Pilgrimage- 'a journey to a holy place'  'since recorded history, the act of travel to areas associated with deities'

These definitions remind: pilgrimage need not be something done only geographically.  Writer Eudora Welty, at the end of a lecture series given at Harvard stated, "So you can see I have not traveled very far." Geographically she was correct.  Her adult life was spent in Jackson, Mississippi only a few blocks from the house in which she lived as a child.  Yet reading the lectures, it was clear she had traveled very far as a human being.

Friday, ten youth and four adults from All Souls head to the monastic community in Taize', France.  I wonder what will emerge for us as a group.  I am wondering what will emerge in me as I return a year later to this site of pilgrimage made last summer.

By the time we return, thousands of Episcopal pilgrims will make their way to Anaheim, California for our church's General Convention (Brian Cole is a diocesan delegate).  I wonder what the Spirit will be revealing at that site.  I wonder what it will take for us as a body to hear the Sacred emerging during Convention.

I am conscious that I have not traveled to my garden enough lately due to a week of vacation and now Taize' travel- no sympathy asked for.  And I miss the quiet.  I miss the dirt.  I miss the work.  I miss what it tells me.  Though it is only a few steps from my house, it often takes me to very distant places; engagement with it opens roads to places of understanding, places of challenge I had not anticipated.

Sometimes we get to chose the place of pilgrimage and sometimes it comes to us.  Sometimes it is a geographical journey and sometimes it happens 'in place'.  What is consistent is we are lead into a new place, a new land; like the disciples in the boat with Jesus, we are all traveling to the 'other side', be that the other side of the ocean or the other side of our prior understanding.  On that side we will have had to leave things on the prior shore.  On that side we will have passsed through things which will alter us forever.

Richard Rohr reminds us that 'true sacred space grounds us around one undeniable Reference Point that is bigger and beyond any of us... we are not in control and not the center.'  'The opposite of control is not non-control or giving up.  The opposite of control is actually participation.'  And that is a very vulnerable place- true participation.  In true participation we must walk into the thing completely, not walk by it.  We must get into the boat and risk capsizing with Jesus.  We can not stand on the shore and watch.

I am not sure what we will find in Taize'.  I am not sure what we as a church will find in Anaheim.  I do know that any hedging on our participation, any holding back will keep us from the 'other side'.

Peace,

Todd Donatelli