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  • Pilgrimage
  • Steven Chase

Religion as a word points to that area of human experience where in one way or another a person comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

Not all of the articles in this issue of Spiritus are explicitly about pilgrimage, yet all can be read in some sense as pilgrimage. Essentially, all writing is a kind of pilgrimage.

Having just returned from my own pilgrimage to Saint Benedict's Monastery in Minnesota, it is Cara Anthony's article that first catches my attention as I sit to compose this Introduction. Still, every article can be read as a summons to or from mystery. I find it fitting then to frame each introduction as pilgrimage, a soul journey undertaken by the authors in response to mystery's call.

Another bit of mystery that comes to mind is the beckoning of pilgrimage in the work of Michel de Certeau. Certeau's life was pilgrimage in praxis. As I listen to his discourse, I find that mystery is as much about wonder, as it is about nightmare. Certeau is every bit as honest about mysticism as Buechner is about religion born of mystery. Yes, nightmare and wonder, twin bed-children to the gods of mystery.

The first article is clearly about pilgrimage: "Walking as Resistance to Hypermobility: the Camino de Santiago Pilgrimage" by Cara Anthony. Cara declares a summons to pilgrimage from the start in the words in her title: "resistance," the nightmare-sounding word, "hypermobility," and "pilgrimage," itself seeking the mother of us all, "mystery." In Cara's prose, "hypermobility" not only sounds like a nightmare, it is a nightmare of a most contemporary kind; the resistance against which is provided in pilgrimage through the slow act of walking. Her husband, who provides the light and airy drawings, slows hypermobility with pen and paper. We are blessed to have both arts, writing and drawing, entwined in a married couple and consigned to resisting "hypermobility."

The essay and the drawings dauntlessly resist the nightmare of hypermobility, effectively a metaphor of homelessness, and offer a rendering of the pilgrimage summons as home. [End Page vii]

Nuptial election and the election of religious life are mysteries that summon one to pilgrimage as well. In the sense that Buechner intends, they are both driven by the energy contained within mystery. In "Nuptial Election and the Ignatian Exercises," Daniel and Jacqueline Cere follow the mystery of marriage as a pathway to Christ. All "elections" in the Exercises are thus intended, but only two are recognized as permanent, unchangeable elections: nuptial and religious life.

It might sound a bit out of step to consider the Exercises as a mystery that summons the pilgrimage of marriage. However, while often overlooked, marriage is the very definition of a summons, a core feature of election within the Exercises that "distinguishes it [Excercises] from other forms of prayer and spirituality approved by the church" (15). Election is a choosing, or recognition of the mystery that summons one into a life of astonishment and (again) nightmare which together form the pathway to Christ. Neither marriage nor the religious life is intended to idealize a particular path, as Ignatius was quick to point out. Both are, rather, "simple" walks of wonder on the way to Christ.

In the Ceres' portrayal, the awe, mystery, and often darkness of the pilgrimage of marriage taps into deep veins in the Catholic tradition emphasizing the bridal nature of humanity's relationship to Christ.1 In fact, Pope Innocent III viewed the nuptial relationship as a key to unlock numerous primary mysteries of faith.2

The nuptial election, to become a bride of Christ, literally and metaphorically, unveils the shadows and lights of the mystery of our creation in the image and likeness of God. This is a summons. Unlike Camino, it is a pilgrimage without end, an immersion into deification, divine theosis, epektasis. Nuptial election: a dark, bold, and cold uncertainty? Yes. Nuptial election: a shared, illuminated, and amazing pilgrimage having something to do with love? Yes.

Mark Graves does a wonder-filled job of translating Buechner's "mystery" into "Mystery" wherein, if "Mystery" is to...

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