On the gift of strangeness...

The dictionary tells me that ‘the word ‘pilgrimage’ comes from the Latin word peregrinus, meaning "foreigner," "stranger," or "traveler." Over time, the term evolved to specifically denote journeys to holy places for religious reasons.In Old French the word evolved into pelerin, still carrying the meaning of a traveler or foreigner.

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Hello dear ones, I’m thinking of this making a stranger of ourselves, and again a John O’Donohue line springs to my mind : “It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves me.” It is the opening line of his book, Anam Cara. I am thinking of the gift of strangeness, of seeing as if a stranger, with unexpecting eyes, open to grace, open to be taken by surprise, open to be interrupted in the way we usually relate with reality.

As Bayo Akomolafe says “‘God’ must be the way reality overwhelms itself; the messianic rift that tears open new dimensions of the ordinary, reintroducing it to itself; the disturbance that never permits the world to cool off absolutely into one thing or the other. The promiscuity of things.”

I am writing this from Japan - as I’ve mentioned before, tagging along on my husband’s work trip because I love living out “lost in translation”. I love it here for many reasons but one being that everything is so strange and different and it humbles me to not be able to make any assumptions about anything. You know that feeling?

It wakes me up.

But I want to write to you about a pilgrimage I made just before coming here -

It was my fifth year visiting the Magdalene sites in Saint-Baume, France. So I know the way well. I was a bit rushed you could say, I was tired, en-route from a festival near Berlin transporting the camper back to Spain. 

But I always make a point to detour to Her. 

And to take some days. But south of France high heat summer is not my vibe (at all). I had a lush early evening in the closing hour of her mountain Grotto (now a church sanctuary built into the deep wide open cave high up in the mountain cliff, where they say that she lived and taught from when she was in exile). I arrived just as the monks devoted to Her were delivering their stunning end of day Gregorian chant. Then after closing I started making my (familiar) way along the friendly forest cliff path towards the more secret ‘Cave of Eggs’ the one that looks exactly like a pussy. But I somehow ended up on a path too high that slowly traversed me to the top of the mountain, which I didn’t realize until I was standing at the top with no other way of making my way down but to walk 40 minutes all the way back to the grotto church and try again. Somehow, even though I’ve never gotten lost before suddenly now I took a bunch of paths that led nowhere, that suddenly ended without warning, and suddenly - though it has never been my experience before - the paths were tricky, I was sliding around, I fell hard a couple of times, fought my way through thorny bushes that took hold of my flowing garments - I always dress up for her in reverence, it’s my date-night with the sacred after all - and finally I make it to the cave. Exhausted, a bit angry, a bit cross, a bit “you know how I hate this pressing heat so don’t fuck me around” kind of vibe. 

But inside her inner lips sanctum it is always cold though. As you can imagine of a very very deep cave with a very narrow opening. 

Cold and wet. 

Three tea lights were still burning deep inside. I wondered when the last pilgrims left. I am always blessed to be here alone. The tourists don’t come here, it is only devotees who know about it. You also can’t be scared of the dark to come here. To go alllll the way in. You have to climb far down to get all the way in.

When I returned to my camper, sweaty, red, with thorns and bush in my hair, and dirt on my kaftans, my partner looked at me chuckling sort of ‘What happened to you’. My crossness had returned, ‘I got lost! She sent me here and there and everywhere and on the top of a mountain and back again. And the paths were tricky!’ He raised an eyebrow ‘You mean the easy forest path across the cliff? The one we always walk?’ No…. I mumbled…. It was different…. There must have been a landslide or something, everything looked different, there’s a bunch of paths now that lead nowhere…

A bunch of paths that lead nowhere.

So there it was. My familiar pilgrimage that she made me stranger of. It was not my most wakeful of days, so I can’t say I passed the initiation. I was rather shown my hardness against the “bad timing” of reality. On a better day, maybe the detour would have inspired something in me. But I just wanted to “get there’ (lol).

These days I’m getting more lost than found. 

Maybe that’s how she wants me. Lost. 

I said I liked to be a stranger didn’t I. Everything is strange when you are lost. 

We can receive the gift of that if we can let go of our resistance to it.

Question is - if I will close or open myself to that experience when it is not of my own choosing. Katie Abbott once shared something along the lines of ‘God wants you broken’ or something like that, and it always stayed with me. In a mysterious kind of way.

I have a book on my shelf titled “What is in the way is the way”. I never read it. I don’t feel inclined to… but I like the having the title there as a reminder.

What is in the way is the way.

What do you feel when look into the eyes of Anandamayi Ma? Before I knew who she was I stumbled on a tiny laminated photo of her somewhere, and I stuck her up on a wall in my campervan that I was living in. When I let myself sink into her gaze it melts me. That's enough to know about her.