Frederic Gros, in his book "A Philosophy of Walking," speaks about the practice of pilgrimage as a metaphor for our journey through this life. "The pilgrim," he says, "originally, is not one who is heading somewhere (Rome, Jerusalem, etc.), but essentially one who is not at home where he is walking . . . The pilgrim is never at home where he walks: he's a stranger, a foreigner. We are all, say the Church Fathers, fleetingly on this earth, passing through, and so we ought always to provide a night's shelter in our dwellings, to see our possessions as a disposable burden, and our friends as people met by the wayside."
After all, we are all going to die, and even if we end up remaining in THIS world rather than flying off to some other heavenly realm, we will dwell here, I imagine, in a completely different way. If we've done the work of spiritual transformation, we will - I believe - shed some of our individuality at death and identify more completely with a broader, more divine perspective. In any case, it occurred to me while reading this chapter that one of the aspects of life that truly is NOT a pilgrim's home is the desire to measure up to a particular image of how one should be and act, or wishes about how other people should be and act. Life's frustration of our plans and desires - in addition to our own apparent failures - should make this abundantly clear. Our true home is, like the wilderness spaces of the West, vast and expansive and filled with creative possibility. And that ego-transcendence is precisely one of the reasons why I love hiking so much, especially during autumn, when the leaves all tell us that they too are just passing through!
Photos: Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, October 10th and 11th, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment