Pilgrimage

Song of the Road

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Jacquie and I are still on the longest road trip we have ever taken together. At the end of January, we left our home in Jackson Heights in New York City to drive to Tucson, where we spent the month of February. Then we drove to Santa Rosa, California to undergo a medically-supervised fast at TrueNorth Health Center. My purpose was to overcome the Long COVID that has made me a semi-invalid for three years. So far, it appears to have worked. I will know better when my body finally regains all of its strength in a couple of months.  On the trip home, we stopped in Sedona, AZ. This was where our late son, Matt, took his family on their last vacation together. It was a special place to him. I’ve been writing an essay in order to understand for myself what this trip has meant to me and to us. Maybe I will publish something more about it later. However, in the midst of that writing I wrote about the experience below. It makes me smile. I hope you will, too. 

One measure of the soulfulness of this journey home –a funny one, is that I’ve had a playlist running in my head all through the trip.

– It began at the Golden Gate Bridge with Tony Bennett singing about leaving his heart in San Francisco. 

– Then I heard America (the band, not the country)  singing “Ventura highway, where the days are longer and the nights are stronger than moonshine.”  . .

– That led to Dionne Warwick asking, “Do you know the way to San Jose?” 

– All through the desert from Pasadena across Arizona and New Mexico, I heard the Sons of the Pioneers looking for “Cool water, clear water . . . water!” 

– As we drove across the incredibly flat, yellow-colored plains around Amarillo, I heard Roy Drusky longing for childhood when “the days stretched out before me like a long, long Texas road.”  And also, as we drove across the panhandle I heard George Strait singing, “All my exes live in Texas.” (I’m sure that, if I had any exes,  I would want them to live in Texas — it would serve them right!) 

– Oklahoma brought on Gene Pitney ’s,  “I was only 24 hours from Tulsa.”

– From Arizona through Missouri we kept criss-crossing “historic route 66” as the signs called it. That, of course, brings up the “de de-de dum-dum” of Nelson Riddle’s theme from the TV show and Nat King Cole singing, “You’ll get your kicks on route 66.”  (Or, as one billboard put it, “You’ll get your kitsch on route 66.”) 

But, as we entered Missouri, the music stopped for awhile. As Jacquie said, the landscape from here on east is familiar. Indeed, until we hit the hills of  Appalachia where we grew up, it is all what I call, “Ohiowa,” where we spent the largest part of our lives. That may be why I heard, “I want to go home. Oh, how I want to go home!” If “Detroit City” is the buckle of the Rust Belt, Cleveland is about 3 punch holes to the right.

But, “home” isn’t Cleveland nor is it Bobby Bare’s beloved cotton fields – it is New York City.

I know some of you reading this don’t even want to visit New York, much less live there. But we are all different. 

New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that’s who I am.”

Della Ephron

That’s me. I grew up on a dairy farm about as far from New York City as you can get geographically and culturally and still be in New York State, but every time I walk in the streets of Jackson Heights, the world’s most diverse neighborhood, I say (as Jacquie will attest) “I love it here.” As we left Ohio yesterday morning, I heard Frank Sinatra singing: “Start spreading the news! I’m leaving today! I want to be a part of it, New York, New York!” 

Perhaps the purpose of pilgrimage, as T. S. Elliott, G. K. Chesterton, and so many others have said, is to come back to where you began and to see the place for the first time.

Or, as Dorothy Parker put it: “When you leave New York, you see how clean the rest of the country is. Clean isn’t enough.”

From Tourist to Pilgrim

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Photo: Roger Talbott

In the late 90’s, I visited our son, Matt, in Poland where he was working on a short-term mission for the World Student Christian Federation. During those ten days, we ate gelato in Warsaw’s Old Town, visited Białowieża National Park where the last of Europe’s elk and bison still play, and went to Auschwitz. When I returned, I had lunch with my friend, Ken. I described what a wrenching experience it was to see Auschwitz — especially to walk into the ovens.

Ken then said that he and his wife had a similar experience visiting Buchenwald. He said as they were leaving, feeling emotionally drained, he heard a man behind him speaking English with an American accent saying, “I thought it would be better than that.”

I often think about this story when I ask myself what kind of traveler I want to be — and don’t want to be. It’s a question I’ve had time to think about as Jacquie and I are stuck in a motel in Abilene, TX on our way to Tucson, AZ.

Modern spiritual writers tend to make a sharp distinction between tourists and pilgrims.

The stereotypical tourist is like the guy who thought a death camp tour should have been “better.” The tourist sees London on Monday, Paris on Tuesday, Rome on Wednesday. He checks Big Ben, the Eiffel tower, and St. Peter’s Basilica off his list — taking a selfie in front of each one. He goes home with T-shirts that say, “Been there. Done that.” But he is unchanged by the journey.

The pilgrim is someone seeking something (like a holy grail) or looking for a place (like Jerusalem) where, in some mysterious way, their love of God will meet the God of love. They may not put the journey in exactly those terms. I know people who have walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain. They were not devout Catholics who would thrill at finally arriving at the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela where the Apostle James is said to be buried. But, they were spiritual seekers looking for something beyond themselves. Pilgrims come home changed.

During this three-day ice storm, I have concluded that I am a combination of the shallow tourist and the devoted pilgrim.

Driving a Prius from New York City across the mid-South and Southwest to finally arrive at Tucson, AZ is closer to a whirlwind tour — six states in one day! Tucson is not exactly Jerusalem. Ostensibly, we are going there to spend February in sunshine — like all those folks I used to call “snowbirds.” I don’t think the grail is located in Tucson.

But, as I ponder this, I remember a story Milton Erickson tells in the book, My Voice Will Go With You. Erickson was an unconventional psychotherapist who often used hypnotism in his work. He said that when a patient was “stuck,” he often recommended a kind of pilgrimage. He told them to take the highway to a specific side road. After that, they should turn left and follow a dirt road the end and see if they can’t see something that tells them how to move on. The place he directed them to was an old gravel pit. There was nothing there but a pile of stones and a leaking, rusted water pipe. Yet, he said, clients almost always came back having found an answer that helped them change their lives.

The pilgrim is open to being changed by the unexpected. The tourist goes with an agenda, a checklist of sights to see and wines to taste. If the experience doesn’t meet his expectations, he judges that “it could have been better.”

A tour can sometimes become a pilgrimage in retrospect. As I look back on that trip to Poland, my most important memories are of Matt. One morning he bought a toothbrush and a mailer. We went to a post office. He paid hundreds of zlotys (the price of a loaf of bread) to have the toothbrush mailed to a young man in Romania who had helped him during the months he spent there. Matt had asked his benefactor if there was anything Matt could do for him in return. The friend asked if Matt would send him a toothbrush — unavailable in Romania at the time. Matt was keeping his promise. Since Matt died last summer, that part of my journey to Poland matters far more than having heard the bugler of Krakow end in mid-tune.

T. S. Eliot summarized what it means to be a pilgrim best in the poem he wrote about his own pilgrimage to a tiny village in England called Little Gidding:

“You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity,
Or carry report.
You are here to kneel . . .’

In Tucson, I may take a selfie in front of a saguaro cactus. I will try to keep from judging whether it is a “good” saguaro cactus. Instead, I hope I’ll feel some awe before a plant tough enough to live a hundred years in the desert. I hope I will come home changed.