Thoughts in Solitude | Michael Valliant

Pilgrimage at home

There’s a good chance that a whole lot of people are feeling stuck at the moment. Stuck at home, stuck in a rut, stuck in the time warp of several weeks known collectively as blursday.

And this won’t do. We are far too busy, we have too much to do to be sitting at home. We believe Tom Cochrane when he tells us, “Life is a highway, I want to drive it all night long.”

Of course, if you are like Holly, Michael, and Daryl from “The Office,” or me, or a lot of people, you realize how old that song gets, how old that way of thinking gets, and how easy it is to get “stuck” and restless with that approach to life.

Maybe we needed to pull the car over anyway. And get out and look around. Thomas Merton helps me do that. The photo at the top of the page was taken by Merton in northern California in 1968. I first came across it in an incredible multimedia piece by Emergence Magazine. One of the most calming, soul-opening, wonder-producing things I have ever watched, if you have 11 minutes, this video captures more of how I feel about God, spirituality, solitude, and pilgrimage than just about anything I have found.

I say this frequently, but Merton has been one of the most influential thinkers in my faith walk; he not only speaks to my soul, he often speaks my soul, and sends me into wonder and awe and connection and helps me find my own words for my own journey.

In the film, Merton talks about the metaphor of the journey.

“Going off where God leads you… We’re all on a journey, we’re all going somewhere… The geographic pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. Every moment and every event of every person’s life on earth plants something in their soul.”
Thomas Merton

In the photo, Merton and company have pulled over. They are out of the car. I think that’s significant. Journeys aren’t always about traveling physical distance; you run the risk of missing what’s going on around you.

Pilgrimage is one of my favorite words. It has been since the first time I heard it–it imprinted on me in a deep way, like it was already waiting in me, just to be woken up, and it may end up as part of a tattoo. Pilgrimage is equal parts an interior word as it is exterior/geographic.

There was a great deal of care and thought given to the house where I live by people who lived here before me. There is a winding path of stepping stones from the back deck, around the yard, to what has become my writing shed/sanctuary. The stones sit above the puddles when rain collects in the yard and it also makes a meditative, mindful, intentional walk in any weather. There are days when I try to make each stone a prayer. Among the stepping stones, there are two with pottery, stones, sea glass, rocks and found objects incorporated into them.

“Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.”
Thomas Merton, “Thoughts in Solitude”

If I think about it, a walk across the yard can be a symbolic pilgrimage. It can take me somewhere new, even while taking me to the same place each day.

If I take each step as a prayer…

“God utters me like a word, containing a partial thought of himself. Let me seek then the gift of silence and poverty and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer. Where the sky is my prayer; the birds are my prayer; the wind in the trees is my prayer. For God is all, in all.” (Merton, Emergence video)

At the door to the shed is the second art-dazzled stone. It puts creativity right at the doorstep. The kind of journey, the kind of art we need right now, maybe the kind we always need is the kind that connects us. It’s the art where we can see another and be seen by another, in the truest sense. And it’s a journey into and from our own solitude that shows us how we are connected.

Into our solitude…

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon, if we’re not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.” (Merton, Emergence)

And back out…

“Our task now is to learn that if we can voyage to the ends of the earth, and there find ourselves in the stranger who most differs from ourselves, we will have made a fruitful pilgrimage. This is why pilgrimage is necessary, in some shape or other. Mere sitting at home and meditating on the Divine presence is not enough for our time. We have to come to the end of a long journey and see that the stranger we meet there is none other than ourselves.” (Merton, Emergence)

Pilgrimage, really faith is about transformation. It’s both about finding ourselves, which we have to do first, and then seeing ourselves in others and them in us.

Whether we are at home or when we can get back out into the world, we are on the same journey. And if we want to get the most out of it, we are going to have to get out of the car. We’ll want to meet the strangers. And meet ourselves. Maybe we will come out of this pilgrimage at home finding ourselves more connected than when we started.

Just Get Living

“Just Keep Livin,” was a notion from David Wooderson, Matthew McConaughey’s character from the movie “Dazed and Confused.” The motto struck McConaughey so much that he named his foundation after it. I have dug it as a way of going about life–you struggle, you fall down, if you are lucky enough to get back up, just keep livin. You have great moments, you celebrate, you drink it in, just keep livin. What else can you do?

But what if you get to a point in life, you come to a crossroads, you have an awakening of some sort, and you look at life differently? What if you wake up to a revelation you can’t go back from? You are compelled to do something. You have to act.

Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts. – Thomas Merton, “Thoughts in Solitude”

You can know something all you want, right down into your very being, but unless you act on it, act in accordance with it, unless it means enough to live it, what do you really have?

Thought and life, thought and action, need to be aligned. They need to have each other’s back, to prove one another. It can be a feedback loop:

Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. – Merton

I would venture to say, if you live in an area where you grew up, and you love life, you are tapping into something like experiencing new things in the old and old in the new. Coming at something familiar with fresh eyes is huge for me.

Let’s get back to action. We are a society whose actions don’t line up with our words. We see it in churches, politics, sports, schools, you name it. We are all guilty of it to some extent. But we can do something about it in our own lives.

I’ve been pretty good at thinking elevated thoughts, finding and mining great experiences outside, or as a father; having moments, minor epiphanies that leave me reeling; riding that stoke, maybe writing it down, on to the next. Surely they are moments to be savored, to carry with us, to seek out.

Then I come to a place in life, where things look different. Things feel different. Life the way it was falls apart, shakes to pieces. And a new life is opened up–opened up and connected, or uncovered to be part of something bigger. Like I’ve been given the gift of a new way of seeing and being. If I do nothing with that, if I put it on a shelf to come back to later, or I just keep living the same way, and sit on it, then what do I know differently? What have I done with the gift?

The spiritual life if first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived. – Merton

When you know things to be different than they were, it is no longer okay to just keep living. It’s more a matter to just get living.

There’s a funny thing about an awakening where God is concerned. That kind of awakening is not a matter of: go to church, be good, color inside the lines and everything will be okay. Anybody can do that and churches are full of people who like that safe approach to spirituality: follow the rules, keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times. It’s comfortable, reassuring.

Look back at the lives that the early prophets lived, the life that Jesus lived, the lives the disciples lived. Did they play it safe? Not so much.

The prophets, too, were a wild bunch. They had to be because they were the spokespeople of a wild God, a God who didn’t care much about temples and offerings but who cared a lot about the way people were treated and the opening of the human heart. – Richard Rohr, “From Wild Man to Wise Man”

In my mind, any kind of spiritual life is not about playing it safe, but following, being led by the spirit, or more specifically, the Holy Spirit working through us. The opening of the human heart. And that can be some scary stuff. But it’s when and where the adventure begins. It’s where it gets good. It’s open eyes, new eyes, wide eyes, looking down a path, taking it all in, and walking it to see where it goes.

Hold on, what’s different? I’ve walked paths, walked and run trails for years? What’s new? The difference is a new understanding: it’s not about me, or my walk specifically. I’m not just randomly picking paths. I’m trying to go where I am led, called, and trust it, trust God. I’m not setting out down a path I would have chosen or thought about prior to now. I’m trying to act on thoughts that I don’t exactly know how they came to me.

Wisdom is God Himself, living in us, revealing Himself to us only in so far as we live it. – Merton

I’m trying to wise up. And just get living.

A Journey with Fire

There are a few times in life where I have felt my heart and soul consumed by fire. It’s an incredible feeling. One that I am starting to feel again. It is wholly overwhelming. It’s a stirring of the soul, a call to action.

I am laid back, I tend to go with the flow and enjoy where the ride goes. That’s a tendency I like about myself, but it’s also one I can let get taken to the extreme. It’s a good thing until it becomes passive. Then it can lead to complacency. I am not a fan of complacency.

I’ve come to recognize that my whole being needs challenges; needs adventures; I need to be roused. Woken up. I’ve been feeling that in crazy ways of late. Fire is the best metaphor I can offer. It feels like flames.

Thursday was bookended by soaring thoughts. In the morning, it was from reading John Eldredge’s “Wild at Heart.” Eldredge flies in the face of the notion of Christian men and women as simply “nice” and “good” people; he sees the church today as being too full of bored (and thereby boring) people and points us more toward living a life with passion, adventure, not playing it safe, and finding our true name, our calling.

The history of a man’s relationship with God is the story of how God calls him out, takes him on a journey and gives him his true name.

It strikes me that it different key points in my life, books have found me that bring up and work through the warrior spirit. The year Anna was born it was Chogyam Trungpa’s “Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior,” from which I have a tattoo on my upper back, and now it’s Eldredge calling me back to that energy with God. It has stoked more inner fire, seeded more prayer, and roused a renewed energy at a time when I need it.

My other Thursday bookend came from watching “The Shawshank Redemption” at the Oxford Community Center’s movie night.

I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope. – Red

The team of Andy Dufresne and Red stir my soul every time. But here we are with the journey again, at it’s beginning.

I fractured my skull during Sunday School at church when I was three years old. That should have been all the indication I needed that my journey was not going to be easy, or boring, or safe. Our walk with God is a full contact sport.

This morning’s sermon ended with a prayer from Thomas Merton, which the minister found during college. He claimed that Merton helped save his life. I feel the same way and have written plenty, and will continue to write, contemplate, and quote Merton.

This morning’s prayer came from the book, “Thoughts in Solitude:”

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not know the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Our journey, our road is ours. It’s not like anyone else’s. It’s wired into our unique DNA, and we have the Holy Spirit in that same DNA, a compass to help us find our way. The Holy Spirit, is also that fire in our hearts, which gets stoked in each of us after our own passion, our own calling. The closer we get, the more it gets stoked, the higher and brighter it burns. We have to find what stokes us, and how to sustain it. We are given maybe a spark, which we have to help grow and light us up.

I’ve got all this dancing around in my head, walking up to communion with the girls together for the first time in our lives. I’ve got deep joy welling up, as the closing hymn begins playing.

The song? “Light the Fire in My Heart Again.”

Amen.