March 2010 Issue
by Kate Jaramillo
Every so often in life, says Catholic theologian Doris Donnelly, we are beckoned to “make an outward journey which responds to our interior quest toward the center we lose in the clutter of everyday living.” There’s something about my turning fifty that made me want- no, need to be- as Thomas Merton said in his Asian journal, “jerked clean out of the habitual.” In my work as a hospital chaplain and living in an urban setting with all that that brings, my life has plenty of clutter. I discerned, from searching the countless websites I had surfed to find the right vacation, that “vacation” was not what I was searching for. This time, I knew I needed something deeper than that, something different. I needed something to get involved in and connected with.
A classified ad in the back of a Quaker magazine offered a trip that was part service and part educational tour of Quaker community development projects in the Bolivian Altiplano countryside. Quakers? Service? Community? That’s different. I don’t know why I decided to go there. I had no particular interest in the country or the continent, for that matter. I hadn’t traveled internationally since my college years, nor could I with certainty pick out Bolivia on a map. Is that it or is it Paraguay? Columbia maybe?
If the tourist experience was not what I was embarking upon, what was it? There seems to be a need in the human person to reach within for an interior wholeness by activating one’s feet and heart and sometimes renewing one’s passport. When that happens, we become pilgrims. The journey we embark upon becomes a pilgrimage. On my trip to Bolivia I was a pilgrim, a woman en route to a destination, moving toward a particular end. I was not a tourist.
What is the difference between a vacation -even one with the lofty goals of service and education- and pilgrimage? Doris Donnelly delineates five distinctions between pilgrims and tourists: 1) pilgrims perceive an internal dimension to themselves, while tourists are focused on the external journey; 2) pilgrims invest themselves, while tourists avoid personal involvement; 3) pilgrims focus on being affected by the pilgrimage, while tourists seek to be unaffected or untouched by their experience; 4) the journey to the destination, the arrival and the return are important to the pilgrim, while arrival at the destination is important to the tourist; and 5) community is formed for the pilgrim, while this is not considered necessary or desired by the tourist.
Valuing the Internal
There are several ways to interpret pilgrimage, and three of those ideas are useful here. There is the literal pilgrimage, involving a physical journey to a significant place, for example, the birthplace of Jesus or where George Fox “saw a great people.” A second kind of pilgrimage is allegorical, viewing life as a temporary abode through which one must travel to reach an everlasting home at the end of life. A third way to view pilgrimage is to imbue it with spiritual meaning. The physical outer experience plays second fiddle to the internal spiritual meaning. Depth is the goal, not distance. It’s not the distance traveled that is important, or even the significance of the destination, but the depth of the experience that is transformative. The transformation sought by the pilgrim is away from incompleteness and fragmentation to a sense of wholeness, a complete human being that is open unto God. Therefore, a pilgrimage is simply a lived experience that helps us become more fully alive human beings. Pilgrims pay attention to this internal realm.
Most people wouldn’t consider removing trees, digging a trench, and other labor the stuff of a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, but for us nine sojourners, it was a meaningful experience. We spent a week in the small town of Sorata working at a student residence, called the Internado, that enables students from outlying communities to attend high school by giving them safe, supervised, affordable housing during the school year. The recently purchased building was in need of repairs and sprucing up. Poor drainage was threatening one of the buildings, so we dug a 32-foot trench for a French drain. The old stucco that faced the interior patio was moldy and in need of fresh paint, so we scrubbed and scrubbed the walls with wirebrushes and bleach before we sealed and painted them a cheery buttercup yellow.
We started work after breakfast and worked alongside the Internado kids when they got “home” from school. We learned just how much work you can do with a pickaxe and machete, and how to make do with the tools that you have when there isn’t a Lowe’s or Home Depot nearby. Pickaxe handles can be made with the branches cut down the day before, and can also be fashioned into sturdy ladders.
Valuing Self-Investment
To be a pilgrim means risking one’s identity. It is risky, after all, to surrender the comfortable clutter of one’s life so that God can be at the center. What is so risky about that? The pilgrim risks change, being transformed, and that personal investment is uncompromising. In the Christian tradition, the “way of the cross,” Jesus’ carrying the cross upon which he would be crucified to the place of his execution, is a metaphor for the Christian way of life and, in this specific sense, Christian pilgrimage as well. On this way of the cross, pilgrims hold on and let go over and over again. By investing themselves, they divest their preconceived notions. Pilgrims are not, therefore, mere observers as the tourist. They are participants, stepping into the photograph, getting involved and risking being changed.
A member of our group was a physician who had the experience of holding clinics in other parts of Latin America under less than ideal circumstances. The Internado was no exception. Patients from far villages waited in the hot sun on the patio to be seen in the “examination room,” which doubled as a computer lab for the students and a bedroom. In some cases, we needed translation from Aymara, the first language of people in the region, to Spanish, then to English. A glitch at customs necessitated a later delivery of medications prescribed at the clinic. The teens, who all had recent classroom experience with Spanish, did the intake work.
I participated by learning how to read blood pressure. It was my first time giving any “hands on” medical care. I was surprised by three characteristics of the people. First, most patients were women over forty with chronic pain being the predominant presenting issue. Lifetimes of backbreaking work, their role being to carry– children, crop yields, material goods –all on their backs, lead to damaged and inflamed spines and joints. Many had unresolved issues from old injuries that were never properly treated. Second, there was almost no obesity and most people were in surprisingly good physical fitness, regardless of age or gender. I never knew that people could have blood pressure so low and still be healthy. No one, even those in their 70’s, had blood pressure above 120/80. Their lifestyle includes modest diets, farming steep slopes at high altitude with no assistance from machines and very little from animals. To get from one place to another, they walk.
Valuing Transformation
The whole purpose of a pilgrim’s efforts, the goal of the journey, is precisely to be affected, altered, to be touched so deeply that a significant transformation occurs. The pilgrimage affects the total human being. The pilgrim’s equilibrium is thrown off, attesting to the power of place, events and people that imprint upon the pilgrim’s mind, body and spirit.
There is no greater equalizer than illness. I know this intellectually from working as a hospital chaplain and experientially from my experience as a cancer survivor. Illness strikes people regardless of demographic grouping or economic status. My experience with a foodborne virus brought me closer with three of my group mates by melting our divisions as only sickness can. Our driver, an Evangelical Friends pastor, reassured me on my darkest night of nausea and diarrhea, that I am to rely on “Solamente Dios.” The doctor reassured me that with medications, time and bowel rest that, “This, too, shall pass.” My brother in bowel distress reassured me that something as miniscule as a virus can fell the young and the strong, as well as the middle-aged and flabby, and that there is no weakness in moaning.
During those three days of illness, I was totally dependent on the kindness of strangers. I had to muster strength and courage just to stay with the group’s itinerary, partaking of some activities, missing others. Taking care of those who were sick brought the group together, reminding us of our common humanity, vulnerability and mutual dependence. The experience taught me, again, the value of being helpless, weak and totally dependent upon our fellow travelers and God.
Valuing the Journey Itself
The journey to the destination and back is just as important as the destination itself. Pilgrims see the journey as a rite of passage and a state of transition between where they were and where they are going. In the Christian New Testament, the story of the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-33) illustrates the importance of the journey in Christian spiritual practice. It’s in the process of the journey on the Emmaus Road that Jesus’ identity is revealed to his disciples. Even though the disciples don’t recognize Jesus as Christ, they love him as a pilgrim and offer him hospitality. The journey itself is an important aspect of pilgrimage, for it is an occasion for growth in love and recognition of the stranger as Christ in disguise. In the generous offer of hospitality and in the receiving of it, the pilgrims become beloved, familiar and known, where once they were invisible strangers.
When we were not working, we took time to visit several community development projects funded by Quaker Bolivia Link. We visited two water projects, including the dedication celebration at one in Huarina Choro where we were fed a wonderful meal of chicken, corn and a variety of potatoes and other tubers. In the village of Pallca Pampa, a predominately Quaker community six miles from Sorata, we were told of the many development projects that improved their way of life. An irrigation project enabled them to grow more than one crop per year. Another water project added potable water, latrines with showers and flush toilets, a communal laundry tub and major crop improvements. Another project added beehives, providing another source of marketable income for the community. These Quakers have taken the initiative to improve their community. The Internado itself is also a result of their initiative and dedication to education of their youth. Coming from a tradition of Friends that has difficulty organizing and providing for the smallest of tasks, I found this particularly inspiring. In La Paz, recipients of Bolivia Quaker Education Fund scholarships for college gathered with us for and Amarya-style potluck and story-telling about the importance of education in their lives. The San Gregorio Weavers Collective hosted us to a scrumptious meal of roasted chicken and potatoes, and provided us an opportunity to sample their wares of fine alpaca woolens.
Valuing Community
Pilgrims build community, and that bonding is essential to pilgrimage. The community is non-hierarchical, based on voluntary association. Through the shared experience of the journey communitas emerges, a spiritual community that is tied in worship and faith. This tie of communitas strengthens relationships between former strangers and between family members. Community enlarges individual life and cuts across social lines. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Psalm 122, known as the “Pilgrimage Psalm,” informs us that pilgrimage builds community and establishes solidarity with the oppressed. Jerusalem, the destination of pilgrimage in the Psalm, is the place in which the 12 Tribes of Israel are gathered. It is also a place where God’s order for the universe is established, fair dealing is done, the weak are protected and the underprivileged can receive impartial justice. The goal of the pilgrim is to enter into community with that kind of world-view. Pilgrims are not autonomous, independent, individualists. The pilgrimage imbues the pilgrim with a sense of solidarity, connectedness and community.
Our pilgrimage was a family affair. A grandmother, grandson, and his buddy, two mother/daughter teams and, a same-sex couple rounded out our little Quaker service trip group. We came from the West Coast and the East Coast and included active Friends and non-Quakers. The three teens were veterans of previous service trips to Mexico and El Salvador. After a day of digging and painting, they still had energy for a couple of hours of soccer with the Internado kids after dinner. At 73, a Friend from Philadelphia led the painting crew in scrubbing and painting. Her daughter, a yoga teacher, helped us work out the kinks after a hard day. Our 75-year-old leader was always the first up the trail to the villages we visited past the end of the road. Our doctor, when not leading clinics, was helping us avoid the turista sickness, and when we could not, treat it.
We are interconnected. We share the road. Pilgrimage, like meeting for worship, is a corporate event. We are not in it alone, for our own edification. Human beings need support, encouragement, and relationships or they perish. Our community is our companions on the road, those who offer us hospitality along the way, and those who wait for us back home. The journey toward wholeness is away from isolation and individualism, amid the perils of the world and through all forms of darkness, toward the Light of God.
Kate Jaramillo is a member of Bridge City Friends Meeting. To learn more about an upcoming Quaker service/study trip, visit http://treasuresoftheandes.com. To learn more about Quaker Bolivia Link, visit http://www.qbl.org/. To learn more about Bolivian Quaker Education Fund, visit, http://bqef.org.