Get Outta Here

After writing this blog for two years, I have come to the conclusion that it is time for me to move on, to ‘get outta here.’ 

Why?

Well, you could say “the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak.”  If you have read any previous posts you may have detected that writing this blog has not been easy otherwise I would do it more often.  Patheos would prefer I post twice a week.  As it is, I am down to posting once a month.  Even my lazy fortnight schedule is apparently too much for me.  (Can you spell ‘passive aggressive’?)

In the most recent case, it has been a while for other reasons.  I was traveling mid-December visiting friends in New York City, came back ready to resume only to get Covid – ON XMAS EVE! – then being sick for a week or so.   Still, I kept forgetting my duties.

Then it came to me.  Writing about pilgrim life as a blog is the least pilgrim thing I can do.  Where living the pilgrim life itself is soul nourishing, writing about it over and over is soul sapping.  Yes, there are some great books about great journeys, notably for me, Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North.  There are plenty more, but a book is not a blog.  Even the pilgrim needs to reach an end from time to time, and blogs are open-ended.

Thus, if you remember that last post, I decided to summarize my thoughts in five posts and get outta here, because that is what pilgrim life is about.  So let me get to the point.

Move!

Cut to the quick, pilgrim life is to ‘get outta here,’ wherever ‘here’ is.  Often that is literal, but even those who do not physically travel can go on pilgrimage because stepping out of your usual life can happen anytime and anywhere.  To be honest, it is much easier to ‘get outta here’ physically.  In a sense, physical pilgrimages are training camps for a life of spiritual pilgrimage.  Despite having done several, I still cannot claim to live a fully pilgrim life.  Nevertheless, they are useful.

Look!

In January of 2015 I was in Bodh Gaya, India, the place where Gautama Siddhartha became the Buddha. Leaving my hotel, where the power went on and off every few minutes, I took myself to the temple which sits on the spot.  Dusk has fallen.  I pass under strings of colored lights, booths of souvenir stands, crowds everywhere. The pyramid shaped monument is lit up like a stadium. Loudspeakers bellow chanting Tibetan monks who occupy every space around the temple.  I pass through metal detectors.  Hardly the image of Buddhist serenity.  Nor, when I leave, the elephant with a floral necklace walking down the middle of the street.  

That was about as far from the usual as I ever got.  But well short of that are moments and places in our daily liv es where we step away from the usual, well short of going to India. 

Feel!

If you attend worship, that is a time you go outside the usual.  Be it church or shul, masjid or temple, the place you worship is different from your home and work.  If it were not that would be paradoxically unusual.  You go in and sit down, chances are you sing.  When or where else do you sing in public?  The actions are unusual – standing, sitting, kneeling, prostrating, passing a plate to put in money, praying.  These are all outside the usual part of life.  You are not acting like you usual self.  

Consider theaters, stadiums, art museums, movie houses.  These are all deliberately unusual.  We seek these places exactly because they are different from daily life.  We expect ‘theater’ in the sense of something created to transport us away from the ordinary.  The more unusual the better, in fact.  Films delight in creating ‘magic’ and concerts go to great lengths to make us feel transported.  We watch a movie or play and get involved emotionally even though it is fiction.  

We need to ‘get outta here’ more than we realize.  For our lives to have meaning, we have to step outside our lives, in a sense.  We need moments like this old woodcut, when we get a glimpse of what lies beyond our view.

But Wait, There’s More!

There is more to getting out than this, the stuff a smart fellow would use to write a book.  There is that link to books above, so don’t expect me to do it.  However, let me say there is more to pilgrim life than ‘getting outta here.’  That will be the subject of my next and final posts.  But start here, with that fellow peeking behing the sky.  And pray that I get to the next part before February.