Faith: Children, like religious pilgrimage, open our eyes
It is late spring, and the school year is coming to a close. The routines that surround so many of our lives are at a hinge point — summer is looming with possibilities and openness. We are coming up on Mother’s Day, on summer, on times of travel.
We are planning a number of official pilgrimages in my congregation — to Malawi in Africa to see how God is at work there and how we can be a part. To explore the civil rights movement in the United States. To Ireland and Scotland to learn about Celtic Christianity and the roots of the Episcopal Church in America and our ties to Scotland. And closer to home we are embarking on adopting a trail near our congregation and helping to improve it. We took a trip a couple of years ago to the Holy Land, which helped the stories of our tradition come to life and deepen, and our understanding of current realities expand.
I am a firm believer in pilgrimage — an intentional journey to draw closer to God or the divine. We step away from our routines and go to unfamiliar or holy places to discover more about ourselves and our place in God’s plan. To listen to what God is doing and has done in the world and how we can be a part of that plan.
There are many ways to do a pilgrimage. All faith traditions have this idea in some form, such as Hajj visits to Mecca in Islam, visiting traditional Christian holy sites, and visits to Hindu shrines and teachers. We know that there is something very transformative about entering into a different experience and rhythm of life and finding the divine at a deeper level.
From going far away into cultures and realities very different to our own to stepping into nature just down the street and working to improve it to visiting a place of worship just down the street, we connect to that which is beyond ourselves and become a part of something bigger.
It has me thinking about how parenthood is like a pilgrimage. You go from the one life to another and enter a new land. Your view of the world changes. Your perspective changes. Whether you are doing the majority of the parenting, you have called in all the help you can get, or your children are largely self-sufficient at this point in your life, parenting expands your world. Pilgrimage is often summarized as a trip to a holy place. And motherhood/parenthood is certainly a holy place.
I remember the first time I looked at a photo that both my child and I were in and instead of looking for myself first, I looked for them — this person that had pushed me out of the center space of my own life and taken that position themselves. No longer was it just about my needs and wants, but I was focused on theirs. Sometimes to the point of neglecting my own until I was doing us any good.
We do good together when we are able to experience the together — when we are able to get out of our own way and understand the other. That is true if it is a child, or people in another land with a different culture, or what others have experienced and done in times past that impacts us today.
What pilgrimage could you plan? Maybe a visit to a place close by that is holy to you or others, or you start saving and planning for something farther away.
Perhaps you come alongside a child or person that has had other experiences than you and try and understand the world through their eyes. There are so many ways to expand our understanding of this amazing world and how we can make it better for others and ourselves. We are all pilgrims in this life. Enjoy the teachers and teachings you discover each day.
The Rev. Katie Wright is rector at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Northwest Austin. Married for 27 years and mothering for 26, she has three amazing children. Doing Good Together is compiled by Interfaith Action of Central Texas, interfaithtexas.org.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Motherhood feels like a religious pilgrimage
