Pilgrimage and Pomegranates
Rick Steves loves travel because it helps us grow, it accelerates connection and invites wonder. Travel can be sacred if we approach with intention and so I want to invite us into the stories of folks on a journey. A pilgrimage is a sacred journey and it can happen even if we don’t get on an airplane or pack a backpack.
Sue Monk Kidd is known for her journey to find a face of God that doesn't resemble Santa Claus or exclusively use the pronoun HE. She shares the story of growing up Baptist and like most Protestant Traditions, Mary only comes up at Christmas. Her church shared the story of the nativity catching on fire and the Pastor rushing in to save baby Jesus but left his mother behind. Until she grew up and the theology she inherited didn’t really serve her all that well anymore, maybe that’s something we can understand. We read this story not because it's extraordinary but because it is so ordinary; it is so common and beautiful to unpack the faith you inherit through questions and study until you can weave something new. So she finds Mary, first by loving her mother in a classic painting.
“I was struck mostly by Mary’s mother, Anne—by her great, extravagant lap and her burning, unapologetic gaze. She looked for all the world like the Great Mother who births, contains, and encompasses everything, even the male savior. That was probably the first time I grasped that the image of a female could be a symbol of the divine. And Mary was her mother’s daughter. I amended my opinion of her, coming to understand that she’d inherited the role of the ancient Goddesses, however sublimated their earthiness, grit, and authority had become in her. The human soul needs a divine mother … and Mary had carried it off the best she could.”
-Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates, pg. 49
Pilgrimage may literally be an external journey but the internal journey matters most. The physical, the context, the unknown may facilitate but most stories of pilgrimage are about what happens on the inside. This is why scripture is interesting, folks never stay the same. This is why we read the stories of other people, because their insights and struggles, their epiphanies and obstacles might teach us something too. Traveling with Pomegranates invites us to follow Mother and Daughter as they travel to sacred sites in search of the feminine divine but most importantly in search of their whole-selves. Ann is in what we might label a Quarter-life crisis and her mom Sue is approaching menopause and while her midlife crisis may not involve a sports car it certainly invites deep reflection.
Ann, in her final seasons of college, travels to Greece. Her academic trip changes her; it’s sacred. In a place where the past and present are palpable, her class approaches the Oracle at Delphi for a "Palm-slap to the forehead” moment” in Apollo’s temple. “The inscription must’ve been the more ulterior meaning of the oracle: to find the answers inside oneself. What if the oracle was a metaphor for a source of knowing within? As I treaded toward the amphitheater with the group, wondering whether I possessed my own source of self-knowledge, I had a thought which seemed to have originated form just such a place: I forfeited way too much of myself as a girlfriend. I don’t know how I knew it to be true-and in fact, to be vital- but I did. Maybe it was because I was far from home, far from my ordinary circumstances, and more of less alone for the first time in my life, feeling like I was on an awkward first date with myself. I’d known who I was with my ex-boyfriend, I’d invested years in the girlfriend role, in the ways of accommodation, being what I thought he wanted me to bemoan to his Jupiter, quietly organizing my psychological orbits around him. But in Greece, I existed in a kind of solitude, and in this quietness I realized I’d lost myself” (Ann Kidd Taylor, p 25).
As Ann followed her class journey on to Athens and Athena’s temple, she meditated on the clarity and courage connected with Athena and began to pray that she never lose herself again. In new and wondrous surroundings, Ann's pilgrimage invites her to hold onto herself, to know herself and to be herself. That is the whole point of the pilgrimage.
Medieval European Christians wove pilgrimage into their spiritual practice. Churches and Abbeys dotted the landscape with relics and festivals to celebrate saints. When I lived in Germany a nearby village was the site of such a pilgrimage, which conveniently became Germany’s largest wine festival (also please note this festival served folks from everywhere and used not one single disposable plate, cup or fork and it was the 90’s so it's possible for us to do today.) The Pilgrimage had become a community space, a festival along with the journey to learn through the life of the saint. It is longing for teaching that invites deep reflection, longing for the gifts of the saint or the attributes that the space embodies, so you might embody it too.
As Medieval Europe practiced pilgrimage to places near and far, they opened their eyes to the pilgrimage that doesn’t require everyone to leave. The journey that doesn’t require a ticket or PTO, the labyrinth. They looked to the ancient practice and placed paver after paver in the floors of the great cathedrals and Abbeys so people could follow the path. The labyrinth isn’t a trick or a maze. It is a path you can walk without having to think about your next steps and where they might be. It is a path that invites you to move your body so you can open your mind and plum the depths of your spirit. The labyrinth was a journey without the cost of the pilgrimage. And no matter where you travel the pilgrimage is about what happens on the inside.
Ann writes about the sacred spaces where people from near and far named their longing in the courtyard of a great tree. Mary’s icon had survived the violence of war, it was possibly one of the only relics left of the pre war monastic community. The nuns find her outside and put her back in the sanctuary only to find her outside at the tree. Who are they to argue with Mary, so they leave her in the space she has chosen. The entry is sacred in these moments with the buzzing bees and the mean prayers. She journeys home to work on her novel which we can now know as the Secret Life of Bees. Returning from Greece with her deadlines looming she starts to work again.
“That I felt migratory and displaced in my physical surroundings was hardly surprising, but I was a little shocked at how displaced I felt inside. So much of my sense of myself had been altered in Greece, far more than I realized. Old understandings of myself as a woman, a mother, a writer, and a person in search of the spiritual were unraveled by my experiences over there, by the places themselves. I cloistered myself during those months, struggling to sit in the cubical and type on the keyboard. At one point the computer crashed and I lost every word I’d written. I wished for my desk, which was in storage along with everything else, I wished for some idea of what I was doing and whether it would about to anything, A dozen times a day, on fire with a hot flash, I ran from the computer to the refrigerator where I stood with the doors thrown open, prickly with sweat, rubbing ice cubes on my arms, face and neck. An acupuncturist brewed up a Chinese tea for me to drink that smelled like car oil, but it was a worse remedy than the ice cubes. I missed my estrogen.” (Sue Monk Kidd, p 115).
Sue Monk Kidd is changed again and again by her journey. In the end she goes in search of the Black Madonnas, dotting the French countryside that echo a pre-patriarchy faith. And she finds something in Mary that she can weave through her spiritual understanding; her sense of self evolves too. Mary’s song in the Gospel of Luke holds so much for us. A woman, pregnant when she shouldn’t be, sings a song of courage from her people. It has echoed through the generations and it first placed in the lips of Hannah who in ritual pilgrimage, prays for the baby she longs to hold with all her heart. Hannah longs and sings this song in the face of a culture that could not value her without a baby. Mary sings the song in the face of a culture that couldn’t value her with a Baby. She should feel ashamed by the standards of the world and yet she sings out, My soul magnifies the Lord. I help you see God.
Pilgrimage changes us on the inside; the journey is the destination. The travel is a greater distance within the heart. May we have the courage to make the trip. Amen.
Questions for Reflection:
Have you taken a pilgrimage?
What stand out to you in reading the stories of journey?
What local pilgrimage can you take?
Try the labyrinth.