Passion for Pilgrimage

by Alan Jones

Overview

The Christian spiritual journey is a pilgrimage to wholeness, a search for home that is in God. In this classic work on contemporary spiritual living, Alan Jones explores the various parts of the pilgrimage home. Using literature, art, and biblical texts as illustrations, he explores our search for light and love, repentance, and forgiveness in the context of the Passion and Easter stories.

An excellent book for group study during Lent and Easter, this edition includes study questions at the end of each chapter. Passion for Pilgrimage is also provocative reading for individuals at any time of the year who want to understand the Christian journey more deeply.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819225214
Publisher:	Morehouse Publishing
Publication date:	01/15/2000
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Alan Jones, author of Passion for Pilgrimage and Soul Making, was dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. He was formerly director of the Center for Christian Spirituality at General Theological Seminary in New York.

Read an Excerpt

PASSION FOR PILGRIMAGE

Notes for the Journey Home: Meditations on the Easter Mystery

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By ALAN JONES

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 1989 Alan Jones
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2521-4

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CHAPTER 1

The Same Old Story

We are actors in a Passion Story about the joy of homecoming. We may, however, be tempted to give up the dramatic project we call our life before we even begin. After all, isn't it the same old story, the same old folly, we the same tragic ending? I am often overcome by the thought that my years are running out and I seem to play the same old tune. I wonder if anything really new can happen to me. Even if we have only a vague sense of history we can see how pointless it all is. Life is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing." This is a cry of a despairing man caught up in the drama not of his own choosing. Are we not similarly caught up in an inexorable drama, with no guarantee of a joyful homecoming? Some seem to find their way through to a kind of happiness but isn't that at the expense of seeing the whole picture? If it's the same old story, where is the promise of freedom? Is it possible that the telling of the old, old story is a way of opening us up to new possibilities? The season of Lent involves the telling of the same old story that invites us to become participants in the drama. If we choose to act in this great Passion Play we shall find ourselves called to be experiments in vulnerability. We will have set in motion a course of events totally beyond our control.

Not long ago, just as the season of Lent has got underway, a friend complained to me, "I know it's Lent, but where's the joy?" It is easy to understand why Lent is often misunderstood as a period of savage and destructive negativity. Doesn't it encourage a despairing view of life "full of sound and fury"? It begins, after all, with Ash Wednesday and the grim reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. This is hardly the prelude to a party! Nevertheless, reminders of our mortality are salutary. Understood in the context of a life of faith, they prepare us for a celebration. Lent is about getting ready for a banquet, about preparing for a wild party. While there can be a great deal of fun in a spur-of-the-moment party, the preparation for a great banquet takes a lot of time and effort. Getting ourselves ready for this particular wild celebration demands our being willing to be probed by hard questions about the meaning of our longing. This particular party requires that we bring with us, especially, our passion and our need.

We live in an age when everything has to be palatable and easily digestible. Hard questions and tough decisions have to be reduced to the consistency of cream of wheat. We have neither the stomach nor the teeth for solid food. Lent, however, is a time when real meat is served to feed the mind as well as the soul. There used to be a steak house in New York that displayed a sign: "If you find our steaks tough, then quit. We don't want weaklings here!" Lent is a serious time and, if the moment is right, it can present us with life and death issues. It isn't, however, meant to be a grim time. It is an opportunity for truth-telling, for our discovering the true grounds of joy and hope. It is often hard to strike a balance between the struggle and the joy. Perhaps that is why popular religion tends to come in two forms: the vindictive and the sentimental. The vindictive preacher threatens his hearers with hellfire, while the sentimentalist pours out a cheapened and easily digestible cream-of-wheat kind of "love." What we crave is a glimpse of the joy in the struggle, of hope in our pain. What we long for is to be actors in a drama with substance.

Let us begin with a question. Do you really know how to enjoy the world? Do you know how to enjoy yourself? One of the greatest parables in the New Testament has to do with the search for enjoyment and fulfillment (Luke 15:11–32). The Prodigal Son thought he knew what joy was. He had to wander far away from "home" (his true joy) to find his heart's desire. The journey home for the festivities takes us through miles of alien territory. Literature abounds with figures searching for home, for heaven. Dante goes to hell to find heaven. Faust sells his soul. Milton's Adam and Eve lose paradise. Wandering off, far from our true selves, is, paradoxically, the way back to who we truly are. There are many names for this pilgrimage to our joy. Jungian psychology, for example, calls it individuation (a very dull term for such an exciting process). There are many descriptions and stories concerning the search for joy. Underneath are questions about where "home" really is, about the way there, and about what we can expect when we arrive. In order to find our way back we have to be willing to be actors in the drama of our homecoming. An actor in a drama is given a certain character to play. He or she has to become a new person to be convincing. A great actor so embodies his or her character that we are caught up in the action and we "believe" that there, before our eyes, is Hamlet or the Phantom of the Opera, or St. Joan. Acting requires embodiment, incarnation, being genuinely present in the here and now. The difference between us and a real actor is that we are playing ourselves or, rather, we are searching for our true selves so that we may play our part more and more fully.

Do you really know how to be truly present, here and now? Do you know what it is not only to have a body but to be a body? In short, do you know how to enjoy the world? Do we really know how to enjoy each other? Are we "at home" in our bodies? We will never be able to answer these questions until we ask ourselves a more fundamental one, and that is, What kind of person am I called to be in this drama? What is my role and how do I find out my part? There are as many ways of being human as there are people. What we fail to understand is that finding out what our distinct role is in the world demands that we embrace some form of discipline. True freedom involves limitation. If, for example, a poet chooses to write a sonnet, he or she has chosen to write within certain limits. The poem cannot be thirteen or fifteen lines and still be a sonnet. Choice involves limitation, but within those chosen limits is the possibility of infinite variety and innovation. This simple truth is one of the most difficult for us to grasp. As with a sonnet, so with a human being. It needs emphasizing: Freedom involves choice and choice implies limitation. Human beings tend to choose contradictory roles in the drama and hurt themselves and others as the story is played out. The question remains: Do you know your part? Are you really in it? Do you want to play it to the hilt? The issue is further complicated by the fact that many of us feel trapped in playing a part in a drama in which other people have control over the casting. We find ourselves playing the same tapes over and over again. The same old story becomes a ghastly repetitive cycle of addictive "happiness," anxiety, and despair. We have to be very careful about not accepting our role from anyone less that God. God is the only one who knows our part, and while our unique role may involve the playing out of tragic elements, there is glory in it and its end is joy. In fact, while the dramatic shape is set (it is the same old story) we, as coauthors and coactors with God, make the play up as we go along.

The paradox is that, the more we embrace the fixed form of the Drama of Death and Resurrection, the more we experience the joyful freedom of being fully alive and fully present. This principle is as applicable to the spiritual life as it is to the making of an epic poem or the writing of a sonnet. We live in an age when most of us are frantic about "being ourselves." This is all well and good. What we don't understand is that being ourselves requires submission to a particular form or shape. This is what spiritual discipline is all about. It introduces us to the dramatic shape of human life, to its form. Within that form is the promise of liberation and unspeakable joy. Isn't it time we got ourselves in shape for our role?

We talk a great deal about "getting in shape." In fact, many of us are very concerned with our bodies. No one would quarrel with the importance of a sound diet and regular exercise. We may be overweight. We may eat junk food and avoid exercise, but at least there's the goad of guilt that we should try to do better! We know what a perfect body is supposed to look like. But what about the perfection or the wholeness of the inner life? Allan Bloom suggests that we need to recover the sense of urgency with regard to the inner drama.

Utopianism is ... the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out who we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly. As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of the perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine there is such a thing.

Rather than utopianism (Utopia, after all, means nowhere), the Drama of the Passion is the fire with which we must play, because it is the only way we can find out who we are. The literary guidance of which Bloom speaks is the same old story told over and over again. It is a story that truly forms the soul. The first thing it does is stimulate the imagination so that we begin to entertain the idea that we have one. But we cannot concentrate on the soul at the expense of the body.

We are spirit-enlivened flesh, and we suffer a great deal already from disembodiment. We have lost a sense of the body. That is why we cannot enjoy the world. We cannot enjoy each other. To be cut off from the body is to be deprived of a lively connection with passion. We frantically try to get back in to our bodies by taking in large quantities of food and alcohol. Sex and violence are other ways to feel connected to our bodies. We dread the dead weight of matter as much as we fear "the unbearable lightness of being" when we realize that our lives have no substance. The novelist Milan Kundera writes positively about the relation of the body with the soul. The soul needs the body's weight.

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

The Passion Story has to be played out in our flesh. We are to feel it in our bones as human beings rooted in the earth, fully present here and now. The actor in the Passion Play needs to cultivate a sixth sense, which is an awareness of the body. This sixth faculty is called proprioception—the sense of knowing where body is. The neurosurgeon Oliver Sacks tells of a patient whose proprioceptive faculty was destroyed. She is now disembodied. She has no way to recognize the body's "heaviness." She has no sense of its place. She says, "I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself. It has no sense of itself."

Imagine what a commitment it takes to recover a sense of the body. Such commitment is a passion. Sacks tells another story of a musician who suffered from a lesion in his visual cortex. He couldn't easily recognize things. He had no sense of objects outside himself. The way he kept in touch was by singing to himself. Any interruption to his singing made him lose his connection with things. He lost touch with his clothes, with his body. The result is that he sings all the time: eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs. In fact, he cannot do anything unless he makes it into a song. I think it is the same with us "normal" persons! We need a song to sing, a story to tell, a dance to dance so that we know where we are and who we are. But we seem to have lost the art of storytelling and dreaming. Singing bits and pieces of what we know and telling snatches of half-remembered stories are better than nothing. The more we sing and tell the old, old story the less we shall be satisfied with psychological and spiritual junk food, with false and temporary means of embodiment. Individually and collectively we feed on junk food—we hum snatches of tunes, dance a few steps, tell the fragment of a story. All this keeps us alive but barely. The Church invites us into a painful and passionate process of discovering who we are by the telling of a story. It offers us the kind of food that will make us into a true body with others. We are not brought to a sense of our bodies only individually but communally as well. Together we make a body. We become a body when we recover the proper sense of gravity that binds us to the earth and to each other. In order to do this we must recover the lost arts of storytelling, dancing, and singing. We need to learn to dream great dreams.

Mary Durack begins her book about the pioneering of Australia (The Rock and the Sand) with these words: "The people of the dream watched the people of the clock come out of the sea and strike their flagstaff firmly on the sand." The clock people triumphed over the dream people. The conquered dream people of the world have much to teach us about ways in which we might "find ourselves" by telling familiar stories and singing well-known tunes. In the commonplace rhythms of our lives there lies new hope and new possibilities.

Think for a moment of the idea of theme and variation in music. Milan Kundera, in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, reflects on the fact that Beethoven, toward the end of his life, became fascinated with composing variations on a given theme as a means of exploring infinite musical possibilities. There are two infinities: the infinity of space and time, and "the second infinity" of inward variation. The first infinity is, of course impenetrable. We cannot fill space, and time is running out for all of us. But, just as there is freedom in fixed poetic forms, so there are infinite possibilities in playing variations on the same old tune. Beethoven concentrated on plumbing the depths of the same sixteen measures.

What Beethoven discovered in his work with variations we find when we enter the Passion Story. Our lives are given "another space, another direction." The sixteen or so measures that make up our lives are suddenly fraught with significance when we make the journey into the second infinity. This journey is no less adventurous than a trip to the moon or to the planets. The journey inward is not unlike "the physicist's descent into the wondrous innards of the atom."

The Easter Cycle of Stories beginning with Lent is an opportunity to go into the "innards" of things, to understand them afresh and to find in them new space and new direction. To do this we have to learn some new skills. The journey into the second infinity requires our being able to remember the basic themes of our own lives without the benefit of editorial revision. The trick is how to remember old and painful chapters in our drama without being crushed by what we have to remember. How do we recall all the hurts and pains without being crippled by the memories? Doesn't our well-being depend on a kind of amnesia? Isn't forgetfulness better than remembering? If we refuse to remember we aren't anybody. We aren't any body. We aren't anywhere. How then are we to remember in hope?

The important thing to realize is that ours isn't the only drama that is going on. Besides all the petty dramas of our fellow human beings, there is the Drama of God. There is an overall theme played in the heart of God. We have to listen to that tune and share in the larger drama if we are to make sense of our own. The Book of Genesis initiates the main theme of creation. Adam (not one man or male but all people) is made from the dust of the earth and given a garden to live in. These first human beings were born in a garden. The theme of a garden will return many times as we play the tune through to the end. Two gardens (Eden and Gethsemane) are connected by our singing. Our first parents were capable of dreaming great dreams. They were given a gift too hard to bear. They were crushed by a knowledge too wonderful for them. They came to a dead end, to a barren and tuneless place.

We know what it is to have knowledge that is too hard to bear. That is why we edit our lives. That is why we lie to each other. That is why some Americans want to ban books in schools. Knowledge is dangerous. Knowledge has to be prepared for. Knowledge has to be sung and danced and made into story. The ancient tune of the first Adam (with its hidden knowledge of our once being in a beautiful garden and then being expelled from it) still plays in our bones. We know from the inside (even though our intellect may reject the theme of Adam's Fall as a silly myth). We are people of the clock and find it difficult to sing anymore. Our capacity to dream left us when we left the garden, although the memory remains.

Our bones "remember" many measures of the old tune. We not only know from the inside the themes of a garden and an exile, we also resonate with the hope and longing for a restoration. St. Paul writes about new possibilities in the new Adam (Rom. 5:12–21). The old, old story is given a new and revolutionary twist. We are introduced to a new and startling variation. We thought we were living a "tale told by an idiot" (a relentless cycle with no possibility for innovation), when, in fact, we are living a life capable of being filled with freedom, wonder, and glory. In short, we find ourselves in a garden of delights.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from PASSION FOR PILGRIMAGE by ALAN JONES. Copyright © 1989 Alan Jones. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface          

Introduction: Broken Bones May Joy!          

Part I. The Lenten Journey          

1. The Same Old Story          

2. The Road That Leads Nowhere          

3. Home—The Last Place on Earth          

4. The Search for Light          

5. A Heart Willing to Give Itself Away          

Part II. The Week of Crucifixion          

6. God Has Fallen in Love with You and Wants You to Come Home          

7. Homecoming—Facing What We Dread          

8. Home Means Freedom to Become a Family          

9. Come Home! All Is Forgiven!          

10. Who Is That Man Nailed to Those Two Pieces of Wood?          

11. The Tree Joining Heaven and Earth          

Part III. The Call to Glory          

12. Easter Is Now!          

13. Easter—The Hope of Glory          

14. The Drama in Our Bones          

15. The Fire of Love          

Notes          

Select Bibliography          

Editorial Reviews

"[Alan Jones] is a consummate storyteller and his stories illuminate our human condition as they speak of God's passion for us meeting our passion for God...Tell[s] the old, old, story and tell[s] it so well, that it seems new and yet familiar—setting us on our pilgrimage home."
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"Jones has written a fervent, beautifully expressed journal....Not just a Lent-Easter book, but a book for all seasons, to be re-read and dipped into over and over."
—The Living Church

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