Celtic Advent - Day IV - November 18
"Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you cant practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage." ~ Maya Angelou
I have always been fascinated by the tenent of Islam that every believer is called to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca in her or his lifetime. The closest I have gotten to anything like - but nowhere actually near - this religious expectation of pilgrimage is an annual tradition of my devout Roman Catholic family to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Attleboro, MA.
We actually called ourselves Advent Pilgrims.
Sometime in mid-December, usually just as the street lights came on, we would pack ourselves into the car and drive up to Attleboro where we would begin our pilgrimage by feasting on hot dogs and french fries or a slice of pizza and a Coke at the cafeteria.
I can not convey to you what a special treat this was, to have a meal - such as it was - outside of our home, away from our family table, in a place that was as close to a restaurant as we could afford eating food that bore no resemblance to the fare that usually graced our dinner table. It was a pretty heady experience for kids of a Portuguese immigrant family.
Once fortified with food, we would begin to walk around the grounds, going from exhibit to exhibit (called stations) which told the unfolding story of the Nativity of Jesus in 10 exhibits. At each station, we would stop and say a decade (10) prayers known as the "Hail Mary". (Meaning, we would say that prayer 10 times.)
At the last decade, we would arrive at the mid point of the Shrine to Our Lady of La Salette. There, only for the strong of heart, the faithful pilgrim would fall to their knees on the cement steps in the cold December night and say a Hail Mary, on your knees, one on each step, until you arrived at the foot of the statue where you whispered your prayer petition and kissed her foot.
If you didn't want to do the path of the Nativity Story, you could start at the bottom base of the Shrine and do an entire rosary, 10 rounds of 10 decades on the 100 steps up to the statue.
In the New England cold.
With your rosary beads in your mittened hand.
On. Your. Knees.
That, my grandmother said, was for "Catholics of Courage," which she defined as those Catholics who had the strength to "put their faith to the test".
Which I did. Every year. (Of course, I did.)
I didn't know why I did it, exactly, except, I suppose to prove the point that I was a "Catholic of Courage". Besides, I would do it not for myself but for my grandmother who had gotten to an age where she could no longer walk around the Nativity stations much less kneel her way up the "Catholics of Courage" concrete steps.
To be clear: This was not about the betterment of my character or the edification of my soul. To the contrary, this was a point of pride, a goal to be achieved, a service to be rewarded - usually with a trip to the Gift Shop where I would get yet another religious medal. And then it was back to the Cafeteria for a mug of steaming hot chocolate.
The Shrine burned down in an unfortunate fire in 1999. One of the priests fell asleep smoking a cigarette, as I recall. They've rebuilt it, I hear, but I don't know if the 100 step shrine was replaced. When I googled pictures of La Salette, I didn't find any pictures of the Shrine I remembered from my youth.
It made me a little sad.
I've since learned that my first introduction to being a pilgrim was not at all what it means to be a pilgrim. That is not to say that one could not visit the Shrine of La Salette as a pilgrim and avail themselves of the same things I did as a child and still have a deeply spiritual experience.
It all depends on intent.
The word pilgrim has its root in the Latin word peregrinus or “foreigner.” I love that because it sums up for me one of the important aspects of a pilgrimage - that a person removes themselves from the familiar and intentionally places themselves in a situation or place which is foreign - or different - or, out of the ordinary.
A pilgrimage is a journey or search of moral or spiritual significance. It could be made to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion or to pay homage or a quest for purpose. It could also be the intentional search for the holy land of our souls.
I have come to understand that my desire for pilgrimage is centered in what I think is a universal human longing for growth, for becoming more than we were by going farther than we ever dared.
A pilgrimage honors your deepest values and invites you to discover your own inner wisdom by practicing deeper listening and wholehearted decision-making.
It welcomes you to reflect on your vocation and life direction and allows you to get lost, to make mistakes and learn the lessons from those "failures" that you couldn't have learned any other way.
And that, my friends, allowing yourself to get lost, to set a goal and fail but continue on your quest, takes real courage - whether you do that step by step on a pilgrimage to a holy place far, far away, step by step on your knees up to a shrine of a holy person, or step by step on a journey down deep into the center of your soul.
I love this quote from R.S. Thomas: "The point of a pilgrimage is not to arrive but to return laden with pollen you shall work up into honey the mind feeds on."
I offer this poem as a reflection for this fourth day of our pilgrimage into an experience of a Celtic Advent.
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