In the email devotional I’ve been helping to put together for Lent, one of the weeks focuses on pilgrimage. I’ve been thinking about how the experiences in my own life that I would qualify as a pilgrimage always take place in the wilderness. While some people may go on pilgrimages to cities or temples or cathedrals, I go to cathedrals of rock and snow, towering peaks stretching to the sky above valleys brushed with wildflowers. I look to the wilderness as a place of renewal and of oneness with the Creator. When I push my body to its limits, muscles straining up one last hill, dirt staining the palms of my hands, a breeze caressing my cheeks, the sky opening up into a panorama of splendor, I can feel my soul surge through my chest. I feel like God is wrapping me up in a blanket of awe, like I’m going where God is calling me to go. My hours out on the trail blend into one long journey, an eternal pilgrimage into the Divine.
But I don’t want the wilderness to be the only place I experience God. While nothing can fill me up quite like a day on the trail among flowing water and Douglas firs, I don’t want to have to step outside my life, to retreat into the woods away from other people in order to find God. I live in the city and the Cascade peaks I love are thousands of miles away. There is noise and distraction here, cars and trains, exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke. I can’t step outside my backdoor and onto the trail anymore. But there is a river on the other side of Storrow Drive and sometimes when the sun sets into the clouds above Commonwealth Avenue, it feels like the world is going to split open in wonder. The full moon still hangs in the sky above the Prudential Center and in the fall, the wind can make the ivy-covered buildings dance in waves of soft red and brown. On Sunday mornings, there are moments when the streets echo with silence and the sound of my footsteps seems to hang suspended in the air like snowflakes. When the cold descends on the city like a curse, the wind tips my head back and reminds me to accept it like a cure. Because sometimes I can hear the whispers of the Spirit in the billowing of my jacket against my cheeks and when I can coax a smile out of a passing stranger, it feels like an answered prayer. The graffiti scratched into the chairs and windows on the T reminds me that we’re all still looking for a way to leave our mark on the world, to find where God is calling us to go. And the hawk that swooped over my head last fall reminded me of the voice of one calling out in the wilderness. It doesn’t come as naturally to me, but I’m starting to find God in the noise of this city, in the roaring of highways and beeping of crosswalks, in the thick accents and the train cars that feel like they’ve been vacuum-packed, in the sheer force of life being lived on every street corner.
I still feel drawn toward the wide-open spaces of my mountain valley, pulled toward a space so big that only God can fill it. But I’m learning to find wide-open spaces in the shadow of brick buildings, to write prayers on pavement instead of tree bark, to hear God in the trundling of trolley cars as much as in the bubbling of creeks, to look forward to where I’m going instead of back to where I’ve been. I’m learning to find wilderness where I am.