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"Back in the USSR"

This was my first thought after crossing the Canadian border into the United States! Every other border crossing in the past felt like coming home. Not this time. It's not a case of "you can't go home again" or, "seeing the place as if for the first time." No. This time I returned to an America that does not feel or look like the America I grew up in during the 1960's. Those armed guards at the station remind me of Guatemala; those shared whispers in the ladies room of Cuba; those masked men nabbing citizens off the streets of the USSR!

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Paul McCartney, of Beatles fame, in 1968 wrote a song that was prescient: https://share.google/NLiypN3CIcMIcHa8o


McCartney talked about it in a 2023 interview that is like opening up a time capsule. Beatles' music was bootlegged in the USSR when the song came out. Later, the Beatles played in Red Square. In the interview there is a clip of McCartney asking Putin if he had ever listened to the Beatles when he was young. He says: "Yes, it was a window into the world".






 
 
 

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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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