A month ago, I was on a Bucket List pilgrimage to both the UK and Spain. And I've been back for a good while already. I've been quite aware that I have not written about my experiences. All of my life I have written with a kind of interior compulsion, but I find that this, along with so many other things, has changed.
So I'm coming to writing like I'm coming at life in general with a difference sense of sort of inventory-ing and learning.
The trip itself while it was happening did not often feel like "naru hodo" moments were detonating left and right. It was made up largely of normal life, lived in exceptional surroundings. The way I've described the interior experience to those who have asked me is with the metaphor of my life being like a baking dish that had food remnants baked hard onto it, which then was soaked in water. And then I became aware of a lot of truths in a manner much like baked on food lifts off and even floats around the water, once it has soaked adequately. So there were no detonations. (Well, there was one very profound moment, but more on that later.) There were vast swaths of things that simply suddenly appeared to me clearly, but undramatically. Most of these are not for public consumption right now, except as they filter through my living.
But some other things I will share.
My body forgot what anxiety feels like. This is significant, given the trip involved six flights, and I've always been an anxious flyer. I did occupy myself with some phone games on some of these flights, especially the very first one. But by the time we returned, I was able to experience the plane lifting off the ground as a physical sensation rather than an emotional threat. And this forgetting extended far beyond flying. This was a little surprising, but I'm very grateful.
I realized how much trust is involved with travel, and simply with daily life. I think I had an inkling of this that I wrote about a few blogposts back. And by "trust" here I mean knowing that external realities are reliable, especially where people are involved. Take flying. I think in part I've always been an anxious flyer because in the back of my mind I've thought I don't know how to fly a plane and I believed that I could not trust there to be a "common good" where pilots did know. Everytime I opened CityMapper to figure out how to get from place to place, I trusted that someone created this tool for that purpose. Even more significantly, I put a lot of mental and emotional labor into planning the first three days we spent in London. And I trusted the plan I made, and carried it out. And it not only went fine, but was also open to creativity and surprises along the way. I proved trustworthy to myself. It may sound odd, but that may have been the most impactful thing of all. I met my own needs instead of leaving myself hanging.
I met myself in a different way when we went to Spain. This was the pilgrimage within the pilgrimage, for my graduation ceremony from my spiritual direction program. I gave very little thought to it, because I didn't have to plan any of the logistics and was very pleased to simply allow someone else to carry that work. The Carmelite friars do this every year so they know the drill well. This was the point at which I began to meet the soaking dish.
I know that it was the grace of God through the prayers of the community and my patron saint of 2026 (St. John Houghton and my London experience of him deserve their own blog post) that I was soaking in, but in a real way I was also soaking in the physical experience of walking SO MUCH. My step counter tallied 315,000 steps for October, the vast majority of which were during the trip. On our last day in London I got in almost 30,000 steps, and yes my feet felt like hamburger at times. But something happens when you walk a lot. At least for me, it does. Walking naturally involves the same sort of bilateral processing that is used in EMDR, which I've been using in trauma therapy. When I wasn't exhausted, I felt great in ways that are hard to explain. Not walking in unnatural. So walking gives a good sense of oneself as a creature. I do believe all of that had something to do with being able to simply realize several things about myself and my life experiences that really could have been a bit emotionally devastating in other contexts.
I did have one big Naru Hodo moment which happened when we were in Alba de Tormes on October 14. Alba de Tormes is where Teresa of Avila died and where most of her body still remains. (The poor woman, and I do think it's a good thing that Catholics have let go of hacking their beloved ones into small bits, and least in the way they did in those days.) We toured the museum connected to the Convent of the Annunciation, and the church, and saw her relics. The friars mentioned there was to be a procession before the noon Mass for the convent, which we could catch if we so wished. At one point I saw a few of the friars racing out the door, presumably towards it, so I decided to check it out.
The Spaniards like to process with very large statues on very large biers carried on the shoulders of several very strong men, and this was one of those processions. There was singing (someone told me it was the national anthem) and people yellling "VIVA!" They had to move slowly of course. As the statue of Teresa exited the church and passed by me, I expected everyone to fill in behind the friars and the men and procession and, you know, process! Instead, almost everyone simply stood and watched. Inside me, hot grace was brewing -- the kind you just can't ignore but is also melting something. As the statue went ahead of me, I suddenly saw a scene from a dream I had some 30 years ago when I lived in Japan, a dream which I knew at the time was significant, but I didn't know what it meant. I was in my apartment looking down into the street where there was a woman wearing a brown dress and a black veil. She had her back to me, and I felt like I was called to walk with her. I've come to understand that as Teresa of Avila, and my call to become a Secular Carmelite. But there she was. And there I was, in my life circumstances, in this trip, in 2026 which has had some teeth. And hardly anyone was processing. Even the phrase from Teresa rang in my heart, "It's time to walk." It was a moment of surrendering my life to follow, regardless of what it was needing to mean. It pulled up deep things -- I guess this is the new dawn of I know it's significant, but I don't entirely understand what it means. And I started walking behind the procession. The tears flowed. And within a few steps I looked to my left, and my daughter was following beside me. If I can say it means anything, it means a commitment to live in freedom -- the freedom of the Spirit that is the Carmelite way.
I'll never pack everything into this blog post, but one more piece. I need to give a shout out to Fr. Matt Blake. He did a lot of the teaching in Spain during the pilgrimage, and I recognized in him somewhat quickly a kindred spirit to myself. He's intellectual, and seems like an encyclopedia of the Carmelite saints. He said he's been coming to Spain for 40 years, so he knows the sites very well. He could talk for an hour about intricate history off the top of his head. I'm not saying I can do any of that -- but I felt a kinship for his intellectual bent, and mostly the way he would then go silent and hidden. Felicity and I actually ended up at his meal tables several times, and so we did chat with him a bit, but also sat silently a good deal. He was also the type to want people to move punctually and not lag behind, and we also tended to be of the same mind and so somehow we moved in the same pod often. Let's say he struck me as not-a-people-person in the same way that I am not a people person. On our last full day together, we had a Q&A session for people to ask him anything we wanted about our pilgrimage. One woman asked him how he manages to stay so incredibly spiritually vibrant and have so much energy. He answered, "What makes you think I do?" which struck me as exactly the fitting thing to say. But he went on to talk about how he was simply being himself, and this is what the Holy Spirit calls each of us to -- have the freedom to be oneself, and how we were all doing this for each other, and yes, somehow we minister life to each other that way.
The rest of the trip and insights will need to wait for another time to expound on more.