“Pilgrimage is often regarded as the universal quest for the self.” Phil Cousineau

“It’s here, in all the pieces of my shame, that now I find myself again.” Rilke

“Tell me about yourself.”  If someone were to say that to you, how would you respond?  Perhaps it depends on the person or the context.  It’s one of the best requests one can make of another, expressing, one would hope, genuine interest in something deeper than merely what the person does or where they live.  And it’s one of the most thought-provoking as well, prompting a deeper look into who we really are.  And who is that?

Who are you? And who is God?  And what gives your life purpose?

I’m curious how would you answer those questions?

I believe that those questions are rattling around in the back of most people’s minds, whether we recognize it or not.  Life is an ongoing quest to discover the answers to those questions.  And I also believe that many are looking for the answers in the wrong place, namely externals.  The ultimate answers which transcend time and take us into eternity are found in something other than the superficial surface distractions in which we find temporary delight, and rather are discovered by intentionally journeying deeper into the sacred.

That journey is called a pilgrimage. Sometimes it is literal, and sometimes figurative.  The prompting to set out on pilgrimage, or to see our lives as such, may be a dissatisfaction with our lives as they are and a concurrent desire to seek the answers to the aforementioned questions, like the protagonist in Paul Coelho’s book “The Alchemist”.   Or it may be some sort of life crisis that creates a cataclysmic and catastrophic shaking of our flimsy foundations and causes us to seek more solid ground.  Maybe, as Rilke notes above, it results temporarily in shame, but permanently serves a more therapeutic purpose in a removal of the mask that we’ve been wearing in life and a discovery of an authentic identity that goes much deeper than the momentary externals that pass before us like floats in a Labor Day parade.

Kenneth McIntosh writes, “Loving God is a lifelong pilgrimage, a labyrinth walk that in this mortal life never fully reaches the center point.”[1]  There it is!  A pilgrimage to find and love God, and in the process to find and love oneself.  Two sides of the same coin.  And as a result to find purpose and meaning in this life.  True, we may never reach the center point, but we will come close.  Very close!

This truth was brought home to me recently as I sat with a person who saw no point in living anymore.  They were asking what the purpose of this all was.  In the course of our conversation, they came to discover the love of God for them, and their love for another.  And in that discovery began, I believe, to re-discover their Self.  As we parted I blessed them on their journey.  For whether they recognized it or not they had just set forth on a pilgrimage.  One that we are all taking.

“No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,

Haphazardly assembled from voices and fears and little pleasures,

We come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses where all these lives are laid away,

Like suits of armor or old carriages or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,

To the repository of unlived things.[2]

---

[1] “Water from an Ancient Well”, Kenneth McIntosh, p. 39

[2] “Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”, Renee Marie Rilke,  poem II.II.  Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macey.