The officiant does not direct. The officiant accompanies. They know the terrain because they have crossed it, and they know that no two crossings are the same, and so they hold the road for the seeker without claiming to know in advance what the seeker will find on it.

Sometimes the pilgrimage is undertaken in a small group of fellow seekers walking at the same pace and toward the same destination, and the company of others on the same road is its own gift. Sometimes it is undertaken alone, with only one or two officiants present, for a more personalized encounter. The earlier essay on ritual named that the face of the Divine is most consistently met in the faces of our fellows. The pilgrimage extends this in time and in space, and on this road it is met first in the face of the one who has walked here before, and again in the faces of those who have arrived at the same hour to walk the same ground.

Trip, journey, pilgrimage

Contemporary vocabulary used for the sacramental encounter has been gesturing at this form all along, even where it has not quite fully articulated what it was reaching for. The colloquial language calls the experience a trip. The therapeutic and underground communities, when they want a more weighted word, have settled on journey. Both are pointing at the same recognition: that what is happening to the seeker under the sacrament is shaped like a passage, with a leaving and an arriving and a return.

The etymologies are worth pausing on, because the remedy lives inside the language and these words are not interchangeable. Trip comes from Old French and Middle English meaning to step lightly, to dance, and by extension to make a misstep — to slip out of ordinary footing. In everyday English the word has long carried a second, lighter sense, where one takes a trip to see a friend or to the coast: a brief, casual going-out-and-coming-back, a near-cousin of journey held in a more relaxed register. The “drug” sense, first attested in print in 1959 and circulated widely in the 1960s, picked up the stumble meaning — the slip out of footing that ordinary chemistry does not produce. Journey comes from the Old French jornee, by way of the Latin diurnum, and originally meant a day's measured passage — the distance a person could travel in the light of a single day. The word still carries that sense of weighed and bounded movement, intentional and contained. Pilgrim comes from the Latin peregrinus, from per and ager — "through the fields." The foreigner walking through land that is not their own. The one whose passage carries the deliberate weight of the religious life, on consecrated ground, with intention, and with return.

So: a trip is a stumble, or a brief casual passage. A journey is a day's measured passage. A pilgrimage is consecrated passage, on set-apart ground, with intention, in company, with return. Each successive word holds more weight than the last. Each names something more of what is actually happening to the seeker.

Ekstaeses does not quarrel with the lighter words. They have been pointing in the right direction, and the seeker who has only the word trip available has not been wrong to use it — the experience is, in part, a slipping out of ordinary footing, and trip names that honestly. But the form Ekstaeses offers is not finally a trip and not finally a journey. It is a pilgrimage. And the language given to a pilgrimage — the consecrated ground, the intention, the company, the return — does work the lighter language cannot quite do.

Pilgrimage as Ekstaeses offers it

Within the practice life of Ekstaeses, the sacramental encounter is itself a form of pilgrimage. The seeker leaves home. The seeker travels to a place set apart from ordinary geography. The seeker arrives prepared, having spent weeks or months in the work of the Syllabus and in the work of intention. The seeker is met by trained witnesses and by other seekers who have come for the same reason. The sacrament is taken in the place set apart. The seeker follows with the integration defined by the remainder of the Syllabus. And then the seeker returns home, and the pilgrimage continues to do its work in the ordinary geography from which the seeker came, for a long time after.

This is not the only form pilgrimage may take in a life. Many will continue to walk the older roads, and they should. Many will find their pilgrimages in shorter and quieter forms — a day spent at a place that has long held meaning, a return to ground the seeker has not stood on for many years, a journey to be present at the death or the birth of a beloved. The form is variable. The form is what carries.

What is offered here, when the seeker arrives at the door of Ekstaeses, is a contemporary articulation of the form, available and prepared in the way that contemporary seekers most need it: the geography is set apart, the company is ready, the witnesses are trained, the sacrament is received with reverence, the return is honored. The Camino is not displaced by this. The Hajj is not displaced by this. Whatever pilgrimages have already shaped the seeker — childhood walks to a small chapel, an adult journey made once decades ago to a place that mattered, the long inward pilgrimage of a life lived in attention — none of it is being asked to be set aside. The new form joins what has already been carried.

What pilgrimage is not

It is not tourism. The tourist sees the place; the pilgrim is, on the way, seen. The tourist returns home with photographs of what was seen; the pilgrim returns home seeing differently.

It is not escape. The pilgrimage does not deliver the seeker out of the life that was waiting at home. It returns the seeker to that life, with the eyes turned, the ground beneath the feet quietly altered.

It is not a requirement. Many seekers will live deep and reverent lives without ever having walked one. Pilgrimage is offered in this register as it has been offered in every long tradition — not as a demand of the religious life, but as one of its more powerful forms when the form is available to be undertaken.

It is not the unique path. The Source of All Things breaks through where it chooses, and has chosen the home country as often as the far country. Many of the deepest encounters in the long tradition have happened to seekers who never traveled. The road is one form. There are others. There are always others.

What remains

We are not delivered out of ordinary life by the religious life. We are returned to it, with the ground beneath the feet recognized for what it has always been. The pilgrim's home country, walked back into at the end of the road, is the same country it was when the pilgrim left — and it is also, for the first time, the country that the Source of All Things has all along been in, and of, and with us within.

The road is one of the older forms by which this recognition has been delivered to embodied creatures. It is being offered again, in this place, in this time, for some of those who arrive at this door.