Are you a pilgrim or passenger? A challenge to graduates

The journey is one of the oldest images for a human lifetime. Is it trite? Perhaps, but in our lives we do move from experience to experience, from place to place, from idea to idea, from one cluster of companions and relationships to another. Tomorrow’s graduation from Stanford leads to the rest of your journey.

You are very likely grateful for the gifts given you until now: life, family, youth, a fine education and the community of your friends here. At the same time you are anticipating the journey ahead, with all its promise, changes and surprises. What now?

Of course you have your plans. I’ve often heard people say—not always cynically—”If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Of course promises do get fulfilled, plans do work out, but almost always there are surprises, unforeseen choices, adjustments and alterations.

As you navigate those twists and turns, does it help to choose an image for the journey you hope to take? Maybe so. As I look around at the cultural scene we share, two metaphors for a life journey occur to me. One is ancient, the other fairly recent. They are the ocean cruise and the pilgrimage. These images are not literal but attitudinal. You will behave differently if you believe you are on a cruise or on a pilgrimage.

First, let’s look at the ocean cruise. Cruises have never been more popular. Sixty years ago they were for only the very wealthy, but now they are available to more people than ever before. Full disclosure demands that I admit I have enjoyed such a vacation.

However, looked at objectively, the cruise is an odd sort of journey. It’s movement for its own sake, not to reach a destination. The passengers fly to a city, board a ship, sail around for several days, then dock (often at the same city) and fly home.

Why do we do it? Well, to let the crew pamper us, to enjoy the beauty and the activities of the ship, to eat. Also, to inhale the ocean air, and to visit several quaint, interesting ports of call. Admittedly, the cruise is a largely passive experience: Almost exclusively, passengers are receiving and taking.

A cruise vacation need not make us feel guilty, but it is quite a bit like dessert. A diet consisting only of desserts would be unhealthy and cloying. As a model for a lifelong journey we need something other than “the perfect escape” or “the great getaway.”

Let me propose the pilgrimage as a model for a journey through life. Classically, a pilgrimage is a journey to and from a sacred place for a spiritual motive: to give thanks, to gain help, or for the sake of devotion. Pilgrims ordinarily travel together. Most world religions have a tradition of pilgrimage: For Jews, the destination was often the Temple in Jerusalem, and now the Western Wall; for Christians, it is the Holy Land or a saint’s shrine; for Muslims, it is Mecca; for Buddhists, places associated with the Buddha’s life and teaching; for Hindus, sublime, beautiful places in nature as aids to contemplation. Hilltops, mountain slopes, riverbanks, the seashore are often the sites of Hindu temples.

Maria Ruiz and Michael Scaperlanda, writing in The Journey: A Guide for the Modern Pilgrim, say this: “Each of us is on a pilgrimage from birth to death. … Finding the material answers inadequate, we seek answers in the transcendent, and our pilgrimages intentionally become spiritual quests. A physical pilgrimage to a sacred site is an outward manifestation leading toward a deeper understanding of God and a more profound awareness of God’s great love for us.”

Our pilgrimage needn’t be a literal trip. In the fifth century, St. Jerome told a friend, “You can reach the court of heaven as well from Britain as from Jerusalem.” The pilgrimage as a model for life’s journey recognizes the spiritual dimension. That’s what is crucial. As Nicholas Harnan observes, “Life is a journey with a very special purpose: to foster our full human growth and spiritual development, to realize God’s dream for us.” What matters is that we make our own the vision of the pilgrim: We sense and salute the sacredness of the life of God within us, and within the people and the world around us.

For the pilgrim the road is not just a means toward an end. The road itself is sacred, holy; it is a gift from God and it leads to God. If we reverence the world as we pass through it, we are less likely to trash it, abuse it and spoil it for those who come after us.

Owen Campion remarks that pilgrimage demands that people are open to what God can do: “They have to be open to change.” The pilgrim must be active, engaged in and committed to the journey. He or she will meet the unexpected, the unplanned, in all life’s aspects: physical, social, political, economic, moral and spiritual. The pilgrim spirit in life teaches us a lesson in trust. As one pilgrim recalls: “When I have traveled to other places, I have had to accept whatever the road had to offer—the accommodations, the companions, the weather and the tedious or dramatic situations.” The crew of the cruise ship tries to keep those uncertainties to a minimum, but everyday life does not.

Life’s pilgrim will grow through experience. That’s what John Henry Newman meant when he observed that to grow is to change, and to grow much is to change often. The pilgrim spirit encourages such growth. In the 19th century Chateaubriand said, “There never was a pilgrim who did not come back to his village with one less prejudice and one more idea.” A century later, Charles de Foucauld, who lived among Muslims in North Africa, said of those returning from hajj that “they come back more tolerant, more just and more pious than they had been before they set out for Mecca.” A pilgrim is more likely than a passenger to welcome the unexpected or the unplanned as an agent for good.

There are no genuine guarantees in life, so it is possible to turn a pilgrimage into a cruise. The pilgrim spirit is not that of the tourist. In the 15th century Thomas à Kempis said of the pilgrim-tourists of his day, “They that go much on pilgrimage be seldom thereby made perfect and holy.” Quite a few of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims vividly illustrate that point. The cruise ship passenger might understandably say, “We’ve paid a lot for this trip, and it better be perfect.” That’s not a pilgrim sentiment, however. Life’s pilgrim has to recognize and implement several spiritual conditions: 1) the need to shed the work of the anxious ego; 2) the need to avoid a constantly consuming, hollow heart; 3) the need not to become so immersed in time as to forget eternity.

Those goals are hard to achieve in this place and time. The art critic Robert Hughes, in his book The Culture of Complaint, claims that “the self is the sacred cow in our culture.” It’s easy to nod in agreement, and even to go along with the old saw that the smallest package in the world is the human being wrapped up in himself or herself. What’s tough is to apply that insight to my self, to my behavior, to catch myself forming my own sacred bovine habits.

The pilgrim spirit, recognizing the deep and precious value of the world and the people around us, helps lessen the danger of self-absorption and self-centeredness. A few years ago the film critic Richard Schickel, in a review, described some of the movie’s characters this way: “postmodern urbanites who think far too much about themselves and feel far too little for each other.” If we insist on lives that are like ocean cruises, as trouble-free and undemanding as money and power can make them, we lose the light, the freedom and the joy that the pilgrim spirit can offer, and we begin to hear the lowing of the sacred herd.

If we do join the herd of constant self-regard, we are likely to develop a distaste for diversity. We may yearn to create a separate enclave of people who look like us, think like us, talk like us and act like us. To some extent this yearning has produced the gated community. I’m not attacking a certain kind of real estate development; rather, I’m urging that we not end up with gated minds, gated hearts and gated lives. That would frustrate the potential within each of us, as well as the potential for all of us together.

We just heard Madeleine Delbrel celebrate life as a dance before God, full of spontaneity, movement and joy. Fifteen hundred years ago, the bishop St. Augustine gave his people this advice: “So, then, my brothers and sisters, let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labors. You should sing as wayfarers do … to make your journey more enjoyable. Sing, then, but keep going.” Good advice in the fifth century, and in the 21st.

Pilgrims are likely to dance and break into song along their way. Passengers are more likely to pay others to sing and dance for them. So the cruise makes a good vacation, but a pilgrim lives a fuller life. Vayan con Dios—Go with God!