A Long Restlessness

What we usually call the real world is not Real at all. It is a flaky as they come. Laugh at it; weep over it; pray for it; take every opportunity to expose it; seek to redeem it. But never make the fatal mistake of thinking it is Real.

N. Gordon Cosby, Seized by the Power of a Great Affection (now out of print)

We live in a strange, in-between world, we humans, and mostly it is not at all what it seems. We learn, at school and by contact with most of the adults around us, that what we read of in the newspapers, and are taught in our classrooms, is The Real World, and that we had better pay proper attention to its demands and its particulars. But William Blake saw that

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

The Matrix series of movies touches this concept, in more ways perhaps than one, but for me the crucial expression is in CS Lewis’ luminous fable:

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

Susan looked at him very hard and was quite sure from the expression on his face that he was not making fun of them.

“But how could it be true, Sir?” said Peter.

“Why do you say that?” asked the Professor.

“Well, for one thing,” said Peter, “if it was real why doesn’t everyone find this country every time they go to the wardrobe? I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn’t pretend there was.”

“What has that to do with it?” said the Professor.

“Well, Sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.”

“Are they?” said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

All true pilgrimage follows a path that runs along the fault-line between the real and the illusion, between the world of the senses and what underlies it, between space and time, and the eternal. Dee Dyas, director of the Centre for Pilgrimage Studies at the University of York, in examining the nature of  Christian pilgrimage today, and its origins in Scripture and elsewhere, distinguishes three strands that constitute the practical outworking of life’s journey itself as pilgrimage: moral pilgrimage – our journey of obedience to God; physical, or place, pilgrimage – our journey mapped onto the paths of the geographical world and its holy places; interior pilgrimage – our journey towards communion with God through prayer, solitude and contemplation. In a sense, all three of these question reality as social consensus. Our journey to God takes us along the thin places of the mind, as well as of geography, and pilgrimage is really no more than a way of understanding that, of making it tangible, somehow.

Pilgrimage, too, is a way to understand the grace by which God reveals to us the truth by experience and Scripture. Life is gift, and its journey. Pilgrimage is itself all grace: the gift of landscape and distance, the mercy that prayer is even possible. Kathleen Dowling Singh writes:

Grace is the end of illusion, the realisation of a far more expansive and complete sense of being, the peace that quite literally passeth understanding. The word “grace” itself finds its derivation in the Old French for “kindness”… The word… has the connotation of a blessing, a quality of the sacred, and implies beauty, ease, and fluidity. Grace seems endlessly responsive to our longing for it… grace and gratitude have their origin in the same source. That source is Spirit, the Ground of Being. Grace is the experience of finally, gratefully, relaxing the contraction of fearful separation and opening to Spirit as our own radiant splendour: knowing it, feeling it, entering it, as it enters us.

The Grace in Dying