Alone Excerpt: Rome to Rumi

NOTE:

I will not be blogging about my experience on the Camino de Santiago during the months of September and October. You can follow me on Facebook where I will be posting occasional pictures and comments. To follow either “friend” me on Facebook or use this link: https://www.facebook.com/brian.heron.73/

Every Monday during this period I will post an excerpt from my book, Alone: A 4,000 Mile Search for Belonging—excerpts that I believe reflect many of the assumptions and experiences that have become the basis for this current Pedal Pilgrim work.

Alone Excerpt: Rome to Rumi

Pages 316-317 from the Postcript in the Book

Terrifying and addictive silence and emptiness in the Nevada desert.

But during this time my pilgrimage through the West was working on me. My livelihood was in the Church, but my heart and soul were still on the road. An insatiable desire had been sparked in me to discover the new spiritual world that was emerging. My heart was still on the overlook above Lower Yellowstone Falls, where I wanted to lean into the violent power of the water. I was still feeling giddy about the day I was caught in the thunder and lightning storm in Nevada, when it felt as if God and I were in a playful wrestling match. I still had images of Julie, the Mexican restaurant hostess, who was completing her studies in world religions at William and Mary College. I wanted to be in her world, an emerging world of spiritual leadership that likely would have little to do with church as we know it. And I was still haunted by the terrible and wonderful experience of riding through the barren desert. It was there that I felt I came face to face with God. I wanted more of that.

As I neared the end of my interim position, my soul started to organize and plan another pilgrimage that would pick up where I had left off. If this book was largely about coming to terms with the dying of the church, as we know it, and the dissolving away of my profession, the pilgrimage also revealed that my spiritual life was moving more toward religious mysticism—where the experience of the Sacred overshadows theological beliefs about God.

Another pilgrimage was in the works. In the fall of 2014 I flew to Rome for a pilgrimage that I titled “From Rome to Rumi: A Pilgrimage from the Head of the Church to the Heart of Mysticism.” For seven weeks and over 1,500 miles I cycled through Catholic Italy, Greek Orthodox Greece and into Turkey, largely a Muslim nation. I ended in Konya, Turkey, a couple hundred miles above ISIS strongholds, in a town famous for receiving two million pilgrims every year who come to visit the tomb of the Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi. I think another book is in the works!