A Journey for the New Year (Trinitatrian article)

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 Chartres cathedral labyrinth

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

January 2018 –A Journey for the New Year

“A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.”  --Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive

An elderly parishioner recently told me that her one great regret at this time in her life was that with all the mounting challenges she faced, she would no longer be able to travel.  She had over the decades simply found so much new life and discovered new perspectives and insights from traveling abroad.   Now the disabilities of age seemed to threaten to deprive her of this source of joy and growth.    Joan Puls in glorious little book Every Bush is Burning describes what this dear lady feared she might miss by encounter with the strange in this way: “We live limited lives until we 'cross over' into the concrete world of another country, another culture, another tradition ... I have left forever a small world to live with the tensions and the tender mercies of God's larger family.”   This is the core reason why pilgrimage has always served as a spiritual practice for Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists: travel puts us outside of our comfort zone and challenges our received frameworks.   It is also why raising children has been for many of us a youth-giving, life-affirming thing:  our kids teach us new things and see things with new eyes. 

But, as Proust points out in the quote above, we are able to gain the life-giving benefits of travel and pilgrimage even when physical travel is not possible.  Putting on new eyes, gaining a new perspective, casting off fixed ideas—these all serve as a Fountain of Youth.    One of the reasons that walking the Labyrinth when one could not go on pilgrimage was so popular in the Middle Ages is that contemplative quiet and calm physical exertion can give us new eyes as well.   Reading broadly and focusing on things that challenge us, and, again, take us out of our comfort zone, also is key.

I invite us all in this coming year to go on a spiritual pilgrimage, a personal and private interior trip abroad.   Find one thing to do each day to help challenge assumptions; one thing to do each week to push us to new understanding. 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+