The Nature of Pilgrimage: Inner and Outer Landscapes
I had the pleasure of joining Ron Barnett on the podcast All Things Contemplative to discuss the nature of pilgrimage. Ron received a doctorate in psychology with a focus on cognition and learning and worked for many years in medical research with the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He is a lifelong student and teacher of contemplative practices including approaches to meditation and the flourishing of human well-being.
If you are curious about pilgrimage, I invite you to listen to this beautiful conversation about pilgrimage as an inner and outer journey, one grounded in grace and curiosity and intention.
“Socrates defined truth, which to me is an underpinning of the contemplative stance, as a wandering that is divine. And I thought, “What a wonderful way to describe truth.” A wandering that is divine. So, for me, what makes something contemplative is that divine quality in all things ...
I love the word wandering because it indicates some type of movement, it is never static. So we could pass by a stone and see nothing but a stone. And then another time we may pass by and there’s a certain qualify of illumination, the sun might catch it. And there is a moment where we pause and we’re connected with something deeper. And for me, that goes into the two components of the contemplative stance. One is receiving the impression that we are all deeply connected through a common source. And then also the expression that we are deeply connected to a common, infinite source…
Standing in the contemplative, there is a sense of expressing with an open mind, an open heart, a sense of wonder and awe and curiosity without judgment. So I go back to what Socrates said, a wandering of the divine, a wandering that is divine.”
“The other thing that does make pilgrimage meaningful is a sense of what I call a holy curiosity. And by curiosity, I mean it begins with a chain of questions, small questions.
What I often notice is, for instance, if we are standing at the pyramids, the questions may be begin with the mind, the intellect. When was it built, how many stones did it take, how much does the pyramid weigh? And then there’s the questions start coming from a place of the heart. It might be, “Why does this place draw me?”
There’s an old saying by the poet Basho, who said, “Seek not what the old men, where they went to go, but seek what it is that they were looking for.” So don’t go where they go, but seek what all these other pilgrims were seeking, namely what connects us, what are those connections?
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