Scallop shell, symbol of the Camino de Santiago--one pilgrimage, many roads.
I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a stomach full or empty, with plenty or little. Philippians 4:11-12
There are times when the most decisive step you can take into life-as-it-is is a step away. The present tense, whatever it may be, has a railroading nature, a sense of self-affirming momentum that does not readily give in to reconsideration. Stepping away in deliberate acts of forgetting and release is often the most creative means to nurture and fully enter unfolding reality. “Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself,” Rumi wrote, but not seeking oblivion or escape: “The full moon is inside your house.”
At its heart, this project is about pilgrimage and disentangling, acceptance and return. Each place we enter speaks to us about itself, but it also speaks to us about ourselves and the many places we call home, if we practice gratitude enough to accept contentment no matter its shape or duration. Ultimately, we are both pilgrims and nomads--going somewhere, setting up temporary shelters along the way that each hold a little piece of the home we are seeking. The journey requires both effort and release, or as Augustine exhorted: “Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.”
Several years ago, Fr. Jim Savage gave a homily at St. Paul’s Parish in Cambridge marking the first Eucharist of Ordinary Time following the Easter season. He spoke to the wisdom of the liturgy’s offering of this time, not as an inert placeholder between the high holidays, but as a call to a journey that requires a bit more from us and a bit less from God.
It has occurred to me since that it is quite possible to build a life leaping across the pilings of exceptional moments, just as it is possible to write a quaint history of humanity that hinges on exceptional individuals. But it is not possible to build an honest spiritual life this way. There is a despair that sets in over time, when we allow recovery to bleed into anticipation repeatedly, without intentionally occupying the space in between the milestones of our lives. We become anxious and inconsolable, always needing a new injection of external energy to make sense of our days.
In ordinary time, we are forced to use metaphor in place of revelation. It is the space where we teach our souls reverence for the basic materials of existence, which array themselves beautifully at times but which more often simply rest in their own truth, offering themselves to us as tools and clay.
Most importantly, ordinary time is where we find that abundance resides in every degree of apparent scarcity. In the absence of events overflowing with grace and celebration, we find ourselves still and always in the presence of God, the calmer air we breathe still tinged with the electricity of the Spirit, and Jesus’ footsteps still marking the earth in front of us, calling us to walk and to fulfill.
