The Way of the Pilgrim

Part 1: Books, and the other things we carry.

Photo Credit: Elias Haslwanter

By the grace of God, I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back and in my breast pocket a Bible. And that is all.

—The Way of the Pilgrim.

It’s a sad commentary on today that, with the exception of one or two of God’s special friends living among us, almost all of those who say they love God are so blinded by their own cleverness and learning that they miss the inherent simplicity of contemplative prayer—it’s an easy sort of work.

—The Book of Privy Counsel.

Those who seek learning gain every day
those who seek the Way lose every day
They lose and they lose
until they find nothing to do
nothing to do means nothing not done

—Tao Te Ching. Chapter 48. (Red Pine translation)

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Suffice it to say that I won’t be traveling as lightly as the author of The Way of the Pilgrim. Though a part of me wishes I was at that point in my life, clearly I am not. Over the next few days, in preparation for my departure, I will be loading up my car with my worldly possession. If I were to guess I would have to say that probably 90% of what I will soon be transporting around the country are books. This is my third move in the year and a half since I left Boulder. Two moves are good as a fire, as the saying goes. And though I have radically reduced the number of my possessions over the past few years, my grip remains fairly tight on the few things remaining to me.

In preparing for my upcoming travels I kept exhorting myself to be more ruthless in shedding what I will take with me. Do I really need to be trucking so much stuff around the continent? No, clearly I don’t. But when it came down to sorting the wheat from the chaff I found myself, once again, being more inclined to turn chaff back into wheat and that often on the slimmest of justifications. Sure, I haven’t read a particular book in the 10 years I have owned it, for example, but I might get to it. The desire to keep the few nice hardbacks I own, merely because they are beautiful objects unto themselves, has added more than a few extra pounds to the load. I find it difficult to be practical.

This is surely because, like most of you reading this, I would consider myself something of a bibliophile. Truth be told, my love of books can all too easily shade into a kind of neurotic bibliomania. Amazon truly has my number and often plays me like a fiddle. I continue to volunteer to be that fiddle. It often takes all my willpower to resist the siren song of new books and the lure of new knowledge and understanding they provide. Or rather, that I hope they will provide. For when I am honest with myself, as much as I have learned over the course of my life from books—and I hope I have learned from them—I have to wonder whether the effort I have made has been worth it.

I recall one scholarly tome in particular. Though I never ended up finishing said book, I do recall that the bibliography took up a good third of the book itself. This is surely out of the ordinary. I found it surprising, maybe even doubtful, that reading so many books went into this one book. And it was a book I found difficult to even finish. Maybe that inability was a sign of my own limitations in comprehension and nothing more. But it also struck me that this signaled to me that something has gone wrong in what we consider to be important. Obviously, we now have far more information at our disposal—by orders of magnitude, I would think—than any previous generation could ever dream of. But has this abundance made us wise? Sadly, I think we all know the answer to that.

As novelist Cormac McCarthy once put it:

The ugly fact is books are made out of books.

It is curious that he calls this an ugly fact. Why ugly? If I were to venture my own explanation, I would explain it in the following way. Imagine the large scholarly bibliography mentioned above. What if, given unlimited resources and unlimited time, I were to read all the books mentioned in this bibliography? Obviously, this would take a good amount of effort. My guess is that the vast majority of books cited themselves are scholarly, and would themselves have large bibliographies. Okay, so now I compile a new list and set out to read all of those books.

Of course, you see where this is all going. The list would quickly become effectively endless. At least in relation to a finite human life. And there are always new books coming out and new editions of older, perhaps forgotten volumes. This is the infinite bibliography. Of course, most of us would not even think of attempting such a foolish endeavor. But it is, nonetheless, the hidden telos of Western Faustian Civilization. It happens all the time.

We want to know everything. We want to know everything completely. By knowing completely, we want to control everything completely, totally, and forever.

Though I am far from being a scholar, even an amateur one, I know full well that I can get easily caught up in what might be called a faux-scholarly mode. I too succumb to the lure of the Faustian on a daily basis¹. I have to cringe at the amount of money I have probably spent on books over the course of my adult life. A down payment on a house probably. Yikes. Yes, the intellectual adventure was thrilling, such as it was, but it hardly prevented me from the many disastrous choices I have made over the decades. If all that reading has sharpened a certain aspect of my intelligence—and let’s just go with it that it has—it has not in any way made me wise.

Unless we take this in a negative sense. In committing myself as fully as I have to the Faustian quest, its near-total failure has been most revealing to me. Its failure has slowly but inexorably pointed me in a very different direction, a kind of reverse illumination. Like so many other things in life, it has taken getting repeatedly beaten over the head with it to even begin to accept this different direction, let alone follow where it leads.

In short, the inescapable conclusion this has led me to is that our unknowing has far to teach us, and far more depth than all our attempts to know—infinitely more. What we do know is, of course, not nothing, at least in a provisional sense. Maybe even far from futile, but essential. But it is rather that all our attempts to know can never achieve the certainty we crave. All the knowledge in the world will never satisfy us. Not now, not in another million years of trying. It isn’t what we actually want, and you can never get enough of what you don’t really want. The Faustian project—if it doesn’t just downright destroy us in our very striving for it—is even on its own terms a failure. Acknowledging this failure is in turn the hope for the beginning of wisdom.

Learning the hard way may be one of the only few ways we learn this. Or maybe the only way those of us who have been born and raised under the tutelage and shadow of Faust will learn it. The best we can hope for is what Nicholas of Cusa called learned ignorance. It isn’t simply that we are utterly unaware and ignorant—though obviously we often are. But that for all our failures to know, we can begin to know, and to know deeply, just how much we don’t really know. Just how much we can’t really ever know. To put it even more paradoxically, learned ignorance is the certain knowledge of our own profound unknowing—the unknowable knowledge of the ineradicable mystery that pervades all reality. The deeper we can go into this unknowing—and by definition, it must be endless—the more we find what we never knew what we were even looking for. Because what we are really looking for isn’t a thing at all, but beyond and within all things. This mystery constitutes the very heart of being—and beyond all being—and is also the deepest part of ourselves. There is great freedom in realizing this.

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Don’t get me wrong, I still love books and I have no intention of giving them up any time soon. Maybe never. I am just trying to see them more realistically. But even so, books are only an analogy. In seeing just how determined I am to lug them around at great cost, I also see what else I have been carrying with me all these years. Books are tangible. They can be weighed. If I were more of a numbers guy, I could probably determine how much money in gas it will cost me to tote them around on my wanderings. Thankfully, I am not much of a numbers guy. Why make my irrationally concrete and unmistakable, when it can remain safely theoretical?

In that sense, books are the least of what I have found myself to be carrying for reasons I am unable to fully articulate or even know. Over the past year of silence and semi-solitude, I have been unburdened of much. That is my hope, at least. In silence and solitude, what is hidden—often hidden in plain sight—starts rising to the surface of awareness. Given enough time, at some point what rises simply pops like a soap bubble. Amazing. I find the whole process quite astounding. Even more so, in that it has nothing to do with any effort on my part. I just have to keep choosing to show up for it. On some days, that is far from the easy choice, with so many possible distractions available to me.

It is as if we are made for silence. And in it, we can finally begin to become who we are, who we have always been. Which may have little or nothing to do with who we think we are. Time and again what rises in me could be called a very familiar surprise. It can be at once both shockingly unprecedented and already completely known. Having both carried and long hidden myself from my own brokenness, once it emerges the whole often disastrous trajectory of my life begins to make more sense. Of course, that’s why I did what I did. Of course! Now why did I do it again? And yet at the same time the unfathomable mystery of being human, of being this particular human being, only grows. Honestly, I have no idea what to make of it. That’s the good news.

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As my life now shifts from being something of a hermit to being something of a pilgrim², the reality of all that I blindly carry with me becomes even more crucial to what lies ahead. I don’t know—I can’t know—exactly what that is, just how much of it there is, and exactly how much it has weighed me down. Not unless, and until, I am able to face it squarely and honestly. And then let it go.

The strange thing about being human is that though we continue to bear the load of our entire lives at great cost to us, we often don’t want to let it go. For better or worse—and really, it is mostly for the worse—we can find comfort in our brokenness. It becomes a kind of identity. And on some level we know, have always known, that it will cost us dearly to face up to it. Costing no less than everything.

It turns out we are all pilgrims, even when hidden away from the world in a cabin in the remote wilderness. It is a path of losing everything, particularly one’s self, and the hope of gaining something unfathomable. Though we are all pilgrims we still need to choose this path of losing and losing until there is nothing left to lose. Seeing this we might be inclined to take a different path.

But what then is the alternative to the Way of the Pilgrim?

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A pilgrim contemplates the vast expanse. Photo credit: Elias Haslwanter

I head out in a few days. If possible, I may give a few updates from the road. It isn’t really a long trip. But I found the open road out here in the American West oddly exhilarating. I am looking forward to it.

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CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Come to me, says the Way.
The way seems long
Because you cannot see the end.
But when you reach the end and look back,
The way will seem so very short,
And you will see that you could never have known happiness
Unless you had known that sadness,
That sadness of following the way which seemed so long.

You will be thankful.
You will be glad that things happened just as they did,
That they are just as they are.
You will be thankful in the harbor,
If you can only endure to the end.

—Hieromonk Damascene. Christ the Eternal Tao.

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I am committed, as best I am able, to keeping Stillness in the West open to all readers. I believe the conversation taking place here—and elsewhere—is an important one and the more of us engaged in it the better. If you feel similarly, please consider supporting what I do. I am grateful to those of you who have already done so.

Thank you to all. Be well.

1. I am not saying that all scholarship is futile. There are many great scholars who continue to do masterful and beneficial work. My point is that it is one limited way of doing things that has exceeded its limits. Given sufficient intelligence, time, and money one can get a PhD. How to become wise is less clear.

2. An automotive pilgrim. With air conditioning.