our shared pilgrim identity
To take the journey is nothing short of stepping into the shoes of an expanded identity. It is the leaving behind of a former self, which praise be given, got you to this point. To be a pilgrim is to, in a sense, step out of the identity that’s been so carefully and uncontrollably crafted and step into an identity of a shared space of vast common ground, of the intimate communal aloneness that is the pilgrim identity.
Allowing ourselves to step into an expanded identity is a process of allowing ourselves to be known. Thankfully we’ve many guides and allies along this journey.
Vulnerability here, is our greatest guide. Vulnerability is the lowering of defenses that we’ve convinced ourselves are necessary but actually aren’t. It is the key ingredient of allowance that begins to pull back previously invisible layers of the story under which we’ve been living. At this point, and indeed quite often before this point, fear has a way of reminding us of just how comfortable that old story is. Often times, it’s a veiled comfortability- one that we perceive as anything but comfortable, yet upon honest examination, we find that it’s a story we’ve been clinging to, just to feel the embrace of something familiar. Our depression, anxiety, self-criticism, self-deprecation- these all have ways of convincing us that we can’t do without them. They offer us a home whose entry is granted by a simple, effortless ring of the doorbell that is resignation- resignation to the apparent fact that you are the subject of the doings of others and other forces, that you are not the giver, because in fact you have nothing to give, perhaps even because you believe yourself unworthy of giving.
Silence is a true friend in the process of being known. Silence is always there waiting and has a listening ear unmatched in its willingness to hold space for us to speak. It turns no one away, carries no judgment of its own. It has the uncanny ability to tell us exactly what we need to hear. That is, if we have ears to hear it.
Aloneness is our ally, which points our awareness at all the ways we’re actually not alone. Aloneness brings us to the veil that separates “me” from everyone and everything else, the frontier where “I” end and everything else begins.
This thin space is experienced by the individuated self as loss, as death because here it cannot exist as something separate from everything else, it cannot exist as itself alone and by sheer and simple nature of what that space is, it has no choice but to be transmuted, transformed into something else. But this death has two sides, two sides of the same coin, to turn a phrase.
Seen on the one side, from one perspective, it is a leaving. This side is the place from which fear speaks. Fear sees what’s been left behind because backwards is the direction of its gaze. It know what it sees because that’s what it itself has been until now. It’s in love with what it sees looking back because it’s familiar, comfortable. And this voice convinces us that comfortable is where life resides.
The truth of this resonates in us and attunes our attention to it, fixes our gaze on what has been. But in so doing, we forget the other half of this larger truth.
Seen from the other side, this death is not a leaving, not a stepping out of or away from, but rather a stepping into- a stepping into a more expansive identity. In our moment of aloneness, we’re given the sight to see that we’re indeed experiencing the greatest shared experience of all. Nobody who has ever lived, who is living, or who will ever live, has not at some point felt the presence of their own aloneness. To be alone is to be in the company of all.
It’s as if the essence of life is found in its shared nature. That nature is so fundamental that it extends even into the deepest chasms of aloneness, into the darkest pits of fear, onto the most tumultuous of paths. Our loss, our death- the experience we often feel the most alone in- is the very thing that makes us all human. Death is transformed into life itself through the understanding of it as the gift we’re all freely given.
But yet, there is still a simpler, plainer truth here. It is the truth found perhaps in the middle of the coin, or in no place at all other than in the marriage- the intangible, non-localized point of union between leaving and stepping into. It is the truth of our identity as the fluid space, which is no space at all, between life and death. We are an ever-moving, always present point suspended in eternity on the thread of an elegant and beautiful tension beyond finality.
