The Next Right Step
During the first week of August I will be providing the program for the Seabeck Christian Family Camp in Washington. My theme is “Life as Pilgrimage.”
If you have been following my blog or Facebook posts you will know that I have been planning to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain, but needed to postpone that due to the slower than expected healing of a pickle ball injury from last January. Yes, pickle ball is dangerous for us seniors!
The good news is that my recovery is progressing well and I once again made the commitment to the Camino. I now have a ticket that will take me to Paris on September 1. After a couple of jet lag recovery days and a train ride to St. Jean Pied de Port I should be taking my first steps on September 5. But, I feel very much that this 500-mile pilgrimage is tucked neatly into a much bigger pilgrimage, the “Life as Pilgrimage” theme that I will be speaking about in August.
Pilgrimages that depend on our bodies are largely about trust. When on a pilgrimage one does not know day to day how the body is going to feel. One may plan an average of fourteen miles a day, but the body may dictate less or even allow for more. Many pilgrims on the Camino also don’t reserve overnight lodging ahead of time in order to leave flexibility for the distances one might cover day to day. The flexibility is great, but waiting to secure a bed for the night until your body calls it a day takes a good deal of trust.
I can tell that I am currently living life as pilgrimage right now. Sometime during November I am going to need to make some financial decisions. I am building this new Pedal Pilgrim platform to nurture a culture of pilgrimage and advocate for the repurposing of church space and buildings as pilgrim hostels along some of the 175,000 miles of designated routes across America. But there is no guarantee where the money will come from or if it will come.
So I am find myself very much like a pilgrim vacillating day to day between putting a definite financial plan in place now and simply trusting that the plan will unfold when it needs to (in the same way that some pilgrims book their lodging days ahead out of a need for security and others simply trust hour to hour and day to day). This is tough emotional work. Planning too far ahead limits the potential and just trusting raises the anxiety meter.
Quite honestly, I don’t think there is one right answer—either putting a plan in place months in advance or living with radical trust. So far, as I journal about it and listen to my deepest self, trust seems to be the most faithful response. My need for security seems to be rooted more in fear than in the reality facing me. As long as I don’t let the fear get the best of me, I am sure I will know when trust needs to shift to planning. Just like on a pilgrimage!
Of course, I didn’t need to make this a pilgrimage on top of a pilgrimage. I could have secured a job to go to right after the Camino which would have removed the anxiety of the unknown. But I have this deep sense that America needs pilgrimage language and a pilgrim heart. We are heading into unknown territory and the things we think we should be able to count on just aren’t going to be there. I am convinced that the path to the future is going to be based more on trust than on planning.
In our culture, we tend to believe that problems can be addressed by better strategies. But often our strategies themselves expose how deeply we attempt to control things that are beyond our control. When the veil gets lifted and we discover how impotent we are, we are left with trust, radical trust. It’s not a choice we like, but it is often the best choice and only real choice.
I will close with the words of MaryAnn McKibben Dana from a post I received from a friend today on “Peregrinations and Pilgrimages.” She writes:
Such a journey takes great intentionality—not in the sense of planning, but in the sense of listening, moment by moment, for the next right step.
Life as pilgrimage. All we know is the “next right step.”
Brian Heron
Religious Innovator and Spiritual Pilgrim