Along the Way 0 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

I had a dream of being on pilgrimage. It wasn’t my first pilgrimage dream. Like the dream of the childhood house, the sudden hidden room off the back closet, or the college boyfriend who pops up every six months or so as if to remind me he still lives in my unconscious, pilgrimage dreams are part of my nighttime repertory.

It makes sense. After all, pilgrimages are journeys, both actual and mythic. Holy trips, voyages to find—If not the grail—a kind of completion, a wholeness. We reach the destination, and we close the circle. We are made whole.

As old as dust, the mythical resonance of journey.

Stranger comes to town; hero goes on a journey. The two plots, as every Fiction 101 student learns. Think of Odysseus; think of Persephone and Jesus of Nazareth and Moses leading the cranky Israelites through the wilderness for forty years. Think of Shane, or Harry Potter going off to Hogwarts, or the Brady Bunch in the Grand Canyon.

What would Gone With the Wind be if that guest from Charleston hadn’t shown up at the Wilkes barbecue? Or between-the-wars literature without Nick spending the summer on Long Island and Jake and Brett going to Pamplona?

In writing my first novel, I delved into character, I explored metaphor, I exploited setting. But when it came to plot—when people asked, “What’s it about?”—I grappled with the answer. I had a hard time finding the hook, the angle.

And then I stumbled upon the Shane defense. A stranger—or in the case of my novel, two strangers—come to town. When I used this as my answer, people nodded. They got it. There’s more to the story, of course, but I’d found mythos to my logos.

I went on an organized pilgrimage last year, when I joined thirteen others in France for a trip the brochure referred to as Portals to the Sacred. We visited Vezeley with its bronze scallop shells embedded in the cobblestones on the village’s main street up the hill to the basilica built over Mary Magdalene’s collarbone.

We wandered Fontenay Abbey in the gray drizzle. We stood underground in a dank baptistery in Dijon, among tenth-century pillars carved with figures in prayer, their hands lifted in the air before the Church decided that palms pressed together was a more suitable pose. We walked the labyrinth on the floor in Chartres until the verger shooed us away for noonday mass.

On those ten days driving around Burgundy and into Paris by way of Chartres, we were reminded that pilgrimage is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. The holy resides in the altar at the end of the day’s drive, but also in the village market and the encounter with the stranger in the rest-stop cafeteria, the man walking down the narrow road with a bundle of sticks on his back, the chausson aux pommes warm from the oven, the small dark dank chapel on the hillside.

Some months after returning home, I had the dream. I was back in France, with the same thirteen people, and we were lost. Bus lines, maps, contradicting information, opinions—a lot of strong-willed people, each with his or her own idea of where we should be going. Nothing like this had happened on the trip, and yet the dream felt utterly real and pressing.

The bickering pilgrims, each pointing to his or her preferred route, showed me how entrenched the notion of destination had become in my life. Not just during actual travel but during two of the most important journeys of my life: prayer and psychotherapy. I get so fixated on the end point that I miss the scenery along the way.

“Scenery”: such a mild word, as though I risk missing a pretty vista or a picturesque site. But there’s nothing mild—or consistently pleasant—about a worthwhile journey. Prayer consoles us, yes—but it also brings us to face the moments, the stations, the twists and turns along the way, the bleakness as well as the joy. Prayer meets us where we are, right here and now. So does therapy. Here and now can be uncomfortable, so it’s no wonder we want to fast-forward to the pay-off.

I’ve been in therapy so long that sometimes I feel ashamed to admit the duration, as though something must really be wrong with me. When I step back and look at the events of the past fifteen years of my life—brother’s murder; mother’s death; father’s death; raising my nephew; clinical depression—all those fifty-minute hours make more sense.

But deep down, something in me doubts the journey and wants to rush to the end point. The taskmaster in me morphs into those bickering pilgrims, jabbing fingers at the road not taken, the shortcut that wound up at Donner Lake. If I had more faith, would I need therapy? Shouldn’t prayer alone do the trick? Therapy is a pilgrimage, too, its grail that of acceptance and insight that allows us to move forward.

Someday, I’d like to walk the Camino de Compostela. It’s a long walk, over the Pyrenees and down into Spain and to the coast. You can get there other ways, of course, but pilgrims walk.

Just as they did centuries ago, to Vezelay and Jerusalem and Mecca and other sites, often taking the rest of their lives to get there. Seeing the mythic resonance of journey, whether as a plot point or spiritual quest, is easier when we see it in the other—the novel (even our own) or those pilgrims over there.

The trick—and, I suppose, the grace—lies in recognizing it in our own lives, whenever we feel most lost.".