A Busted Antenna

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Drizzly and 47 out there this twenty-third day of May, the 143rd sunrise of the annus horribilis. I'm a big fan of rainy days, but we are in the third straight day of the stuff. Enough already.

And Glassfest begins this afternoon, one of Corning's two big celebrations every year, the other being Sparkle in early December. Peg and I are rarely around for Glassfest, and this year will be no different as we venture up to Canandaigua Lake after work today. I just hope for the nice people here that the rain lets up for a couple days so their open-air party down on Market Street doesn't get washed out.

My social media feed is filled this morning with happy friends and acquaintances trekking around Europe. One couple poses smiling on a hike in the Scottish Highlands. Another just pulled into port at the Piraeus, just below Athens, on a glorious Greek morning. Then there's a singing gondolier serenading some old friends in Venice as they celebrate an anniversary. All having a wonderful time, and clearly not living in the liquidity crunch that comes with owning five homes.

But the posts that have caught my attention this week came from Sean Dietrich, a.k.a. Sean of the South, a writer from south Alabama whose pieces are sometimes a little sentimental for my taste, but all come from the heart and tell the stories of the least and the lost in our corner of Dixie. My diocese loves him because he's been known to say nice things about the Episcopal Church.

This month Sean's spent on the Camino, hiking from southeastern France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, to the shrine at the tomb of St. James. One can take a number of routes to get there, some as short as a few days and others that take upwards of a long. He took the long one, the traditional pilgrim's path that's been followed by folks seeking a spiritual awakening since the Middle Ages.

And he sure seems to have had that, his posts filled with that glow one encounters from someone who's come face-to-face with something larger than himself, a reality that's always surrounded us but we rarely if ever see. He's obviously seeing it, and seems to be guarding the flicker of a flame he's found from the brutal gusts of living in this moment.

Perhaps the reason these posts have caught my attention is that, if you look at my old online calendar from D&S, you'd see that Peg and I had blocked from right about now to the end of June to walk the Camino ourselves. We both feel like we've lost something since our days in EfM, like whatever spiritual awakening we experienced then has drowned in the cacophony of our lives right now. The antenna's broken, or perhaps just inoperative from disuse.

Back in my clergy days, I was fond of telling folks that spirituality was a discipline just like anything else. Unlike the ecstatic religious awakening William James described in Varieties of Religious Experience, almost a form of madness, for me and for most other people I reckon the path to enlightenment is marked by adhering to a process and a way of thinking and feeling, by having a structure for finding one's way. The Jesuits profess this approach, and it's always resonated with me. No different than making oneself go to the gym or on a long run every day.

But my gym habit has gone sporadic as I've gone soft, and my spiritual practices are more-or-less kaput at this juncture. And I can definitely feel the loss, in both arenas.

Which I suppose is why P and I first tried to block time for the Camino, to get in physical shape by walking several miles a day while being unplugged and able for the first time in a long time to tune back into what's real in this very finite existence. It was exactly the right answer at this moment.

And it never happened.

Instead we'll ride up to the condo here in a bit, enjoy a nice meal and the lovely views from the balcony, drink too much wine tonight and shuffle out muddle headed in the morning for a latte and an hour or two of reading the news online and railing against the dictatorship that's taking shape around us. Rinse and repeat.