Before I left on my road trip/sabbatical, a wonderful member of the church I serve said to me that he hoped I found whatever I was looking for. I confess that I was caught just a little off guard by his words because I had not really thought of my trip in those terms. Perhaps I should.
When the idea of this trip first struck me, it wasn’t in the form of a search or quest. It was simply an intriguing possibility. It likely emerged from recollections of an unfinished motorcycle trip nearly forty year previous, a trip that visited much of the country but didn’t make California or the Southwest thanks to an unfortunate encounter with a logging truck in Oregon. And that previous trip didn’t really have any grand purpose. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.
Of course such a trip has some obvious pluses. It is something I know that I enjoy doing. It would provide a big disconnect from my usual life. It would also provide amply opportunity for thinking, pondering, reflecting, and such, not unlike an extended retreat. And then there is the fact that almost every encounter with people on the trip will be with strangers. What surprising encounter of Christ in the other might await?
Still, despite many good points to be made for a trip such as this, there was no real object of the trip. Other than the plan to hit a lot of national parks and include a couple of stops at some communities of intentional, spiritual practice, the trip wasn’t framed in such a way that I could know if I had found what I was looking for.
I’m not sure if that is a good of a bad thing. One could make a case for the sort of aimless wandering that only realizes its destination after having arrived there. Less a search and more a serendipity I suppose.
At the same time, the lack of any clear goals could be a laziness on my part, or perhaps a fear of failure should I not reach some stated goal, clearly not to have found what I was looking for. And as there was always an assumed spiritual element to the trip, a vague hope of drawing closer to God, failure on that count could be more than a little disturbing.
So what am I looking for? I don’t know that I am much clearer than when that church member raised the issue for me, although I have made a few observations. I’ve barely begun, but things have clearly leaned too heavily toward the doing side without sufficient being. I wanted to get there and then experience things. It’s given the trip a busy feel so far, and I definitely need to find a better balance. Perhaps a lack of clear spiritual goals makes it easy to default to busyness.
I have a two day stay at a monastery followed by a week long art workshop and stay at Ghost Ranch, a Presbyterian conference center northwest of Santa Fe. (I’m not very artistic so this should be interesting.) Perhaps this will help with the balance I mentioned earlier and even give me some clearer spiritual focus.
After that time, will I know what I’m looking for? Dare I say that I need to find God or faith or spirituality in some way? If I did, what would that say about my current state? But I’m glad the church member said what he did.
No comments:
Post a Comment