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Sheltering Walls

Bare Trees in Fog

Crying Wolf

Remember when we were children and got caught telling a" little white lie"? I do. My mother would say: "You're like the boy who called wolf". She was warning that the practice of telling lies becomes a habit and before long nobody believes anything that you say. Then when you were in real trouble, calling for help, nobody would come to help. It sounds so simple now: Tell the truth. Lies are dangerous.  It sounds so middle-class, so middle-America, so GREAT!

That, my dear friends, is the America in which I was raised. If anyone truly wants to make America great again, this would be the first place to start.


But, let's be honest, this is NOT the idea behind making our country "great again". And, it is not just a campaign slogan, either. It is a deeply insidious belief that the more lies you tell, the less truth matters. Crying wolf in the reverse!


While it may be impossible for most of the world to believe the man-boy calling wolf, you can believe that the man-boy is a wolf in sheep's clothing trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. Lookout!

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© 2023 by Marie Laure

​Six Stages of Pilgrimage:

  • The Call:

  • The opening clarion of any spiritual journey. Often in the form of a feeling or some vague yearning, a fundamental human desire: finding meaning in an overscheduled world somehow requires leaving behind our daily obligations. Sameness is the enemy of spirituality.

  • The Separation:

  • Pilgrimage, by its very nature, undoes certainty. It rejects the safe and familiar. It asserts that one is freer when one frees oneself from daily obligations of family, work, and community, but also the obligations of science, reason, and technology.

  • The Journey:

  • The backbone of a sacred journey is the pain and sacrifice of the journey itself.  This personal sacrifice enhances the experience; it also elevates the sense of community one develops along the way.

  • The Contemplation:

  • Some pilgrimages go the direct route, right to the center of the holy of holies, directly to the heart of the matter. Others take a more indirect route, circling around the outside of the sacred place, transforming the physical journey into a spiritual path of contemplation like walking a labyrinth.

  • The Encounter:

  • After all the toil and trouble, after all the sunburn and swelling and blisters, after all the anticipation and expectation comes the approach, the sighting. The encounter is the climax of the journey, the moment when the traveler attempts to slide through a thin veil where humans live in concert with the Creator.

  • The Completion and Return:

  • At the culmination of the journey, the pilgrim returns home only to discover that meaning they sought lies in the familiar of one's own world. "Seeing the place for the first time . . ."

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