Pilgrimage of a Soul E-Book

Phileena Heuertz

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 325

Beschreibung

You can only go so far for so long before you find the limits of yourself. For Phileena Heuertz that moment arrived, mercifully, around the same time as a sabbatical to mark her twelfth year of service with an international organization working with some of the most vulnerable people in the world.Activists often see contemplation as a luxury, the sort of thing necessarily set aside in the quest to see the world set aright. But in Pilgrimage of a Soul we see that contemplation is essential—not only to a life of sustained commitment to the justice and righteousness of God, but to the fully human life that the Holy Spirit beckons each of us to. Tracing seven movements from a kind of sleepfulness to a kind of wakefulness, Phileena shows us that life is a journey that repeats itself as Christ leads us deeper and deeper into our true selves and a truer knowledge of God. This revised edition includes practices with each chapter, as well as questions for group discussion and individual reflection.

Leseprobe

For Chris

Thank you for believing in me. Your passionate love, unwavering support and enduring companionship are my greatest treasures.

And for my godchildren:Adina, Toby, Cora, Kirby, Nevan,Elliott, Amani, Ada

May your life’s journey always be marked with freedom to live into the fullness of who you are.Your lives echo immense love and boundless possibilities.

Contents

Foreword to the Revised Edition by Shauna Niequist

Foreword to the First Edition by Phyllis Tickle

Introduction

1 Awakening

2 Longing

3 Darkness

4 Death

5 Transformation

6 Intimacy

7 Union

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Formatio

Gravity

Praise for Pilgrimage of a Soul

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Foreword to the Revised Edition

Shauna Niequist

In the last several years of my life, God has used spiritual practices like centering prayer, silence, solitude and sabbath to enrich and, in many ways, rebuild my interior spiritual landscape. Essentially, for many years my central spiritual practice was doing­—working, writing, pushing, performing. The way I experienced my spirituality was through my own effort. Even now as I write that, I can see the myriad problems with that way of living, and I experienced them acutely: exhaustion, isolation, numbness, profound inability to connect with God when I wasn’t wearing myself out in his name.

On the path back to connection, to prayer as relationship, to a spiritual life that felt more like life, I met Phileena. She taught me about centering prayer, invited me to practice it—awkward and difficult as it is when one begins. She invited a small gathering of us to place our feet solidly on the ground, to fill our chests roundly with breath, to gently bring our minds back to prayer again, again, again. And then later that night we gathered with other friends in my home—people on the couch and on stools around the kitchen island, little groupings here and there, telling stories, sharing experiences. I’d imagine we ate bread and cheese and blueberry crisp, and I’d imagine there was both red wine and sparkling water—on Sunday nights, those are the usual suspects.

What I do remember from that night is that Phileena sat at the center of a small circle, feet tucked under her, answering questions with a quiet voice and generous spirit. We were a group of learners, and she was a guide. We were Christians just tiptoeing into a more contemplative way of faith, and she’d walked further along this pilgrimage. And it was apparent. And it was inspiring.

Phileena lives and writes and speaks and leads with a marriage of groundedness and lightness that draws people toward her; it draws me toward her. When I’m with her, and when I read her words, I know that she knows some things deep in her bones, in her cells. She has listened and walked and prayed and struggled through into a new way of living, and when you’re with her, you want to do the same.

I’m thankful for this book, for this journey, for this invitation. There are so many of us who are still just starting out on this contemplative pilgrimage, and I’m so profoundly thankful for this wise and honest guide.

Foreword to the First Edition

Phyllis Tickle

There are seven ancient disciplines—more commonly referred to nowadays as the seven ancient practices—that have shaped Christianity and Christians from before the days of our very beginning. That is to say, the seven shaped, and still shape, Judaism just as they shaped the earthly life of our Lord and of the disciples from whom we received the faith.

Three of them—tithing, fasting and the sacred meal or feast—govern the work and pleasures of our bodies. The other four practices—fixed-hour prayer, the keeping of sabbath, the observance of the liturgical year and pilgrimage—monitor or sacramentalize time, that other dimension in which we live while here. Pilgrimage—the seventh and last of the ancient practices—governs and informs and, indeed, sacramentalizes the largest unit of human time—the span of one’s individual life on earth.

As Phileena Heuertz makes very clear in these pages, one of the unfortunate (necessary at the time, but subsequently unfortunate) changes that the Protestant Reformation effected was the more or less active suppression of the practices. While emphasizing the keeping of the sabbath and tithing, Protestantism merely tipped its hat at fasting while energetically discouraging overmuch concern with the sacred meal or feast, the daily offices, the close observation of the liturgical year and, of course, that most dangerous discipline of all—pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage was dangerous, in the minds of early Protestant reformers, not so much for religious or spiritual reasons but for political ones: pilgrimage within the West was inevitably made to Roman Catholic sites. (There were, in point of fact, no other real options, unless one considered that Jerusalem had retained some degree of non-catholicized Christianity; but that too was a highly debatable question.) And thus it was that pilgrimage became, in many ways, the greatest victim of the new ways; formation in the faith went from lived and physically disciplined experience to reasoned and intellectualized understanding. But the times, they are a-changin’ . . .

Or more correctly said, the times they have changed. Now younger Christians are looking at the seven ancient practices and wondering aloud whether the abnegation of them can even be justified now—wondering, aloud and in books like this one, about how we can not only return to our formational heritage, but how we can also blend that heritage with the heritage of reasoned theology and intellectual rigor that has come to us from our more recent forebears in the faith. What we get, when younger and devout Christians—of whom Phileena is most certainly one of the more articulate—ask these questions, is often startling and even agonizing.

In this particularly startling, agonizing book, Phileena explores the sacramentalization of time, drawing from her experience on pilgrimage in Spain and on sabbatical in North Carolina. But even these very special physical settings are, for Phileena and for all of us really, in some ways better understood as windows into a more interior journey—the soul’s pilgrimage through time.

The special grace of the journey that Phileena leads us on in this book entails the reconciliation of each season of life with the next, and the hope that accompanies the agony we may experience as we exit one season in order to enter another. We are guided by Phileena in this book, but she ably reminds us that in our soul’s pilgrimage we are guided by one whose ways are higher than ours.

Enter gently, then, for this is a tender book, even while at the same time it is a sinewy one. There is a candor here that makes one want to whisper, and there is a vigor of faith and a determination to live Christian! that makes one want to shout. If anyone among us yearns to see what post-Reformation, twenty-first-century Christianity is leading to, then let him or her follow Phileena on El Camino de Santiago in Spain and, after that, to the Rose Cottage in North Carolina.

But go easy, and follow softly, for there is much pain here as well as much glory. Five hundred years of interruption are ending and new ways are blending in with the power of old ways. What we shall be and what we shall become as a result of that reunion are whispering here.

Listen.

Listen and hear.

“Poetry” by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don’t know how or when,

no they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names,

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadow perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind.

Introduction

Darkness. If you’ve experienced it, you know what I’m talking about. Darkness sets in long before we’re old enough to recognize it. It begins with anguish. We’ve been hurt, sometimes tragically, and we don’t know what to do with that injury. The safest thing seems to be to hide the pain, perhaps behind a mask. We seek to be safe by any means necessary. We learn to cope. And we achieve for ourselves a form of love, security or power that the wounded part of us desperately needs. But these coping mechanisms rob us of fullness of life. To really thrive in life, our soul needs to be transformed—over and over again. This is the work of the spiritual journey. Exercising the courage to embark on the journey postures us for radical transformation.

Many of you who are reading this book are probably persons of faith. You may feel as if you’ve been on the spiritual journey for quite a long time. But the spiritual journey is subtly different from our faith conversion. According to Father Thomas Keating—a Cistercian monk—at the time of conversion we orient our lives by the question, “What can I do for God?”1 Seems appropriate, right? But when we begin the spiritual journey our life is dramatically altered toward the question, “What can God do for me?” This isn’t a narcissistic, exploitative question toward a disempowered God. It’s the exact opposite. This is the central question of a humble person who has awakened to their true self and to the awe-inspiring adoration of an extraordinary God.2

One of the things we desperately need God to do for us is to transform us from what we are today into what God intends us to be. In a world where leaders of nations are making war and preparing to defend their sovereignty by proliferating nuclear bombs, where religious fundamentalists kill innocents under the guise of righteousness, and where the average American citizen contributes daily to the destruction of our ecosphere, it is clear that we are a people in need of transformation. All of us are subject to self-deception. We commit evil and call it good. We commit violence and call it social justice.

Like the blind man Bartimaeus, when we awaken to the reality of our desperate condition we can hear Jesus asking us, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:46-52). If we surrender and cry out, “Jesus, have mercy on me!” we have begun the spiritual journey.

Whether or not we’ve realized it in the depths of our being, we are people who need to ask what God can do for us. You are a person who needs to ask God, “What can you do for me?” The spiritual journey invites us into the process of radical transformation, and nothing prepares us as adequately for transformation as Christian contemplation.

The Christian contemplative tradition navigates our path toward a posture of receptivity to the One who can save us from our chaos and destruction—whether that is on a small, personal and social scale or on the grand landscape of global politics. All we have to do is submit to the process. That’s it. Submit. Surrender. Dare to approach God with humble adoration. But since the beginning of time, it seems that surrender is the most difficult of postures for humanity. We much prefer self-sufficiency and self-righteousness. In our attempt to “fix” ourselves, we prefer to order, direct and define our own spirituality. In contrast, contemplative spirituality carves the posture of surrender into the fabric of our being, making us most receptive to the transformation that we cannot obtain for ourselves.

This book illuminates how I stumbled into the Christian contemplative tradition and how contemplative prayer facilitated and supported a personal awakening. In these pages I attempt to map this part of my spiritual journey against the metaphor of pilgrimage, drawing narrative from an actual pilgrimage I made in Spain. Through the vulnerability of the unfolding story, this book attempts to illuminate contemplative spirituality for the active life. The “active life” is the life all of us live. We are made to work, play and be in relationship—all very concrete ways of active living. The active life is the life fully engaged and interacting with the world. But to define what is meant by “contemplative” threatens to obliterate the essence of the concept. If we approach the meaning of the contemplative life cerebrally, with the need to analyze, dissect and define, we have missed the gift altogether. The starting place for the contemplative life is surrender. We let go of being in control. We are rendered powerless. To be contemplative is a state of being, a posture more than something concrete of which to grab hold. Even the greatest of mystics tend to use elusive language to describe the contemplative life. Contemplative spirituality is experiential and intuitive. But that doesn’t mean it is only for certain personality types. Contemplative spirituality is the portal to the direct life-giving presence of God. When rooted in contemplative spirituality we are more receptive and supple in the hands of God; the life of Christ flows more freely through us.

Rather than dichotomize the active life from the contemplative life—as if it were adequate to choose to live one way or another—the abundant life brings balance or union to the active and contemplative dimensions of life. If we consider the wheel as a symbol for life, contemplation will be found in the centermost axis and the active life extends out in the spokes, as all the while the wheel is turning, progressing forward.3 But without the center axis, the spokes lose their anchor and are unable to support the forward motion of the wheel. Without the spokes, the center axis is deemed irrelevant. When we are least connected to our contemplative center, our life is most tense and chaotic. When rooted in contemplative spirituality, the active life reflects greater peace, purpose and effectiveness.

Over the years, the following practices have supported the contemplative dimension of my life:

“Phileena Fridays”—At first I made time and space for contemplation through rest, reflection and recreation one day per week. Private retreats—“Phileena Fridays” morphed into regular private retreats lasting a couple of days, four times per year, when I would force myself to be alone with self and God. I was free from the external demands of others and could battle out the internal ones.Sabbath—Honoring a weekly sabbath by committing to do only that which rests and nurtures my soul and is a gift of self offered back to God.4Contemplative prayer—Regular centering prayer (a minimum of two twenty-minute silent prayer periods per day). Consenting to the action of God within me through centering prayer leaves no room for hiding. When we willingly abandon ourselves to God, God calls out to our deepest self and dismantles our illusions. The true self grows in knowledge, awareness and courage.5

For nearly twenty years, I was a part of organizing the movement of Word Made Flesh—an international community of Christians who serve among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor. We were compelled by the vulnerabilities of children of war, children with HIV and AIDS, abandoned children, children living on the streets, women and children enslaved in the commercial sex industry, and widows abandoned by their families. As a community we entered these dark and desperate realities and surprisingly discovered the reign of God. Driven by our faith, youth and idealism, we established compassionate communities of justice in thirteen cities in the Majority World. Youth, of course, lasts only for a moment; idealism in the context of poverty, injustice, oppression and violence was challenged daily. It was our faith that remained the anchor for our service.

My faith and inevitable need for spiritual formation in the context of social activism motivate the telling of my personal story. After years of laboring with my community among the world’s poor, I was in need of a calm and grounded center that could withstand the buffeting of a world full of injustice and unrelenting demands. Contemplative prayer became an oasis in an active life that was becoming arid, and it taught me how “to be,” how to surrender my anxieties, compulsions and the suffering of my friends into the hands of God. Contemplative prayer taught me how to find rest in God. But the grace of contemplation also eventually led me into a life-altering dark night of the soul. The experience of internal darkness and subsequent transformation became a wellspring for my active life.

At the heart of Christian faith is the invitation to die and be reborn. During our lifetime we may be invited into a number of deaths and rebirths. The paschal mystery of Christ serves as a model for contemplative spirituality and spiritual formation: at any given point in life we may find ourselves identifying with the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.6 Throughout these pages I detail my experience in the paschal mystery and hope that the telling of my story might encourage you to stay true to your own journey.

This is a story of following God, losing sight of God, seeking after and ultimately being renewed by God. This is a story of prayer as a centering, tethering event—an infusion of contemplation into a lifestyle of activism. This is a recurring human story, one of death and rebirth. It is a story of how God awakens a soul to new life.

During a retreat at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado (home of Thomas Keating), I had the privilege to be drenched in the silence of God. For ten days I met with twenty-five other retreatants from all over the world. In grand silence (silence of the eyes as well as the voice) we met together seven times per day, for a total of four hours each day, to pray. We prayed a prayer of surrender beyond words, thoughts, imagination and feeling. Together we consented to the action of God within us, growing acquainted with God who is immanent as well as transcendent. But adapting this prayer posture as a way of life isn’t easy. Surrender as an active ingredient of the spiritual life invites us into a rude awakening.

Father Thomas explains the complexity of the human story in our attempt to embark on the spiritual journey:

When we are converted to a new way of life, to service or to a particular ministry, we often experience a wonderful gift of freedom and a radical change of direction. Perhaps you have made enormous sacrifices in your business or profession, maybe even in family life, to be able to begin a journey into the service of the Gospel. But watch out! All the emotional “programs for happiness,” over-identification with one’s group and the commentaries that reinforce our innate tendencies have sources in the unconscious as well as in the conscious. That is why St. Paul could say, “What I want to do, I don’t do. And what I don’t want to do I find myself doing” (Rom 7:15ff). If we don’t face the consequences of unconscious motivation—through a practice or discipline that opens us to the unconscious—then that motivation will secretly influence our decisions all through our lives.7

We are asleep to our unconscious motivations, and these motivations mask our true self. In essence we are hiding. And the wound in our soul remains unhealed, infecting every aspect of our lives. We are so asleep to our reality that we don’t know we are hiding behind the masks of our false self. In our slumber we are unable to distinguish between what is true and what is false. These masks become so familiar to us, they become a part of our very identity.

When I awakened to the presence of masks in my life, I knew not at first what was truly me and what was a false version of me. What was a mask and what was authentic, beautiful me? Only time would tell. This is a story of what is possible when we prayerfully dare to remove our masks. And Christian contemplative spirituality provides a way to make this authentic journey through life.

In the following pages we will explore seven movements of the spiritual journey. In doing so I will draw from various experiences in my life, most extensively from my first sabbatical: on pilgrimage in northern Spain and at The Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina.

In this new edition, you are better supported to uncover your own pilgrimage of a soul with reflection questions followed by a spiritual practice at the end of each chapter. I hope that these additions to the book serve you well.

Seasons of Undivided Attention

My husband, Chris, and I make our home in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2007, after a combined twenty-five years of service among our impoverished friends, we received the gift of sabbatical. For the first part of our sabbatical, we determined to make a historical pilgrimage that would stretch almost five hundred miles. For thirty-three days we walked the ancient path of El Camino de Santiago. The Camino is one of three primary Christian pilgrimages—Jerusalem and Rome being the other two. For nearly twelve hundred years pilgrims have made this third-most-sacred passage, whose destination is the legendary burial ground of the apostle James, the son of Zebedee, also known as James the Great.

Pilgrims across the centuries have walked the Camino, Spanish for “way,” for all manner of reasons. In one way or another, most people walk it to find themselves or to find God. Curiously, by walking this historic way most are propelled further into their lifelong search for both. With each passing day I awakened more and more to the gift of my life. As time progressed I came to realize that the true essence of my being is rooted in the love of God.

Pilgrimage can be understood as a long journey in search of moral significance. It is a way or passage from one point to another. Pilgrimage is a metaphor for growth and transformation. To grow is to progress from one place to another; to be transformed is to transition from one form to another; to embark on pilgrimage is to leave where one is and arrive where one is not yet.

Pilgrimage can be a metaphor for the spiritual journey. Even the transition from sleepfulness to wakefulness is a kind of passage. Whether we are walking to a holy site or being mindful of our spiritual life, in both cases we can willfully embark on the journey or not. The choice is ours: either we decide to journey in hope of growth and change or we resign to life as it is.

When made intentionally, pilgrimage offers the gifts of detachment from that which is unhealthy or false and reorientation toward health, wholeness and truth. The way of pilgrimage is a contemplative presence-of-being. By posturing ourselves toward contemplation, our awareness is heightened and we can more easily submit to the process of pilgrimage—progressing from one place to another and responding with grace to the world around us.

Pilgrimage speaks to both the internal and external reality of our lives. As human beings we have the capacity to engage the world in meaningful ways through our actions. We are also able to reflect on our actions. A life characterized by pilgrimage brings union to action and contemplation. With this posture, the human condition is poised to ask questions and find answers.

For the second part of our sabbatical, following the pilgrimage, Chris and I relocated to Durham, North Carolina, as visiting practitioners of The Center for Reconciliation. For five months we were invited to cease our normal, active lives of service and find refuge within the embrace of Duke Divinity School. This long stretch of sabbath—characterized by detachment, rest and relative stillness—was a welcome cocoon for my active self.

The “Rose Cottage” became our home away from home. This small one bedroom house provided all the comforts we would need. As the temperature turned cooler we enjoyed the fireplace and outdoor hot tub. Pine trees towered around the house, suggesting I look up and remember the One who cares deeply for me as well as for my friends suffering in a world of cruelty. The backyard, screened porch and hammock were quiet places where I could rest from all the things I had been doing for God (“What can I do for God?”) and hide away with God, whom I would come to know intimately as the Lover of my soul (“What can God do for me?”). Long, lingering walks, working with my hands in the garden, visits to the seaside and delighting in music marked my days in Durham. And gracious new friends entered my life, who became welcome companions in the journey.

The purpose of sabbatical, as dictated in the Hebrew Scriptures, took on new meaning for me.8 An ancient practice of the early nation of Israel has profound relevance for us today. After thirteen years of social activism, sabbath and sabbatical revealed themselves as crucial gifts for my spiritual journey. This season allowed me to give my undivided attention to the movements of my soul.

Seven Movements

Throughout these pages we will explore the gifts of contemplative spirituality as the central anchor for the active life, service and mission. Transformation is what the spiritual journey postures us to receive and is supported by the active-contemplative continuum. Within this dynamic we find movements or rings that illuminate growth.

Awakening is the first movement in the spiritual journey. Six movements follow: longing, darkness, death, transformation, intimacy and union. Picture seven three-dimensional rings all interlocked. Each ring represents a movement or season in the soul’s development. During a process of formation, the soul moves throughout these rings at various times, in no particular order. The spiritual journey is more cyclical than linear. Each moment in a certain movement or ring provides a necessary experience for personal and spiritual growth and development. At times we may progress from one ring to another, only to find ourselves revisiting a former ring for a deeper work in our ever-expanding soul. The following pages attempt to bring to light these hidden mysteries and wonders of the spiritual life.

This is my story. But in many ways it is our story. It’s a story of awakening, darkness and transformation. It’s a story of being born. It’s a story of striving to be free. As a Christian it is a story of ongoing transformation in the image of Christ. As a Christian woman, it is a story of feminine awakening as central to spiritual formation—a story that cries out to be heard by women and men alike. This is a story of questions and doubt, sorrow and grief, death and love. Embracing these realities is the essence of the spiritual journey. As you enter into my journey, let these movements burrow deep into your soul, so that your own story might emerge with more clarity.

Whether you read this book on your own or with a group, consider me to be present with you, cheering for you in the process of awakening and becoming who God intends you to be. There’s no time to waste. The world needs you to be fully you.

1

Awakening

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

George Eliot

When I was a child my mother would wake me in a most delightful fashion. She’d come in and draw open the shades and sing,

Good morning, good morning, good morning.

It’s time to rise and shine.

Good morning, good morning, good morning.

I hope you’re feeling fine.

The sun is just above the hills

and all the day’s for us to fill.

The day is calling just for you

and all your dreams are coming true.

Though my husband, Chris, hasn’t adopted this way of waking me, eventually I do rise and attempt to shine. Usually I rise before him anyway, though on occasion he has been known to grace me with “the morning dance.” Only a few have been so lucky as to witness him strutting around like a proud peacock or “old school gangster,” as he puts it. In this fashion he sets the tone for a day full of joy and laughter.

You know how it is when you wake up from a long, deep sleep? At first it’s a struggle. I often find myself in this “somewhere in between” space, not quite sure where to land. Sometimes the dream I was having was so nice I want to continue it. Or at times the dream feels more real than the life waiting for me when I wake. Do you ever experience that psychological quagmire where you wonder if reality really is dreamland and what you presume to be your waking state, fantasy?

When it’s time to wake up, I find myself wavering between going back into the dark state of slumber that feels comfortable and familiar, and giving in to the pull to open my eyes and transition into the realness of the day. Sleep is comforting. It rests the body and mind and, for a few hours, frees us from the stress and anxie-ties of life. Maybe it is the stress and anxieties that we’re trying to avoid by staying in bed. Choosing to disrupt a comfortable, peaceful state of existence for the unknowns of a day that could include pain seems kind of absurd. Isn’t dreamland a better place to be? But sleeping too much is a common symptom of depression. And living life perpetually asleep doesn’t seem like much of a life at all. The comatose condition is nothing to be envied.

In our contemporary times, we are so busy that some of us hardly take time to sleep. With the advances of technology, life is fast and very full. Primitive times offered a much slower, calmer pace with more natural opportunities for silence and solitude, in addition to hard physical labor, which is good for the body as well as the soul. Now with electricity we are less in touch with the natural rhythms and cycles of our days, months and years. We can stay up as late as we want with the aid and company of light bulbs, television, DVDs, iPhones, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter. If socie­ties that came before us could see us, they might think we were a bunch of overactive crazies.

Cloaked by overactivity, a typical day in the life of many of us is marked with avoidance and escape. Busyness sometimes serves to help us evade the vulnerable places in our hearts that are wounded and afraid. Perhaps we numb the pain within by filling our lives with commotion and workaholism, we create a full social life to avoid the interior life, or we try to dull the ache by eating, drinking or exercising too much. Others do the opposite—in an attempt to avoid pain they suppress or control it by not eating and by other repressive behaviors. Indulgences of most kinds are often signs that we are avoiding or trying to escape our pain.

Sometimes we resist retiring for the day because it is on our bed at night that everything stops and we can no longer escape the voices in our head or the ache in our heart. The stillness and silence of bedtime is sometimes haunting rather than peace-filled. When we’ve used so much energy to try to avoid our personal turmoil, and we finally manage to reach dreamland, why would we want to wake up? Another day sometimes threatens us with more avoidance and sedation. And so the cycle continues: we live our days finding ways to sedate our woundedness and, if we’re lucky, we find an escape at night through sleep. Inevitably, though, it will be time to wake once again from our slumber and attempt to live the chaos of another day. Day after day the morning comes and the gift of the hours is ours to receive. So we rise. After all, we do have a life to live. And if we remain in a state of perpetual sleep we might as well be dead.

Waking Up in St. Jean Pied de Port

It was a brisk, springtime morning in St. Jean Pied de Port, France. The sun had yet to rise on the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. The birds hadn’t even begun singing their morning songs. But the promises of pilgrimage stirred in our hearts as we forced our eyes open and stumbled out of bed. El Camino de Santiago stretched out before us and summoned us to our feet. It wasn’t long after leaving our guesthouse that we spotted the first yellow arrow to direct our way. All along the Camino yellow arrows mark the path—painted on trees, rocks, streets and buildings. Whether we walked on dirt paths, gravel roads or village streets, the arrows guided our way.

The long flight from Omaha to Chicago to Bilbao in the Spanish Basque region, followed by the winding train that marked the entrance into our journey, culminated on that morning. After decades of service among our impoverished friends, Chris and I detached from our work and determined to walk the ancient Camino.

Just before setting out on our first day’s journey we read the following reflection as a prayer for pilgrimage:

Up early on this first day and not at all sure you want to embark on a journey to some distant, fabled place. Why bother? You would prefer to be asleep, warm within the comfort of your day-to-day routines.

Yet you start on your pilgrimage, unsure of what lies ahead or even why you’ve chosen to go on such an arduous adventure. You only hope that, drawn forward by the lure of some far-off sacred city, you will find journey’s end worth the hardships along the way.

At the same time, you sense a call to some larger purpose, a call that will not be denied.

Knowing that the road flows forward beyond your time of pilgrimage, just as it winds behind you through countless other lifetimes, fills you with a sense that you are part of a great continuum.

You take a deep breath, put your pack on your shoulders, and step out onto the road.1

The spiritual journey too is marked with an invitation to wake up. The Buddha is remembered to have said that people live most of their life asleep.2 Of course he didn’t mean that people spend most of their lives in bed, physically asleep. Five hundred years before the time of Christ, the Buddha referenced the spiritual condition of humanity. Jesus echoed this universal truth when he said, “I came that you might have life and have it to the full” (John 10:10)—in contrast to a “partial” life. The Christian journey begins with an invitation to wake from our sleepfulness. As St. Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” It’s hard to be fully alive if we stay asleep. By waking up, we determine to embark on the spiritual journey.

Like my mother’s morning ritual or my husband’s dance, there are spiritual practices that can help us wake up and fully live. The posture of pilgrimage and the practice of contemplative prayer have been vital to my awakening. As I have awakened, I’ve endured brokenness, confronted the false self and experienced new revelation of the love of God. Awakening is difficult and life altering, but the glory of God compels nothing less.

Brokenness

Months prior to setting out on the Camino, I had a sense that I would not be the same when I returned. In a state of awakening, my identity was being shaken and dismantled, and I was entering an internal nakedness. It’s difficult to describe this experience. Only in hindsight can I really name it for what it was. I felt like I was losing my orientation for life, relationships and service. During prayer I would often find myself in tears and not know why. (This is an outward sign of what Thomas Keating calls “divine therapy.”) I found myself needing to differentiate in new ways from my husband, my community and my work. But that left me feeling very insecure with seemingly no anchor to keep me stabilized. Jesus points to this transformation when he says, “He who seeks only himself brings himself to ruin, whereas he who brings himself to nothing for my sake discovers who he is” (Matthew 10:39NAB).3

In this internally exposed condition I felt vulnerable, insecure and fragile. Symbolized by pilgrimage but realized through awakening, I was finding out that I wasn’t who I thought I was. Meet the false self—the shadow of who we truly are, the expression of who we are that pales in comparison to the truth of who we were created to be. The false self is so much a part of our identity that we don’t know it is there. We don’t distinguish it from our true self.

St. Paul taught about the false self and true self using the language of “old and new creation” in 2 Corinthians. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, [she] is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17NIV). He also described the battle between the two in the process of being transformed into the likeness of Christ. “I don’t understand what I do—for I don’t do the things I want to do, but rather the things I hate. . . . This makes me the prisoner of the law of sin in my members” (Romans 7:15, 23).

Watchman Nee, the famous Chinese Christian author and church leader of the early twentieth century, expanded on this teaching and spoke of the “old man” and the “new man.” Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, spiritual writer, poet and social activist, wrote of this ideology as the “false self” and “true self.” Mystics throughout the ages have spoken and written prolifically on this state of our human condition.

The apostle Paul explains in Ephesians the spiritual revolution that we need in order to grow into the life of Christ or our true self.