1. Journeying
The whole idea of the journey is basic to humanity. I think of the universality of the image of the quest, the myths of the odyssey or the search for the holy grail, the many stories of wandering and exodus. The monastic life has always been that of continual conversion, moving on, the never-ending transformation of the old into the new. Jung’s psychic reality is journeying on. If we say ‘Yes’ to Christ’s call to follow him our Christian discipleship asks of us to follow a man who had nowhere to lay his head. Christ himself is the Way and his followers are people of the Way. Just as he entered the wilderness, like Moses and the children of Israel, and made his own journey through life to death and resurrection and new life, so that pattern is inescapable for us all. And if in this model we see Christ encountering temptation and hardship we his followers should not expect anything less. This journey will be costly and the Celtic tradition never allows us to forget just how costly. It is also surprising and risky, not necessarily following any clear-cut pattern of having some end and goal in view so that the purpose can be clearly established and then followed. For the really significant journey is the interior journey. As Dag Harmmarskjold said, ‘The longest journey is the journey inward.’ It is here that I need help and this is one of the reasons why I have found it such a source of strength and inspiration on my own journey to look at the Celtic understanding of peregrinatio, a word and concept that is found nowhere else in Christendom.
The word itself is almost untranslatable but its essence is caught in the ninth-century story of three Irishmen drifting over the sea from Ireland for seven days, in coracles without oars, coming ashore in Cornwall and then being brought to the court of King Alfred. When he asked them where they had come from and where they were going they answered that they ‘stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where’. This wonderful response and this amazing undertaking comes out of the inspirational character of early Irish spirituality. It shows at once how misleading is that word ‘pilgrimage’ and how very different indeed is the Celtic peregrinatio from the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages or the present day. There is no specific end or goal such as that of reaching a shrine or a holy place which allows the pilgrim at the end of the journey to return home with a sense of a mission accomplished. Peregrinatio is not undertaken at the suggestion of some monastic abbot or superior but because of an inner prompting in those who set out, a passionate conviction that they must undertake what was essentially an inner journey. Ready to go wherever the Spirit might take them, seeing themselves as hospites mundi ‘guests of the world’, what they are seeking is the place of their resurrection, the resurrected self, the true self in Christ, which is for all of us our true home.
So peregrinatio presents us with the ideal of the interior, inward journey which is undertaken for the love of God, or for the love of Christ, pro amore Christi. The impulse is love. And if the journey is undertaken for the love of Christ then it argues that Christ must already hold a place in our lives.
To go to Rome
Is much of trouble, little of profit;
The King whom thou seekest there,
Unless thou bring Him with thee, thou wilt not find.8
This short poem reminds me of a truth I must never forget: I shall not find Christ at the end of the journey unless he accompanies me along the way. The same idea is expressed in a saying attributed to the wise saint Samthann of Clonbroney, who is reputed to have told the hermit who wanted to look for God in foreign lands: ‘Were God to be found overseas, I too would take ship and go. But since God is near to all that call upon him, there is no constraint upon us to seek him overseas. For from every land there is a way to the kingdom of Heaven.’9
‘Let us not love the roadway rather than the homeland lest we lose our eternal home; for we have such a home that we ought to love it’, wrote St Columbanus, one of the greatest of all peregrini. At the end of the sixth century, already middle-aged, he had set out to wander over the face of Europe and was finally to die at Bobbio in Italy in 615. ‘Therefore let this principle abide with us, that on the road we live as travellers, as pilgrims, as guests of the world … singing with grace and power, “When shall I come and appear before the face of my God?”’10
In those words ‘guests of the world’ St Columbanus has given me a phrase which I treasure on my journey. In a later sermon he says ‘the end of the road is the end of our life, the end of our roadway is our home’ and that again brings me back to the theme of ‘the place of resurrection’. I am reminded of Bairre of Cork who travelled with an a...