By Ann Stebbins
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Originally I had planned to talk about Rumi, a 13th century mystic. BBC has claimed that Rumi is the most widely read non-English speaking poet among English readers today. His work appeals because he believed that the spiritual side of life was best expressed through the arts, including music, dance, and poetry. You have already heard Rumi’s words in this Fellowship Hall. They are set to music in a lovely round found in our Hymnal. Please turn to page 188.
Come, come whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
Ours is no caravan of despair.
Come, yet again come.
Let us sing, first together, then in a round.
However, I have postponed Rumi as my topic until next summer. Although I am captivated by some of Rumi’s words, so far he has not played a major part in my life’s journey, although, in fact it was actually a journey that further fixed Rumi in my mind. While traveling in Turkey, Bob and I stopped and walked where Rumi had walked . .. and taught and whirled . . . in Konya. Rumi was often a traveler on a sacred journey.
B. Instead I decided to talk about one very important part of my life’s journey, my travels. Travel has probably been an important part of the life journey of most Uus, including yours.
Last time Esther spoke she introduced us to the idea of “Vacation as an Art”. She mentioned a book which partly informed her comments, The Art of Pilgrimage: A Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred, by Phil Cousineau. Since travel has always been very special for me, I wanted to see what Cousineau had to say about sacred travel.
I confess that I have often felt guilty about my travel. I have questioned my motives for traveling as well as the ethics of using so many of my resources to travel. Has my travel only been self-centered and self-serving, or does it have a moral/redeeming dimension? In my comments this morning I have woven together reflections from Cousineau about travel as a sacred pilgrimage and my own travel experience.
II. BODY: Historically people have traveled for many reasons. I want to touch on just three: travel as tourism, travel as religious pilgrimage, and travel as sacred journey.
A. TRAVEL AS TOURISM
Many Americans travel to “consume” travel. We live in a consumer society. In recent years, when traveling with tours, I have been assailed by fellow travelers who want to play one-up-man-ship about the number of countries they have visited. Tour companies promote such one-up-man-ship; it produces profits. People whose goal is to visit the most places often do so without really experiencing them: they neither see, nor feel, nor smell, nor touch, nor taste what a country has to offer. They view their travel experience only through the lens of a camera and in a souvenir shop . . . where they buy things to remember the experience they didn’t have.
One of the world civilization courses I taught at EKU included a unit on ancient civilizations, so I was looking forward to my visit to the island of Crete, home of the ancient Minoan civilization. We arrived at Knossos, the architecturally artistically unique Minoan Palace in a tourist bus, along with perhaps two dozen other buses. Parking spaces were limited. The lines of tourists at the site were long, and the guides were short-tempered, competing with one another for the most advantageous position for their clients. As our line slowly snaked toward an excavation of one of the lovely Palace mosaics I heard the man ahead of me say “just another hole in the ground.” I could only think: why didn’t you stay home. To me he epitomized the tourist as consumer.
I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Fidel Castro’s dream to create a more just and economically secure life for the Cuban people. When I finally visited Cuba, already knowing his dream was failing, I was chagrined to find that my own travel there , , , as consumer. . . was undermining some of his accomplishments. He had finally bent to pressures to develop a tourist sector so that Cuba could earn foreign exchange to buy much needed capital equipment. Sadly, the Cuban school teachers and doctors who had been building a more equitable society, have been siphoned off by tourist businesses who can pay higher wages than the Cuban economy can afford.
In reading Cousineau I discovered that he wrote his book, The Art of Pilgrimage, partly in response to the rise of tourist consumerism and its experiential emptiness and to the negative footprint left by tourists.
B. TRAVEL AS RELIGIOUS PILGRIMAGE.
The word Pilgrimage itself most often brings to mind religious pilgrimage. (Congregation: Have any of you observed a religious pilgrimage or been on one? Know of one?)
[ The Moslem's once-in-a life Pilgrimage to the sacred city of Mecca as required by their Seven Pillars of Faith. . . . Or the Jewish pilgrimage to touch and to pray at the Wailing Wall, once the base on which Solomon's Temple rested.]
As you know, not only do major religions practice pilgrimage, but so-called pagan worshipers make pilgrimages to their sacred sites. (Congregation: Do you think of examples?)
[The Mayas. . . To pyramid centers they built. Aborigines . . . To Ayers Rock, a gigantic stone outcrop in central Australia where their Dreamings are recorded. Navajo . . . To sacred mountains and lakes.]
For its practitioners, “The religious pilgrimage is a transformative journey to a sacred center, a holy site. It may be . . . a spiritual exercise, . . . an act of devotion, . . . a source of healing, or . . . an act of penance.(xxiii)” Some religious pilgrims seek the erasure of sins . . . Others look for forgiveness . . . Still others earn merit from their gods or goddesses.
I have never been a religious pilgrim, although I have seen religious pilgrims on my journeys. Bob and I went to Mexico in 1955 to direct a work camp at Mazatlan, the first time I had traveled outside the United States. On that trip we visited Mexico City, and I have been back to Mexico City several times since. Each time I have visited I have seen devout Roman Catholics Mexicans on a sacred pilgrimage to the Basilica of the Virgin Guadalupe to honor the Black Madonna. I have watched wrinkled old women in shawls, young fathers in torn tee shirts and worn tennis shoes with babes in arms . . . , dark-haired teens in pony tails . . . all crawling on bloodied knees from the iron entry gates of the Basilica through the wide Basilica doors and finally on to its imposing candle-lit altar. With solemn faces and bent heads they were petitioning the Black Madonna to relieve their suffering or thanking the Black Madonna for answering their prayers. There is little doubt that religious pilgrimages are pregnant with meaning for their practitioners.
C. TRAVEL AS SECULAR PILGRIMAGE
However, I am a humanist traveler. Although I was brought up Christian . . . a religious pilgrimage is not for me. I have always wrestled with the frequently heard words from my Christian upbringing . . . the three S’s: the spirit/ the sacred/ the soul. In my growing-up experience, Spirit was always tied to the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Sacred was that which was blessed by the Trinity. The Soul did not belong to me but was claimed by the Trinity.
When Cousineau talks about making travel sacred his definition goes beyond the Trinitarian definition of sacred. He says, “Pilgrimage is a powerful metaphor for any journey with purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler (xxiii). “ He includes among the things that may matter deeply: architecture, history, music, books, nature, food, family history, the lives of scholars, heros or artists a well as the lives of saints, and/or religious heritage. He includes deity as one of the possible definitions of the sacred but he adds other possible definitions: ground of being, human emptiness, the unconscious, Mother Nature, and the absolute (90).
So what has mattered deeply to me? Taking away the Trinitarian connotations, what have been the sacred/spiritual/soulful experiences that travel has brought to my life’s journey.
For me travel has been a life-affirming experience, making me feel fully alive in body and mind.. When hiking in the Sierra Madre Mountains above Oaxaca, Mexico, I found myself looking over a precipice I had just scaled . . . looking at a valley far, far below. And over the precipice was a narrow ledge, my only way ‘out.’ ” “Tengo miedo.” “I am afraid,” I shouted. But once the hike was over, I felt extremely empowered. . . fully alive. . . having met the physical and mental challenge.
For me travel has provided new ways to connect with others. Perhaps the most dramatic life-changing experience has been the magic and miracle of learning another language. It is a thrill to see the world through a new symbol system and to communicate with a different set of sounds. This life- changing experience came for me through travel. A two-year old Costa Rican who was correcting her US daddy’s Spanish motivated me to finally do something I had always dreamed of: to learn to read, write, and speak another language fluently. So at age 52, I began taking Spanish classes at EKU and living with Spanish-speaking families in Costa Rica. Among other lessons learning Spanish has taught me to connect. . . to empathize. . . more fully with those struggling to learn English. To connect to the “other” through Spanish continues to be a challenging, exhilarating experience.
For me travel has made me feel more fully connected with an ever greater part of Mother Earth . . . her landscapes and seascapes. In a fourth grade geography class I learned about the jungle, a frightening, threatening environment with wild animals and an impenetrable tangle of plants. Through travel I lost that fear, canoeing on the Amazon River and walking its jungle paths, looking for snaking lines of cutter ants and scanning the treetops for furry sloths.
In the world’s oceans I have come face to face with seals peering through my swim mask in the cold Pacific waters surrounding the Galapagos. I have snorkeled with sting rays and nurse sharks among the reefs of the blue-green Caribbean. More connections with Mother Earth.
I like Joseph Campbell’s definition of pilgrimage as . . . a winding road to meaning, both intellectual and emotional. I would add that there is a physical dimension as well.
Travel has made me more fully aware of the sources of the self. Buddhist scholar, David Loy, speaks of the construction of the self being a result of the habitual ways we perceive, feel, think, and behave. The experience of travel challenges these habitual ways of defining one’s self.
In far away places one can reshape . . . or escape . . . one’s current identity, to temporarily abandon one’s name, one’s personal history, one’s possessions, one’s affiliations. It is an opportunity to step outside your “normal” self, and try on a new identity. An opportunity in Buddhist terms, to deconstruct and then reconstruct the self. The first time I went to Costa Rica, I stepped outside myself; I was no longer identified as Bob’s wife, Susan/Beth/Kara’s mother, Kentucky resident, EKU college professor. I became, instead, a wealthy blond middle-aged Gringo student. It was a reminder of the sources of the self and the significance of the “other” in defining the self.
The first time I went to Mexico I had serious Culture Shock. My habitual ways of perceiving, feeling, thinking and behaving were challenged. Bob and I drove all the way from New Haven, Connecticut (Atlantic Coast) to Mazatlan, Mexico (Pacific Coast). In Mexico, the landscape was a cultural shock, miles and miles of sand and cacti and sweeping purple mountain ranges. Through sleepy adobe villages that seemed uninhabited. Signs I couldn’t read. People whose language I could neither speak nor understand. Stray dogs and ragged, maimed beggars. Strange, new, disagreeable odors. Odd kinds of things, not previously identified as food. I was shocked at my shock. How much of my self was tied to my own language, to my own culture, to my own geographic surroundings, and how could I feel such a distaste, such a disgust for the other?
I was once accused of liking to travel because I was alienated from my own society. I was attending a symposium, probably presenting a paper researched in Costa Rica on their women’s movement. A faculty colleague, an American historian, suggested that people who travel outside their own society do so only because they are estranged. . . are outsiders. . . don’t fit in. Certainly wanting to escape is motivating. In 1984, tied to my administrator’s desk, I was looking for an escape. A folder advertising a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship landed on my desk. It was a means of escape. I could study and immerse myself in Costa Rican life: its language, its geography, its flora and fauna, its politics, its schools, its economy, and its treatment of women. But what began as escape became a love affair, a life-changing experience.
By profession I was a teacher. Still am. I have traveled to become a better teacher. Cousineau would approve. He quotes the 15th century Indian mystic, Kabir, “If I have not experienced something it is not real (xxix).” I wanted to more completely understand the societies about which I was teaching. My travel helped make world civilizations more vivid, meaningful . . . believable . . .authentic, first to me, and then to my students. I wanted my students to better understand the dilemmas of “the other.” I hoped travel would allow me to communicate that same reality more clearly to my students. Like Esther, who gets our attention by personalizing her message … I could personalize my message to my student, hopefully a more effective way to communicate.
Some of the classes I taught were about so-called developing or third world societies, societies where many people still live in tiny villages, engaged in subsistence agriculture. My travels in Latin America have taken me to some of these places.
In Mexican Indian villages I observed that running water meant a hose running from the local well to the mud-paved adobe pueblo. In Guatemala I observed men and women working with digging sticks on their small patches of milpa, the traditional agricultural combination of corn, beans, and squash, to eke out a living. I hoped my direct experience would help my students understand better the nature of poverty, the dilemma of “the other.”
I rode jammed public buses along the Atlantic banana-growing coast of Costa Rica, experiencing the extreme difficulty of travel in a country where few could afford automobiles and where government resources to provide more public transportation were limited. These and other experiences helped me to connect and empathize with the “other,” to see how their lives were different from mine, but also how they were the same. . . More to pass on to my students.
Philosophically/morally I am a UU. I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Travel helps me ” experience the deeply real that lurks everywhere beneath centuries of stereotypes and false images that prevent us from truly seeing other people.(xix).” As a teacher I wanted to help my students recognize the stereotypes and false images. I wanted them to be able to connect and empathize with “the other.”
Each society stereotypes its enemies. Cold War propaganda resulted in my students having false images of the peoples of the Soviet Union. As a teacher, I wanted them to know that the Russians as people had worth and dignity. So I told them this story.
. . . One day while riding on the Moscow Underground I watched a well-dressed Russian woman start to board a train. But she was too late; she was left standing outside the train. However the pocketbook she was clutching was caught in the door and then dropped to the floor inside the train. A young Russian man picked it up, consulted with fellow passengers, and evidently developed a plan to return her pocket book. I watched him get off at the next station, and wait for the following train going in the same direction. Sure enough the woman who lost the pocketbook was on the following train and he was able to return it to her.
. . . Further, to dispel false images I told my students about the Russian wedding party. I went with some American students to a War War II memorial high on a hill overlooking Moscow. There we spied a wedding party, young bride in a traditional American(?) white bridal gown, her groom in his best suit, their attendants, and various family members. But no photographer present to commemorate the day. Our American guide had previously advised us to carry Polaroid cameras when we went to the USSR. To the wedding party he explained how the cameras worked. When I took a picture of the bride and groom they watched in astonishment as their features gradually appeared in the photo . When I presented the photo to them the bride got misty eyed . . . and then thrust her bridal bouquet into my arms. How touched we both were . . . Our common humanity came through.
Travel challenges our normative beliefs/standards. In the Mazatlan work camp I was in charge of the kitchen. Part of my job was to shop for food for about 15 campers, not in a local supermarket . . . there were none. . . , but in a typical Mexican open-air market, with its strange smells and sights. I was shocked to see meat hanging out in the open air, studded with flies. Or draped over a refrigerator, recently purchased under fiat from the Mexican government. But to the Mexican customer cold meat was repugnant. They were accustomed to unrefrigerated meat . . . Their habitual ways of perceiving, thinking feeling, and behaving were different from mine..
According to Huston Smith, religious historian, one of the aspects of travel that makes it sacred is the offerings provided by the pilgrims. Cousineau puts it another way: A sacred traveler owes respect to his destination.
Perhaps this is where my travel guilt kicks in. No, I am not among the many travelers who travel to consume . . . to lengthen the list of places I can say I have been. Nor to buy souvenirs . . . Nor take photos. So what offerings have I made? What ways have I shown my respect for my destination?
I hope I have helped in building a global community by spreading the word to others , , , to my students, to my friends, to my academic colleagues . . . about the common the humanity of us all. . . about the way we construct ourselves and others that can divide us.
I hope I have modeled my belief that every person has worth through not being an ugly American who insists that habitual American ways of thinking, perceiving, feeling, and behaving are the only ways. I have lived with their families, learned their language, studied their culture, and explored their landscapes and seascapes. . . I have always traveled to learn more about ‘the other.’
I have often chosen to travel with groups who promote global justice . . . groups that put their money where their mouth is . . . to improve understanding, education, and health care. Still, I am a traveler who feels that I have received much more than I have given.
III. CONCLUSION
When I first picked up Cousineau’s book, The Art of Pilgirmage, I wondered, “Is it worth writing/printing/reading a book on travel as a sacred pilgrimage? As I read it kept occurring to me, and now I repeat: “Has my travel only been self-centered and self-serving, or does it have a moral/redeeming sacred dimension?” Do I participate in sacred travel? Is this sacred travel worthy? Or is this presentation possibly . . . an apology. . . an excuse . . . a rationalization to continue my travels?
And your travels? Why do you travel?
