ARRIVING HOME
Amongst the graffiti in a Manhattan phone booth (remember them?), someone well-meaning if a bit overzealous had scrawled the words, “Jesus is the answer.” Below it, some wit or skeptic had added, “Ah, but what’s the question?” I have learned along my way what others had known before me, that questions are often more important than answers. If we get the questions right, the answers are more likely to reveal themselves.
For the past year, I have been on pilgrimage from one place to call home to another. Hence I have been calling my monthly offerings, “Pilgrim Postcards”, since I have travelled halfway across a continent to resettle in a place that is at once a new and an old home for me. Of course, that was a long way to travel with various adventures and challenges along the way but, as with all pilgrimages, the real question is what has been happening inside me as I covered those miles and the experiences each one contained.
I am not sure I am fully settled out here even yet or that some parts of me aren’t still living back with you folks and others who became dear to me during my sojourn in the Comox Valley. But it is time to commit to being here and part of that, for me, is to let go of some of the ways I have been looking back over my shoulder to where and who I was before. So, this will be my last postcard, at least on any regular basis. I do hope to visit out your way again because there remains a deeper bond to you and to that land that will never be broken. But, still, one year later seems like an appropriate time to do more looking forward than backward – better yet, to focus clearly on where I am now.
What are the questions I need to be asking myself as this leg of my pilgrimage comes to an end? That, in itself, is a question, and I hope it is a good one. Let me answer my own question, then, with more questions in hopes that I get at least one of them right. What about these…?
- How has this pilgrimage been affecting me, changing me, forming me?
- Who am I now that I wasn’t a year ago?
- What has this pilgrimage been preparing me for now that I am here?
- (To allude to the Jacob story in Genesis) “How has another Presence been with me at each step, even when I have not been fully aware of it?”
- What are any nudges of regret (looking back) and anxiety (looking forward) trying to say to me now?
These are quite personal questions which, when I ask them publically as I am now, contain two invitations to thoseof you who are gracious enough to take the time to read them.The first invitation this time is to reach out to ask for help refining my questions. As my companions on this journey, how would you phrase the question I am trying to ask so that the answers I need become more evident? I have received many good gifts from you all and I would be deeply grateful for one more: the gift of the right question for me to be pondering one year after “going east, old man, going east.”
The second invitation is always to nudge you to reflect for yourself on what I write. Maybe, this time, the nudge is to lead you to consider what question would be helpful for you to be asking yourself at this stage on your own journey. I wonder what that might be.
Peace to you,
at each step and each resting place, now and always.
Ted Hicks