What do we search for, and why?

This, I wondered, as I stood on the rooftop of the Cathedral of Santiago De Compostela, gazing down at the Puerta Santa, the Sacred Gate. I might have asked the two women with whom I was chatting; Swedish, but schooled in perfect English, they had just completed “the camino” in five sections, smaller pilgrimages, strung like rosary beads on a string. The cathedral is built on the site where St. James, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, was reputedly buried, and it has been a site of religious pilgrimage since at least the tenth century. I don’t know what motivated these women to traverse the 491 miles of the Camino Frances, the most popular route to this hallowed destination.  Were they religiously devout? Were they “spiritual, but not religious,” as so many of us call ourselves, denizens of a no-man’s land populated by Unitarian Universalists, New Age seekers, and lapsed (fill in the blank with your religion of choice)? Maybe they were hikers, inspired by the challenge and beauty of this route through the Spanish countryside. Maybe they were participating in a TikTok challenge.

Full disclosure: I am the child of lapsed Catholics. My brother, older by two years, was baptized; I was not. I don’t think my dad would mind my characterizing him as “recovering,” rather than lapsed.  At 79, he is still haunted by images of the graphically crucified Jesus which hung above the guest bed in his grandparents’ house, horrific in that inarticulate way of our earliest memories.  Vestiges of the infamous Catholic guilt still cling to him like a poorly-conceived burial shroud, wrought  for the living instead of the dead. But I can also glimpse the altar boy in him, the seminarian (yes, he was a teen-aged candidate for the priesthood), and I can clearly see the devoutness and compassion of the Christian servant in his ultimate ministry of teaching literature and film, first to University students, and later to those attending Community College, which he liked better because he was inspired by the students. My dad has always been a sucker for the everyman, and his students loved him.

My mother, Mary, was aptly named. I can’t think of a person I know who more authentically inhabits the Christian ideal of devoted, patient love, gentle by nature but tough when needed. She too was raised in a Catholic family, in a mid-western Catholic neighborhood, and met my father when they were both attending a small, Catholic college. My father’s Catholicism comes down to him mostly through the Scotch-Irish line, my mother’s through the Germans. But her dad, my Grandpa Johnson, well, he was Swedish by ancestry and Lutheran by heritage— and divorced. Barred from marrying in the church, my grandparents eloped, and eventually my grandma was able to have the first marriage annulled, admitting her back into the Pope’s good graces, at least on paper.

I come from a line of black sheep.

As for me, being the child of lapsed Catholics and a seeker by nature, I took my children to the UU congregation when they were young. I taught Sunday school classes about world religions, the tapestry of faith, and sexuality education. I enjoyed these years, but I’m not sure just what my children took from their would-be indoctrination. I found nothing to disagree with in the ministry: tolerance, compassion, curiosity, faith in action. But maybe the lapsed Catholic lurking in my genetic memory wanted a little more stained glass and murmuring to sink my teeth into. That’s the kind of thing that gets under your skin, and when it comes to the UUs, it’s hard to nail them down (no pun intended).

If my tone seems irreverent, it is intended to elevate, not debase. There is nothing like a good dose of humor to cure the scourge of dogma, which in turn sounds the death knell of inquiry. By upsetting the status quo, by holding it lightly, we can glimpse what’s underneath.  And what’s underneath the idea of “pilgrimage” are questions, not answers. Irreverence keeps us present to the first law of inquiry: it is not what we don’t know that imprisons us, but rather what we do.

Which brings me back to the rooftop of the cathedral. From here, I can see the surrounding plazas, each with its own significance. The Plaza de la Quintana leads to the Holy Door, through which pilgrims can enter the main altar and perform the ritual of embracing the Apostle – but only in a Holy Year, which occurs when the 25th day of July, feast of the Apostle, falls on a Sunday. Pilgrims who pass through this magical door in a Holy Year are granted a plenary indulgence, established by Pope Calixto II, and all their sins are forgiven.

The expiation of sins and the acquisition of graces comprise two sides of the same coin, the most obvious currency of pilgrimage. Even for those of us who do not believe, strictly, in the efficacy of indulgences, this idea holds appeal. Ritual is powerful, whether it is invested with belief or not. It has the deep resonance that can only be imparted by centuries of observance, a path worn in granite, the memory of footsteps long vanished from the earth. The plenary power of ritual is not literal in nature; it is the metaphor itself that transforms, the idea that by taking a particular action, one that has been sanctified by long tradition, we are participating in the human story. Our own story is thereby ennobled, transmuted by the peculiar alchemy of inclusion. We are no longer alone.

Is it that which disturbs us? The idea that the “sin” of our own nature will cause us to be cast out from “the garden?” The fear that we are inherently, irrevocably alone? When the pilgrim embarks on her journey to distant lands, leaving behind all that is familiar and known, is she searching for her lost home?

This yearning to return to a state of grace calls to mind other questions. What am I? Am I confined to the contours of my body, the limits of my mind? From where does this existential loneliness that seems to define the “human condition” originate? I’ve heard it said (most likely by Unitarian Universalists) that “sin” was historically an archery term meaning “to miss the mark.” Is this intuition of our original sin, our inherent isolation, itself a mistake? Small wonder, then, that we are driven to search. The exiled cannot help but dream of home.

I have been traveling internationally with my family for some years now. It is both an adventure and an ordeal: my sleep patterns are disrupted, my digestion too (sending me invariably to the Farmacia for a little white pill to set things right). It is as though everything in my system wants to hold on, even as I force myself to let go through the act of physical departure.

Fears are driven to the surface. I wake at night, thinking of my cat and dog, my garden, my parents and children, my friends. Why am I halfway across the planet? What matters most as I chart this path of hours, days and months, a pilgrim lost in the wilderness? Travel is dislocating, not just physically, but figuratively. I experience my American world view in a way that is impossible without exposure to “the other.” I find myself comforted by the knowledge that the world is vast, that people of other places truly see the world in ways that are distinct from my own. I am liberated from the tyranny of my own perspective and by the same stroke returned to the fold, for along with this awareness of difference comes that of communion. Even without a common language to bridge the divide, I encounter authenticity: a smile, a look, the well-meaning bumbling of getting our message across.

In the unsettling of my status quo, my fears become accessible, robbing them of the power they wielded when suppressed. The outer journey gives way to the inner one, where I hold vigil with myself, the part of me that abides conversing with that which cannot comprehend. During the early days of this trip, an old friend died, the mother of one of my oldest friends, who became dear to me in her own right, a person with whom I could both laugh and cry unguardedly. We shared a certain kindred something that compelled us to start talking the moment we were in each other’s company, the urge to inquire tempered by the urge to laugh, the compulsion toward irreverence. Her death reminds me of other deaths that have not yet come to pass: that of my parents, my husband, my own. And thus somehow, in a strange Spanish bedroom miles from my own, the ultimate pilgrimage of all who are born to the mortal coil is revealed.

This path through life can seem much less like a sacred return than a one-way ticket to deterioration. I cannot quite wrap my mind around the fact that the wrinkles I see in the mirror will ultimately deepen, the aches and pains will grow, and no amount of experiences or achievements will ever render me immortal. To the extent that I travel in a mad dash to redeem my life from this truth, my pilgrimage will lead me astray. It is these moments in the dark, in a strange Spanish bedroom, that illuminate the way, a path defined by honesty which is itself revealed, more often than not, through the recognition of our own misgivings. In the face of the unfathomable, we are tempted to accept platitudes in place of truth, comforts in place of freedom. The meeting of our own death is the one pilgrimage that can only be undertaken alone, and yet it is the defining pilgrimage of all human beings, the key to our nature, and the thing we all share. Therein lies the paradox: in meeting death we are both most alone and most united with each other.

When my father’s mother was nearing death, she could no longer speak. My dad sat with her on the phone, two time zones away, while she counted the rosary in her hospice bed, tears streaming silently down her face. They counted the rosary together. I think she found deep solace in this ritual, real power of a kind that only proves its worth in the moment of greatest crisis. We approach the unapproachable; we contend with the untenable. I won’t be able to count the rosary as I near this altar; it holds no resonance for me. Perhaps I will write, just as I did through the troubled years of my adolescence and early twenties, forging a path, word by word, step by step. I like to think that by having traveled my path truly, I will find myself abiding in the silence that I can sense on occasion, when the noise quiets, when the fears still. And the ordeals I choose for myself in the meantime are informed by this intent. It is not where we travel, perhaps, not what we do, but what we do with what we do that transforms us, reveals us as what we already are.

I found a nice quote in this vein by the poet Mark Nepo:

To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.

Towards the end of our time in Santiago, we heard a woman speaking English at our favorite tapas bar. Turning, we engaged her, only to discover she was from our part of the world, Oregon, with a second home in Monterey. Joanie had just completed the fourth and final leg of the camino, walking 27 miles the day before – with a pack.  She must have been in her sixties, perhaps seventies, a woman of clear vitality and independence who had taken her nieces and nephews on global adventures to accustom them to travel. After paying her bill, she was on her way to get her first tattoo, an image of the iconic scallop shell that is the pilgrim’s badge. We asked her why she chose to undertake such an epic journey and she paused, then laughed and said, “I don’t know.”

And maybe that’s the best answer. The questions that shape our pilgrimage through life cannot be summed up in an easy phrase. We are compelled out into the world by the same urge that drives us within, this sense that we are still strangers to ourselves in some fundamental way, but that communion is not only possible, but perhaps natural. No one can walk our path for us, for each path, though defined by the same realities, is unique. Our path can only be our own, and the method of its traverse is a lifelong meditation of our own making. And yet there’s something about looking over your shoulder at the person walking next to you, knowing that they grapple with the same untenable questions, knowing that in our greatest isolation, we are closest to each other. In that spirit, maybe I’ll walk the camino myself someday, come back to the rooftop of the cathedral to see if the view has changed.  Maybe, by venturing into the unknown with a pack on my back and other pilgrims at my side, I will realize I am already home.