Pilgrimage: A New Way of Walking (from Listening: Voices at the Edge ~ Sheri Ritchlin copyright 1999)
A dirt road again. Like one I know in Montana that curves gently as it descends toward a wide meadow. In the distance, a huge tree rises out of the meadow near the edge of the road. My mind is empty, intent on enjoying the landscape. The guide is walking beside me and he stops suddenly, turning toward me. I can feel rather than see his smile.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asks. The question couldn’t surprise me more. Again and again I have walked with him in similar settings and he has spoken of the importance of walking with an appreciative attentiveness to the details of the path itself. Goals and destinations have never been part of the conversation. I can only shrug my shoulders in reply. He turns and looks into the distance, nodding toward the tree.
I feel even more confused. Obviously, just following the road as we are, we will arrive at the tree. It is just naturally on our path. Inevitable. How can we pass the tree. He has, as usual, understood my thoughts before I have spoken them.
“It is quite a different thing just to pass the tree as we walk or even pause before it once we come near. It is true that you should be open to all things along the way. Aware at each step. Appreciative.
“But now I want you to open wide your heart and look carefully at that tree.”
I do as he asks and see that it is indeed a beautiful tree. I can’t say what kind it is, except that it is a deciduous tree, large and graceful as a beech or an oak or a sycamore.
“It is a holy tree,” he says. “Not an ordinary one. It is very old. Imbued with a certain power. A power that can change anyone who comes to it in the right spirit.”
I continue to stare at the tree. It does indeed have a certain luminosity to it that seems the result of the way the morning light slivers through its branches and is reflected off translucent young leaves. “I have spoken to you of the importance of keeping an appointment with ‘now’. Making the moment before you the most important one of your life. But now I’m going to teach you the secret of the holy tree.”
“I want you to erase your mind of everything but that venerable and luminous tree, so worthy of your gratitude and respect for its subtle and dignified endurance through so many many seasons. For its flowering in spring, its flaring into fall, its patient holding of the winter snow... For its holiness. “This is the posture now in which you go to meet the tree.”
“Is this different in some way from the spiritual posture?” I ask.
“The most perfect spiritual posture is the tree’s. That is part of its gift to you. This is a chance to check your posture. To see how effectively you are making an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace.”
“I want you to do this: Think of how you felt walking along the road to this point. Try to summon that feeling.”
What I recall is a relaxed, empty contentment. Responding to that thought he says “Yes--there is nothing wrong with that simple, peaceful pleasure you felt. But here I want to teach you something else.”
I wait expectantly while he pauses, as if to be sure he has my full attention.
“I want to show you the deep meaning of pilgrimage. You know of its expression as a holy journey to a sacred site, at the core of nearly every religion. That is a rare and often a once in a lifetime event. The form of pilgrimage I want to explain to you is one that can be undertaken in the course of your everyday life. It will help you to understand and apply the spiritual posture in action, as your keeping an appointment with the present helps you to apply it in stillness. In pausing. Underneath both is the spiritual posture.
“Now let us go, with the deepest possible gratitude to meet the tree.”
We were silent from then on. There were places where the tree was obscured from view. But I wasn’t trying to keep sight of it at all. Rather, as the guide had said, an image had formed inside of me of the tree as I had seen it, shimmering in that moment.
The feeling of that tree in my heart had indeed changed the feeling of the walk. I was filled with an
anticipation that was different from the usual kind. The thought struck me that this is what he was trying to teach me. In the past, it had been a matter of letting go of anticipation. Cultivating a still and perfect waiting. But here was an anticipation that had indeed a holy quality. Perhaps it wasn’t expectation.
Already inside of me was a fulness, a sense of the tree’s power and sanctity that seemed to blossom inside of me. My overwhelming desire suddenly was to be worthy of the majesty of the tree.
We came upon it more suddenly than I had expected because it had been hidden from view during the last few minutes of our walk and the road had been subtly curving in its direction.
The size of the tree alone was staggering and with a few steps we were completely enveloped in the umbra of its green shadows, mottled with light. Almost immediately, I burst into tears. The tree was gratefulness and graciousness right before my eyes. But more than that. Enveloping me. Embracing me. Expecting nothing. Beauty.
What could I possibly give the tree in return? It was complete. It needed nothing.
* * *
The traffic swarmed around us. The people pushed and pressed against us in a hurried, dense flow. Cars honked, somewhere a siren blared, the air had the acrid smell of spent engine fuel. It was all a blur, a chaos, a din, a clouded congestion.
“Stop,” the guide said suddenly. At first I was afraid I couldn’t. That I was being carried along by this tide of living motion and commotion. But I saw that he had moved to the protection of a lamp-post by stepping sideways. With some difficulty I joined him. “I give up,” I said, a little challengingly. “Why are we here?” I think it was New York City but it might have been Mexico City or Tokyo. Some crowded metropolitan center.
“Can you see that green awning way down there? Maybe six or seven blocks?” I had to lean out into the road to get a view. I’m small and couldn’t see anything at all with the sea of people around me.
“The one that just says DELI on the side?”
“That one.”
I felt tired and a little impatient, sandwiched between the human traffic on one side and the automotive traffic on the other. There was a tight impatience in the atmosphere too. It must be New York I thought. DELI confirmed it. Hardly a usual trysting place with the guide. I was certainly curious.
“Now,” he said, “please listen carefully. We are going to make a pilgrimage to the DELI.”
I looked at him with shock. I knew we weren’t after corn beef sandwiches. Following him on this one was very difficult.
“You were changed by the tree,” he said. “I know the affinity you have for trees and I knew you would experience the tree’s holiness.
“But this is the second part of my explanation to you of pilgrimage. Try to remember how the same road changed when the leisurely walk became a pilgrimage. It was the quality of your walk, your posture, from the moment of our stopping, onward, that gave the tree its holiness.”
“Now don’t misunderstand me. Everything you experienced of the tree’s nature was real. But had you not made a pilgrimage to the tree you might have missed it. More important, you turned all of the path between you and the tree into sacred ground.
“But there are worlds of difference between a tree and a Deli!” I objected. “For one thing, I have no affinity for a deli! And it is hardly a holy place. I don’t see the connection at all.”
“That’s exactly the problem. I want you to take as much time as you like and look at those six or seven blocks ahead.”
“Do you mean the people, the buildings, the sidewalk, the signs...?”
He laughed. “NOW you’ve got it,” he said happily. “You’ve asked just the right question.” I was not sharing his pleasure in this at all. The noise was getting on my nerves.
“Fine, but what is the answer?” He was very serious again as he answered me.
“Consider it this way. Knowledge and technology have advanced to such a degree that any given area can be mapped in a number of ways. Different maps can take the same area and show its political boundaries, its elevation, its population density, its surface temperatures, its precipitation et cetera. Some show freeways, some show dirt roads, some show footpaths...
“At first glance, you might say that there is only one route to the deli, made up of concrete pavement and curbs. But as you’ve noted, that is not the case at all. The space is alive, dynamic, constantly changing. The vast majority of people moving through it are not in the least aware of its ‘concrete details’. Many are anxious about a pending encounter or worried about being late. Some are re-living an unhappy experience or filled with resentment and hurt over a remark someone made, maybe hours or days or years before. Some are grieving a loss. Some are endlessly re-running frustrating scenes with a friend, lover, spouse, sibling, parent, co-worker or boss. Someone may be contemplating murder. Someone may be developing an idea for a novel, a song, a painting. There are as many routes to the deli as people traversing the space. The inner spaces of those people are farther apart than New York and Tokyo.
“Think of it!” he said, turning toward me. “Hundreds, thousands, millions of people move through here. Therefore there are millions of paths to the Deli. More than a million ways of traversing that space. Each one, consciously or unconsciously, has chosen the route that he or she is taking: grim, joyful, observant, anxious.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” I commented. “But this is what I don’t understand. First, what could possibly make the Deli holy? I mean you’re talking about a pilgrimage to something, not just walking down the street to lunch or work or whatever. And second, I don’t see how this conversation is different from the ones about the spiritual posture.”
“Let’s begin with your first question: What makes the deli a holy place? Let us say you have a prophetic vision that you are going to die in that Deli. That the Deli, therefore, represents your last moment on earth. Certainly that would make it a sacred place. The Deli would become a turnstile to the beyond and how you entered it would be the most important thing in your life.
“Imagine now that you have this added gift of knowing in advance. This bonus I’ve given you that you may take all the time you want to decide how you want to walk those six or seven blocks. For most people, by the time they see the end, they’re too sick to do anything about it. This is why a pilgrimage has always been such a precious and holy thing. It is a ‘sacred destination’ which is chosen within life, while one is still awake, able and aware. Even done once in a lifetime, it can fill an entire life with grace. It has been so for millennia.”
I looked down the street toward the small rectangle of awning, the shops, offices, restaurants in between...
How would I make a pilgrimage of it?
He leaned over and spoke softly in my ear. “Remember the tree,” he said, as if giving me a hint, a clue. First the image of the tree came to mind, then the feeling that had filled me as I walked the ground between. Now holy ground. Sacred ground. Filled with the sense of my own reverence, awe—the inner tree blooming into a grateful full-heartedness even when the outer was lost from sight. A heightened alertness, connectedness... flowing toward instead of just passing along.
“Yes,” he said, validating my unspoken feelings.
“Pilgrimage is the flowing outward of sacred intent. This was the tree’s power to change you—that its beauty, its ‘posture’ could arouse such a feeling in you and draw you to it. This is what made it holy. This gift. This discovery. Now it is you, carrying this gift, that can make the Deli holy. Without effort, like the tree, you will give this gift to someone else. Someone ‘waiting perfectly’ in the Deli. You may never know when or to whom the gift was given or how the person was changed by it. And it doesn’t matter.
“That is pilgrimage. Its path is the spiritual posture in action. You just keep walking that path, transforming the most mundane sidewalk into holy ground. Sanctifying daily space. On the way to the holy tree.
Which is always inside you.”
* * *
The din was subsiding as his words somehow drew me into a different space.
“Perhaps you’ve already answered my second question by explaining that the path of pilgrimage is the spiritual posture in action. But I’m still having some difficulty reconciling this with your teachings about not leaping and about remaining in the present moment.
“It seems to me,” I added, “as if the whole project of the Deli is a plan in the future. It seems to contradict other things you’ve said to me.”
We had not left our position by the lamp-post and the pedestrian flow beside us kept up its vigorous pace. "Yes!” he said. “You could certainly say that a Deli lunch is in the future. A ‘plan’. You could say that your arrival at the Deli is a future event. But as you see, the Deli itself is part of our present. So in this case, it is not time and space that are so arbitrarily linked as time and perception. The farther you perceive, the larger your present. Imagine God watching the Big Bang unfurl as a blossom of light, trailing stars like fireworks into a Fourth of July picnic. And somewhere in one of those little sparks you and I are speaking together.
“We can also say that as we move toward the Deli, we are in a fluid present. Every moment we are walking, the deli is part of our present, though in fact it is getting closer. Or rather we are flowing towards it.
“This movement is so seamless that it is immeasurable.”
“Like the tree’s unfolding,” I said. I was recalling a thought I had had about the trees in a nearby park: they shed leaves in winter, budded in the spring, blossomed in the summer and yet in every second that you looked at them they were perfectly still! Their unfolding through the seasons was effortless and unmeasurable.”
“Just so,” he said. “And the life of a saint or a sage unfolds in the same way. Every seven blocks is just the same!
"They have learned the secret of the tree. There are not dharmic fields—scenes of action—but only a single one that flows through them and out from them forever and so their present is all things’ presence just as the deli, too, is part of you in this very moment. You and the Deli are one, united in a sacred space. Yet it is also true that making the space sacred, through your posture, is what unites you.”
“But that’s just what I mean!” I exclaimed. “We’re back to the spiritual posture in an everlasting present.”
“Perhaps,” he said, smiling enigmatically. Then it seemed as if he turned me, suddenly, and pushed me into the tide of humanity, surging in the direction of the deli.
’üﰟ
A dirt road again. Like one I know in Montana that curves gently as it descends toward a wide meadow. In the distance, a huge tree rises out of the meadow near the edge of the road. My mind is empty, intent on enjoying the landscape. The guide is walking beside me and he stops suddenly, turning toward me. I can feel rather than see his smile.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asks. The question couldn’t surprise me more. Again and again I have walked with him in similar settings and he has spoken of the importance of walking with an appreciative attentiveness to the details of the path itself. Goals and destinations have never been part of the conversation. I can only shrug my shoulders in reply. He turns and looks into the distance, nodding toward the tree.
I feel even more confused. Obviously, just following the road as we are, we will arrive at the tree. It is just naturally on our path. Inevitable. How can we pass the tree. He has, as usual, understood my thoughts before I have spoken them.
“It is quite a different thing just to pass the tree as we walk or even pause before it once we come near. It is true that you should be open to all things along the way. Aware at each step. Appreciative.
“But now I want you to open wide your heart and look carefully at that tree.”
I do as he asks and see that it is indeed a beautiful tree. I can’t say what kind it is, except that it is a deciduous tree, large and graceful as a beech or an oak or a sycamore.
“It is a holy tree,” he says. “Not an ordinary one. It is very old. Imbued with a certain power. A power that can change anyone who comes to it in the right spirit.”
I continue to stare at the tree. It does indeed have a certain luminosity to it that seems the result of the way the morning light slivers through its branches and is reflected off translucent young leaves. “I have spoken to you of the importance of keeping an appointment with ‘now’. Making the moment before you the most important one of your life. But now I’m going to teach you the secret of the holy tree.”
“I want you to erase your mind of everything but that venerable and luminous tree, so worthy of your gratitude and respect for its subtle and dignified endurance through so many many seasons. For its flowering in spring, its flaring into fall, its patient holding of the winter snow... For its holiness. “This is the posture now in which you go to meet the tree.”
“Is this different in some way from the spiritual posture?” I ask.
“The most perfect spiritual posture is the tree’s. That is part of its gift to you. This is a chance to check your posture. To see how effectively you are making an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace.”
“I want you to do this: Think of how you felt walking along the road to this point. Try to summon that feeling.”
What I recall is a relaxed, empty contentment. Responding to that thought he says “Yes--there is nothing wrong with that simple, peaceful pleasure you felt. But here I want to teach you something else.”
I wait expectantly while he pauses, as if to be sure he has my full attention.
“I want to show you the deep meaning of pilgrimage. You know of its expression as a holy journey to a sacred site, at the core of nearly every religion. That is a rare and often a once in a lifetime event. The form of pilgrimage I want to explain to you is one that can be undertaken in the course of your everyday life. It will help you to understand and apply the spiritual posture in action, as your keeping an appointment with the present helps you to apply it in stillness. In pausing. Underneath both is the spiritual posture.
“Now let us go, with the deepest possible gratitude to meet the tree.”
We were silent from then on. There were places where the tree was obscured from view. But I wasn’t trying to keep sight of it at all. Rather, as the guide had said, an image had formed inside of me of the tree as I had seen it, shimmering in that moment.
The feeling of that tree in my heart had indeed changed the feeling of the walk. I was filled with an
anticipation that was different from the usual kind. The thought struck me that this is what he was trying to teach me. In the past, it had been a matter of letting go of anticipation. Cultivating a still and perfect waiting. But here was an anticipation that had indeed a holy quality. Perhaps it wasn’t expectation.
Already inside of me was a fulness, a sense of the tree’s power and sanctity that seemed to blossom inside of me. My overwhelming desire suddenly was to be worthy of the majesty of the tree.
We came upon it more suddenly than I had expected because it had been hidden from view during the last few minutes of our walk and the road had been subtly curving in its direction.
The size of the tree alone was staggering and with a few steps we were completely enveloped in the umbra of its green shadows, mottled with light. Almost immediately, I burst into tears. The tree was gratefulness and graciousness right before my eyes. But more than that. Enveloping me. Embracing me. Expecting nothing. Beauty.
What could I possibly give the tree in return? It was complete. It needed nothing.
* * *
The traffic swarmed around us. The people pushed and pressed against us in a hurried, dense flow. Cars honked, somewhere a siren blared, the air had the acrid smell of spent engine fuel. It was all a blur, a chaos, a din, a clouded congestion.
“Stop,” the guide said suddenly. At first I was afraid I couldn’t. That I was being carried along by this tide of living motion and commotion. But I saw that he had moved to the protection of a lamp-post by stepping sideways. With some difficulty I joined him. “I give up,” I said, a little challengingly. “Why are we here?” I think it was New York City but it might have been Mexico City or Tokyo. Some crowded metropolitan center.
“Can you see that green awning way down there? Maybe six or seven blocks?” I had to lean out into the road to get a view. I’m small and couldn’t see anything at all with the sea of people around me.
“The one that just says DELI on the side?”
“That one.”
I felt tired and a little impatient, sandwiched between the human traffic on one side and the automotive traffic on the other. There was a tight impatience in the atmosphere too. It must be New York I thought. DELI confirmed it. Hardly a usual trysting place with the guide. I was certainly curious.
“Now,” he said, “please listen carefully. We are going to make a pilgrimage to the DELI.”
I looked at him with shock. I knew we weren’t after corn beef sandwiches. Following him on this one was very difficult.
“You were changed by the tree,” he said. “I know the affinity you have for trees and I knew you would experience the tree’s holiness.
“But this is the second part of my explanation to you of pilgrimage. Try to remember how the same road changed when the leisurely walk became a pilgrimage. It was the quality of your walk, your posture, from the moment of our stopping, onward, that gave the tree its holiness.”
“Now don’t misunderstand me. Everything you experienced of the tree’s nature was real. But had you not made a pilgrimage to the tree you might have missed it. More important, you turned all of the path between you and the tree into sacred ground.
“But there are worlds of difference between a tree and a Deli!” I objected. “For one thing, I have no affinity for a deli! And it is hardly a holy place. I don’t see the connection at all.”
“That’s exactly the problem. I want you to take as much time as you like and look at those six or seven blocks ahead.”
“Do you mean the people, the buildings, the sidewalk, the signs...?”
He laughed. “NOW you’ve got it,” he said happily. “You’ve asked just the right question.” I was not sharing his pleasure in this at all. The noise was getting on my nerves.
“Fine, but what is the answer?” He was very serious again as he answered me.
“Consider it this way. Knowledge and technology have advanced to such a degree that any given area can be mapped in a number of ways. Different maps can take the same area and show its political boundaries, its elevation, its population density, its surface temperatures, its precipitation et cetera. Some show freeways, some show dirt roads, some show footpaths...
“At first glance, you might say that there is only one route to the deli, made up of concrete pavement and curbs. But as you’ve noted, that is not the case at all. The space is alive, dynamic, constantly changing. The vast majority of people moving through it are not in the least aware of its ‘concrete details’. Many are anxious about a pending encounter or worried about being late. Some are re-living an unhappy experience or filled with resentment and hurt over a remark someone made, maybe hours or days or years before. Some are grieving a loss. Some are endlessly re-running frustrating scenes with a friend, lover, spouse, sibling, parent, co-worker or boss. Someone may be contemplating murder. Someone may be developing an idea for a novel, a song, a painting. There are as many routes to the deli as people traversing the space. The inner spaces of those people are farther apart than New York and Tokyo.
“Think of it!” he said, turning toward me. “Hundreds, thousands, millions of people move through here. Therefore there are millions of paths to the Deli. More than a million ways of traversing that space. Each one, consciously or unconsciously, has chosen the route that he or she is taking: grim, joyful, observant, anxious.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” I commented. “But this is what I don’t understand. First, what could possibly make the Deli holy? I mean you’re talking about a pilgrimage to something, not just walking down the street to lunch or work or whatever. And second, I don’t see how this conversation is different from the ones about the spiritual posture.”
“Let’s begin with your first question: What makes the deli a holy place? Let us say you have a prophetic vision that you are going to die in that Deli. That the Deli, therefore, represents your last moment on earth. Certainly that would make it a sacred place. The Deli would become a turnstile to the beyond and how you entered it would be the most important thing in your life.
“Imagine now that you have this added gift of knowing in advance. This bonus I’ve given you that you may take all the time you want to decide how you want to walk those six or seven blocks. For most people, by the time they see the end, they’re too sick to do anything about it. This is why a pilgrimage has always been such a precious and holy thing. It is a ‘sacred destination’ which is chosen within life, while one is still awake, able and aware. Even done once in a lifetime, it can fill an entire life with grace. It has been so for millennia.”
I looked down the street toward the small rectangle of awning, the shops, offices, restaurants in between...
How would I make a pilgrimage of it?
He leaned over and spoke softly in my ear. “Remember the tree,” he said, as if giving me a hint, a clue. First the image of the tree came to mind, then the feeling that had filled me as I walked the ground between. Now holy ground. Sacred ground. Filled with the sense of my own reverence, awe—the inner tree blooming into a grateful full-heartedness even when the outer was lost from sight. A heightened alertness, connectedness... flowing toward instead of just passing along.
“Yes,” he said, validating my unspoken feelings.
“Pilgrimage is the flowing outward of sacred intent. This was the tree’s power to change you—that its beauty, its ‘posture’ could arouse such a feeling in you and draw you to it. This is what made it holy. This gift. This discovery. Now it is you, carrying this gift, that can make the Deli holy. Without effort, like the tree, you will give this gift to someone else. Someone ‘waiting perfectly’ in the Deli. You may never know when or to whom the gift was given or how the person was changed by it. And it doesn’t matter.
“That is pilgrimage. Its path is the spiritual posture in action. You just keep walking that path, transforming the most mundane sidewalk into holy ground. Sanctifying daily space. On the way to the holy tree.
Which is always inside you.”
* * *
The din was subsiding as his words somehow drew me into a different space.
“Perhaps you’ve already answered my second question by explaining that the path of pilgrimage is the spiritual posture in action. But I’m still having some difficulty reconciling this with your teachings about not leaping and about remaining in the present moment.
“It seems to me,” I added, “as if the whole project of the Deli is a plan in the future. It seems to contradict other things you’ve said to me.”
We had not left our position by the lamp-post and the pedestrian flow beside us kept up its vigorous pace. "Yes!” he said. “You could certainly say that a Deli lunch is in the future. A ‘plan’. You could say that your arrival at the Deli is a future event. But as you see, the Deli itself is part of our present. So in this case, it is not time and space that are so arbitrarily linked as time and perception. The farther you perceive, the larger your present. Imagine God watching the Big Bang unfurl as a blossom of light, trailing stars like fireworks into a Fourth of July picnic. And somewhere in one of those little sparks you and I are speaking together.
“We can also say that as we move toward the Deli, we are in a fluid present. Every moment we are walking, the deli is part of our present, though in fact it is getting closer. Or rather we are flowing towards it.
“This movement is so seamless that it is immeasurable.”
“Like the tree’s unfolding,” I said. I was recalling a thought I had had about the trees in a nearby park: they shed leaves in winter, budded in the spring, blossomed in the summer and yet in every second that you looked at them they were perfectly still! Their unfolding through the seasons was effortless and unmeasurable.”
“Just so,” he said. “And the life of a saint or a sage unfolds in the same way. Every seven blocks is just the same!
"They have learned the secret of the tree. There are not dharmic fields—scenes of action—but only a single one that flows through them and out from them forever and so their present is all things’ presence just as the deli, too, is part of you in this very moment. You and the Deli are one, united in a sacred space. Yet it is also true that making the space sacred, through your posture, is what unites you.”
“But that’s just what I mean!” I exclaimed. “We’re back to the spiritual posture in an everlasting present.”
“Perhaps,” he said, smiling enigmatically. Then it seemed as if he turned me, suddenly, and pushed me into the tide of humanity, surging in the direction of the deli.
’üﰟ