The Risk of the Journey

"'When the poet says pilgrimage,
what world does she enter?'
I wave my hand - in my head,
explain to the sink and the mirror,
'The word, pilgrimage, brings
you into a world
where God is a possibility,
where a journey
to a place where God
is a possibility
is a possibility.

(Explain God? Silence. The silence
after the terrible whirlwind Never mind.)

So, a pilgrim pins a cracked scallop
shell to her ragged hat
and walks, stained feet, feet blistered,
then callused, sometimes bleeding,

(even after years on the road,
surprised by sharp rocks, broken bottles)

lame as old Jacob, hamstrung
from wrestling the angel,
walking toward his brother.  Pilgrim: anyone,
tired, head down, head up, on the road,
squinting hard into a bright silence."

~excerpt from poem "The Word: Pilgrimage" by Capers Limehouse

I feel a lot like the pilgrim in this poem.  After four and 1/2 years at school, running back and forth to work and classes, trying with all of my might to get everything done right and on time, I am tired.  The journey has gone on this long and I feel dirty, bruised and in many ways beaten.  The only hope I have, the only reason why I keep on this road, is because I hope for the possibility of meeting God at the end of it.  When I see Him then everything will make sense.  For now, however, my only experience of Him is silence. This is not the journey I was expecting.  For some reason I expected a much more fun and easy trip.  I thought that once I started out on the path everything would always fall into place and I would be supernaturally provided for until the end.  Sometimes it has been like that.  At other times, however, the journey has been a struggle.  It has been a fight to keep going and not give up as worries and difficulties have piled up.  No one has ever promised though that pilgrimage would be easy. 

One surprising thing I have learned about pilgrimage as I have studied it, is that suffering is often an integral part of the experience. This is because there is an element of risk in pilgrimage. You are going to an unknown land with unforeseen dangers. The journey is unpredictable.  The parable of the Good Samaritan that Jesus tells in Luke 10:30-35 exemplifies this risk.  In this story, a man who is travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho is attacked by a bunch of robbers and left on the roadside to die, both stripped and beaten.   As time went on other travellers came to the place where the man lay bleeding, but these men did not know him and had their own business to attend to, so they just left him there on the roadside. This certainly was not the journey that the man was expecting when he started out. As a stranger in a strange land he had lost all of his possessions, he was injured and dying, and the people who walked by him could care less.

Why do people do it then?  Why do pilgrims go ahead with the journey when they know that they could lose so much?  Why do they walk to the edge of danger and not stay where life is comfortable and safe? Why take the risk?

If there is no risk there is no progress.  If we are scared to move forward then we will never experience anything greater than the life that we are leading now. We will live in a narrow and isolated world that, in its safety, has become absent in meaning.  We will never be able to know what is real because we were too busy protecting an illusion.  We will allow our current reality to dictate our future because we were too afraid to look beyond it and dare to dream of what might be. We will be in control, but in the process we will never to find that place where God is a possibility.

Being a pilgrim means entering a place of the unknown.  It means entering a place of risk.  It means going to a place where everyone might not know your name.  It means entering into a state of vulnerability.  It means entering into a state of trust, hope and faith.  When the pilgrim sets out on the journey they trust that they will discover through the journey something that is real about their life.  They hope that the risks of the journey will push them to a place where they can learn more both about themselves and about God. 
There may be times when the landscape demands more exertion than they were perhaps prepared to give, but they have faith that the journey will be worth the risks.  After all, they have a profound understanding that life in itself is inherently risky.  Any sense of control or safety that we might have is essentially an illusion.  The world could change tomorrow.  That is why we need to live into the fullness of today.

To finish the story of the man who was left bleeding on the roadside, his journey did not end there.  Soon another person passed by who had pity on him.  Although the stranger was someone who was considered inferior to man's own Jewish race, the Samaritan still stopped to help him, bandaging his wounds, clothing him, taking him to the closest inn, paying for his room. It was unthinkable at that time that a Samaritan would help a Jew, and yet it happened.  That day, quite unexpectedly the injured man experienced mercy and love from someone whom he had always considered beneath him.  Perhaps his world expanded a little that day; maybe he met God in a place where he was not expecting Him.

And so, my own journey continues on.  Only a few weeks are left of my undergraduate experience.  It is true that I am afraid. I am afraid of failure.  I took a risk in coming to school; I devoted time, money and effort to engage in a journey, and I fear not being able to see the end of that journey successfully.  It is also true that I have suffered.  The journey has not always been as easy as I hoped it to be; often it has demanded more effort and creativity from me than I knew that I possessed. It has pushed me to the very limits of my abilities, but I tell the truth when I say that I walk away from this experience knowing more about myself.  I also have learned more about God, and how close He is.  My world has expanded; the risk and the pain have been worth the opportunity to live and to grow.