Tag Archives: Pilgrimage

July 10, 2011

UK 2011

I’ve been anticipating the 10th.

It’s my favorite meditation in the CDP:

“. . . Land of my fathers, how I long to return, to touch the earth, and find again thy sacred paths. . .”

I get shivers typing it out. We leave on that very pilgrimage in just two days.

Pilgrimage.

It was the name of the “last stone” from my sabbatical. It was the idea at the very beginning of 7 years of Sundays in 2003. It’s not so much a journey to a place, though place figures large in all of this. It’s an interior pilgrimage.

On the interior, I find puzzle pieces still. Now some are integrated. My father’s home has been absorbed into the “New Monastic” puzzle piece by serving as the resource for making the trip to Northumberland, and (not insignificantly)saving the house we currently live in from being sucked into the housing market sink hole that so many others have fallen into. While this is not nearly as sexy a use of that puzzle piece as I would have hoped for, it no less a significant one: providing my family with a stable base of operation from which we can strike out and take other risks.

The MBE puzzle piece is now gaining momentum. There is every indication that this endeavor CAN succeed.

So for the time being, all that requires my attention are the sacred paths of my fathers.

I am glad that I re-read portions of this blog. It has caused that word to lodge in my consciousness once again:

Pilgrimage.

Happy are those who strength comes from you, God, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage . . .Psalm 84

December 31st, 2010

Posts

Well, I said I’d be done by tonight . . .Seven years of Sundays have come and gone.

I’m still largely unsure as to what it all means in the end; what this was  really all about . . . a mid-life crisis of some kind, a period of transition certainly.

I know more than I did when this started, but I also have more questions than I did.

The God of the Bible is more real and my love for Brenda and the girls is more profound.

My gut is bigger, shoulders less broad and my back hurts.

My eyesight is fading, my politics are changing and I love sleep in a whole new way.

Puzzle pieces that don’t fit, a new embrace of duality and freedom from a need for approval (well . . .substantial progress in that area at least). Not a bad harvest for seven years of cultivation.

Life is good. I have no wish to die, but neither do I fear it.

God gave me one last thing this morning as I looked out on a frosty landscape and I asked for some little touch . . . A “last word” of sorts.

His voice rang clearly like it only rarely does . . . . a thought that appears fully formed, solid as rock, smooth as glass and unquestionably not my own:

“Take nothing for granted.”

Good advice.