What makes a pilgrimage a pilgrimage?

When I was a graduate student I chose the topic of Pilgrimage for my thesis. What I soon learned was how many others were as interested as I was in pilgrimage. It seems to capture the imagination. In hindsight, I see the many reasons it was of interest to me as a woman on the cusp of a changing life. It took many more years before I would embark on my own pilgrimage. I had one failed attempt when my long-planned pilgrimage was thwarted at the very last minute as I was about to board a plane: That connecting flight could not land in Boston in time for my international flight. It was over before it started. Another year would go by before I finally made that pilgrimage to the Anchorage of the medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich in England within months of the pandemic foreclosing all travel. Julian, herself, lived during the Black Death plagues of the fourteenth century. She had a near-death experience in which she saw sixteen visions. She survived three long days that forever changed her life. Writing about those visions became her life's work. An anchorage was just the place for a writer given that there was no exit! When she entered at the age of fifty she knew that she would spend the rest of her life living in that 12 x 12 room attached to the small parish church with three windows but no door! How did she do it? What was it like to live there? Could I? Could you? Seeking those answers comes as a "pilgrim call" to leave home to go to the place where one woman lived and died and has never been forgotten. She is now affectionately known to twenty-first century pilgrims as Lady Julian or Mother Julian.

In three weeks, I will be leading a small group of women on a pilgrimage to Julian's Anchorage. The writing that she left behind resulted in Julian becoming the first known woman to have written a book in English. A quite extraordinary feat for a woman in 1373 in direct defiance of the Roman Church who killed "heretics" for having a Bible in English rather than Latin. In spite of that, she wrote two separate versions which have survived for over six centuries. The first was known as the short text, or Showings; twenty years later while living in the Anchorage, she wrote her well-known Revelations of Divine Love. Both books are still in print in 2024! Her handwritten words were transcribed for posterity by some nuns and are now part of the rare manuscripts archives in the British Library. These writings fared better than the Anchorage and St. Julian's Church having been bombed to the ground during World War II. They were rebuilt and reopened in 1953 thanks to some nuns who did not want Julian's life story to be forgotten. Clearly, the nuns in the middle ages and those in the twentieth century were forward thinking in a way that has made it possible for the Anchorage to have become a pilgrimage destination. Many a pilgrim travels far and wide with Julian's most well known words "All Shall be well" on their lips and in their hearts. Our own pilgrimage will coincide with Julian's feast days, May 8 and 13, celebrated by both the Anglican and Catholic Church.

The Guardian Editorial* in the past week spoke to the ever-growing number of people who set out on pilgrimage each year and continues to increase exponentially. What is behind this global phenomenon reaching across geographic, demographic, and ideological beliefs? The answer may be in the word itself:

WHAT IS A PILGRIMAGE?

For as long as humans have walked, they have walked to get closer to their gods.

The Greeks made these quests, as did the Israelites, the Mayans, and the Chinese. Jesus hailed these journeys, along with the Buddha and the Prophet Mohammad. These wanderings have been around forever. Pilgrims made them in the eons before writing was invented. Believers made them in the millennia during which the great civilizations were built. Seekers follow them today.

Six stages characterize every pilgrimage:

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

2. 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.

3. The Journey: The backbone of a sacred journey is the pain of the journey itself. In India, pilgrims approach the holy sites barefoot. In Iraq, they flagellate themselves. In Tibet, the more difficult the trip the most merit the pilgrim acquires. In almost every place, the travelers develop blisters, hunger, and diarrhea. This personal sacrifice enhances the experience; it also elevates the sense of community one develops along the way.

4. 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.

5. The Encounter: After all the toil and trouble, after all the sunburn and swelling, 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 membrane in the universe and return to the Garden of Origin, where humans lived in concert with the Creator.

6. 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.

from: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/sacredjourneys/content/pilgrimage/

*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/14/the-guardian-view-on-pilgrimage-a-21st-century-spiritual-exercise?CMP=share_btn_url

Music Saved My Life.

Music educators take note!

I vividly recall the day that Mr. Filiatro, sporting a green bow tie appeared out of nowhere, or so it seemed to my eleven-year-old senses. He took off his suit coat placed it on the back of a chair, rolled up his white shirt sleeves, then set up his music stand in the school cafeteria. He passed out sheet music for “Oliver” which if you recall was the story of the orphan boy who dared to say: “More please, Sir.” Then, he lifted his baton and said: “Ladies, let’s sing."

Mr. Filiatro had no idea he was to become my savior. I have often wished that I had had the presence of mind, the maturity, and the understanding to tell him so. If only I had understood then the impact that he would have on my entire life going forward, I would have "climbed every mountain" to sing his praises. Forte!

God knows I could belt it out! My father had encouraged me and I had loved so much our time together at the piano which he had bought brand new for his three daughters so we could take lessons when he had never been given that chance. He knew music by heart and shared it unabashedly around the house singing all the musical theatre scores that he performed in community groups. I sang with him, as did my sisters, and we were something like the Von Trapps though not in the highlands but in the lowlands of a rural town. “Nothing could be finer,” to my ears.

In the first grade my sister and I, wearing beautiful handmade taffeta dresses (sewn by our seamstress mother), took the stage to sing: “Snow, snow, snow. Happy snow, snow, snow. Where does it come from? Where does it go? Snow, snow, snow.” Then we swished away behind the heavy, red velvet curtain as enthusiastic parents applauded. Those three minutes of my young life mattered in a big way.

On weekends my father was prone to working in the yard while I, always nearby to wherever he was, sang with him from the swing: “Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh what a beautiful day. I have a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way.” One song after another, we sang our duets: “If you were a picture, I'd hang you on the wall, sit back where I could see you, never move at all ...'Cause that’s how much I love you, baby.” One day, Daddy came home with sheet music for the song: "MOTHER". He secretly gave it to his three girls and asked us to learn it for Mother’s Day. Somehow without my mother’s knowledge (I doubt that) we did so, surprising her that May with my older sister at the piano while we sang. “M is for the million things she gave me.” She applauded and my Dad called for an encore. We obliged. Such was life. Until it wasn’t.

On a cold and frigid February night the music stopped when my father’s heart stopped beating. From then on, the piano sat silent except when I would hear the clink of a note or two at the brush of my mother’s feather duster. Silence does not always come in a welcome way. Silence does not always indicate harmony. Silence as we know, can be deafening. But, it was not so much silence, as absence. There would be three very long years living, so to speak, without the sound of music . If I sang at all, it was alone: A wailing song in the woods behind that little house.

So, when the day came in the school cafeteria, I knew exactly how that young orphaned boy, Oliver, felt when I sang those words: "Where is love? Does it fall from skies above? Is it underneath the willow tree that I’ve been dreaming of?” It had been a long, very long intermission between the acts of my young life. The second act opened when Mr. Filiatro brought his unassuming self with that precious gift of music back where it and I belonged, together, as one. Mister Filiatro had come just at the right time, in the nick of time. Time did heal. Music saved me.

This past Sunday, at long last, a moment presented itself for a an overdue thank you. I stood on the stage with the musicians of the string quartet* for whom I had served as Board President. They were honoring me, but I felt myself honoring Mr. Filiatro, my father, Edward Vincent, and Music itself. Unbeknownst to me, as I turned to thank everyone for sharing "Music Among Friends" I was holding in an unopened box the gift of a ticking clock: Time. Music is all about keeping time in a way that measures not just the beats of the notes, but the beats of our hearts. Music is a mysterious, magical, gift from the unseen realm that if left unheard leaves a hole in one's heart. I asked a composer friend how it can be that he hears a few sounds/ jots them onto a page as notes/ then when read and played by a musician or singer / another hears what began in his own mind? His response was: "the paper is superfluous"! Let that sink in the way that music itself sinks into every heart that hears her sound.

*flchambermusic.org

Silencing Our Voices

Silencing is the method for stopping voices from speaking up and out. Silencing is the tool of those who strive for power over all other voices. This is an ancient method that has proven itself over time. It starts with the small things: keeping your thoughts to yourself to avoid an unpleasant conversation or an argument. Then, when it comes time to say something that nobody else will, keeping silent becomes a way of being complicit. Follow that with outright refusal to say what you think for fear of reprisal and pretty soon, keeping silent is a way of life.

The bigger silences come when the powers to be or wannabe challenge every other voice around. The usual tactic is through fear and intimidation. Threats, whether idle or not, have the effect of silencing truthsayers or naysayers which amounts to anyone who disagrees. These days we are all witnesses to the silencing of our own judicial system that seems to be at odds with its own mission of truth and justice for all. Instead what we hear is one overarching voice that speaks louder than all the rest through a “bully” pulpit, never more aptly named and used for all its worth. This “in your face” attitude has been met with total impunity which has the effect of corroding the checks and balances of our Democracy. That, is exactly the point! I heard recently from a woman in England, an American expat, that she has been thinking about moving back to the States to work on the political campaign. It caught me up short. Haven’t I been thinking about getting out of here “in case things go bad” in the 2024 election? Self-silencing is the most resounding silence of all. We are all guilty of it.

When this blog is posted today, it will be my 40th over the span of 10 months. My original intent was to begin a dialogue. I have not managed to engage more than a handful of dedicated readers. Each week I have tried to offer thought-provoking ideas that would spark a conversation. It has not turned out that way. I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness calling out for someone to answer. . . where are YOOOOOOU? I have been asking myself why that is? The answer is not going to come from me alone.

At first I was reluctant to publish beyond my own sphere of email contacts. Truth be told, I dared not invite violent responses. When nothing came back, I took a bigger step out onto the limb and published the blog live through my own social media accounts. The number of readers increased exponentially and broadened beyond "sea to shining sea". Even so, the comments did not rise above sea level. I went all out and wrote more openly about events that impact all of us. One person responded to me privately that my take on events was "way off base" and asked to be dropped from the list. Fair enough, I'll take it, I can take it. I welcomed her honest feedback. But, the dialogue stopped there. If only she had engaged other readers by adding her voice to mine. Surely, someone else would have had a word or two to say. I won't belabor the point because I have nothing to draw from but my own conclusions. It has been suggested to me that many people knowing that voices on the internet last forever do not want to have their own comments out there for any number of reasons. Fair enough. Let's just say, if that is the case, dear readers, we are silencing our own voices, and in my humble opinion is the most egregious silencing of any and all to come from those who ruthlessly seek to hold power over "America the Beautiful". 

Some years ago, I was among others singing in the Tanglewood Music Shed overlooking the beautiful Berkshire Mountains of Western, Massachusetts, my home state. On that perfect summer afternoon, we all shared our voices by singing "America the Beautiful". It lingers even now in my mind as it did over the hills as a reminder of a lovely counterpoint to raising our voices in protest. Voices shared matter, no matter how we choose to do so.

At the end of April I will stop writing this blog not out of frustration or as a way of silencing my own voice. Words alone will not stop this rising tide against Democracy in our homeland. More action is required. In other countries, in other times when dictators seized control, the "resistance" rose up when voices were meant to be silenced. I often wondered whether I would have joined them. Sadly, there is no need to wonder any longer. The time has come here at home. America herself is on the edge of failing rather than living up to her "crowning good" of brotherhood and sisterhood. The resistance must drown out those with the megaphones using their voices against those. . . "who more than self, their country loved. . ." and who refuse to have our voices silenced.