The Geriatric Pilgrim: Traveling the Landscape of Faith and Grief

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One of the great beauties of making a pilgrimage is that the interior journey continues long after the physical one has ended.

Case in point: A friend who read The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey, emailed me that while he liked the book, he wanted to know more about the last leg of our walking pilgrimage along St. Cuthbert’s Way to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, where Mary Lee and I walked to the island at low tide in our bare feet.

Replying to Finlay led me back through photographs, my travel journal, and books I’d read at the time, walking in my mind once more across the sands and mud to the Holy Island, seeing some things for the first time.

For new readers or as a reminder to old ones, St. Cuthbert’s Way is a 62-mile walk from Melrose. Scotland to Lindisfarne, off the coast of England, supposedly in the footstep of St. Cuthbert, who in the year 651, received a vision that propelled him to walk from Melrose to the Holy Island to become prior of Lindisfarne’s monastery, which had been founded by Saint Aidan of Iona in 634.

The island itself is 8 miles around the perimeter, which is shaped like an axe. Its most imposing (and photographed) feature is a castle, which looms against the horizon like something from Middle Earth, especially at sunrise, which is when I first saw it.

Twice a day for 5 hours, the island is completely cut off from the mainland, and you need to plan your walk around the tides—the best time being during a four-hour period before and after low tide, which when Mary Lee and I did it, was around 8:00 a.m.

As I recall, we left our B&B in Fenwick (“Fen-ick”) around 5:00 a.m., walking two or three miles through coastal pastures. I also remember crossing a high-speed railroad line, where you have to use a yellow phone to speak with the signalman before crossing, and passing I don’t remember how many anti-tank blocks from WWII. Along the way, a flock of over 70 sheep moved towards us, herding us on our way to the causeway between the mainland and the island. At some point, the sun rose above a line of clouds over the ocean to our right like a pale pink balloon.

There are two ways to cross to Lindisfarne: a causeway for cars or for walkers who don’t want to walk barefoot or in mud boots, and the Pilgrim’s Path, a 2.3-mile journey across the floor of the North Sea through sands and mud, marked by wooden poles, two with refuge boxes at the top, just in case you’re caught by the surging tide. (And it does surge. Every year, people must be rescued by boat or helicopter.)

We walked to the causeway and down onto the beach. At first the sands were like Maine beaches at low tide, light brown and rippled and firm underfoot. Mary Lee had tied her hiking boots to her backpack so she could use her hiking poles, but at first, I carried my boots in one hand and my poles the other.

I remember a sense of triumph—we’re almost there!—and exhilaration. A stiff breeze blew against our faces and the air smelled of salt and something else: fecund and primordial. Besides walking barefoot, Mary Lee had her blue hiking skirt and I’d put on shorts, which added a touch of titillation to the experience.

Until the brown sand turned to brown mud and then to something the color and consistency of cold tar. Nothing I had read prepared us for this. I, too, tied my boots around my neck and grabbed my hiking poles. At one point, I went into the mud over my ankles, leaving my feet and lower calves coated in black. I was doubly glad we’d left our legs bare.

But that stretch really was short lived and soon we were back on the sands, splashing through a shallow tidal stream to wash off the mud. Clouds reflected in the water, and along with the sound of the wind whipping the air, I heard a chorus of seals cheering us to our destination.

And lo, there was the beach at Lindisfarne, with the church and ancient priory peeking over a bank of seagrass. We sat on a bench in front of the bank and looked back, not only at the channel but at the entire pilgrimage. Rejuvenated (which I always am when I look back and see how far I’ve come), we put on our hiking boots and set out to explore the Holy Island.

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I’m writing this at the beginning of Lent, which, as I think about it, is sort of like the low tide of the Christian year. It’s a time of emptying out, on deciding on what’s important in my life. A time to practice trust that, as one of my spiritual mentors wrote, “All will come of its own accord in good time and with abundant fullness (I’m suddenly thinking of the surge of the North Sea), so long as one does not attempt to hoard or cling.” I’m good at hoarding, whether it’s having too many hats (most of which I don’t wear), or too many habits (I must have my hot chocolate every morning), or too many doubts and prejudices (far too numerous to list). Lent is a time to let the tide take those away.

In Lent, I remember that most of what I euphemistically refer to as my “spiritual life,” has been about emptying out, a process that began over thirty years ago, when my daughter died from cancer. After a year of raging at God, I decided to shut up and listen to what God had to say. Which led me to Centering Prayer meditation: emptying myself of thoughts. I also remember that emptying myself of thoughts produced what an early spiritual advisor called an “unloading of the unconscious,” which, I’m realizing, was like mentally walking through noxious black mud, but which I had to do before I could reach the other side to acceptance.

I’m also aware that I am nearing the end of my earthly journey, one, as I wrote in the last blog, to what I sometimes visualize as an island. Even without Lent, I, by necessity, am “self-emptying,” losing vitality, agility, libido, short-term memory, but I’m also finding it easier to empty myself of judgmentalism, fear, co-dependency. So far, the journey has been across relatively smooth sands, but I’ve no doubt they’ll be some mud holes ahead. Still, I’ve slogged through a few of those before, and it’s helpful to stop and look back and see where walking through them has led me. Especially when I’ve kept my eyes open for the guide poles and rescue houses of grace along the way.

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If you’ve read these blogs before (or my latest book, available on Amazon or through Maine Authors Publishing, hint,hint), you know that making physical pilgrimages to places like the Old City of Jerusalem or San Francisco’s City Lights Book Store helped me discover how my life itself has been a pilgrimage, one through both grief and grace.

These days, my great pilgrimage is one into old age, and I’m finding it helpful to try to bring the same curiosity towards aging that I had when Mary Lee and I walked St. Cuthbert’s Way—Hey, there’s a new pain in my shoulder. Never had that before!

Now, pilgrimages are all about having a destination, a place of personal, often spiritual, significance, and lately I’ve been asking myself, just what is my destination, as I age?

The obvious answer is death. My Christian faith teaches me that death means some kind of afterlife, and over the years Christians have been stereotyped as believing in two kinds: heaven and hell. I’m not big on either one. I prefer the way Brother Geoffrey Tristram of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist describes the afterlife: “We have a specific destination: our heavenly home. Our pilgrimage journey is toward God.”

My faith, and other religions with which I’m familiar (not to mention any number of secular books and films), often refer to this heavenly home as paradise. But while I can think of my own pilgrimage as being one toward God, perhaps because God remains such a mystery to me (I always refer in these blogs to God of my not Understanding), I have trouble imagining what this heavenly home, this paradise, looks, feels, tastes, sounds, and smells like.

I’ve just finished the book, The Half Known Life, by my favorite travel writer, Pico Iyer. Iyer tells us the word “paradise” comes from the old Iranian term paradaijah, a walled garden, which then became an emblem of and an enticement toward “the higher garden that awaits the fortunate.”

Christianity, of course, has the Garden of Eden as a paradise. And while I agree gardens are nice, having worked in a market garden 70 hours a week, I can tell you they’re not my idea of paradise. When Pico Iyer journeys to various “paradises”—Iran, North Korea, the Himalayas, Japan, Ireland, Jerusalem, Sri Lanka—he finds dirt, danger, and disappointment. So, he decides paradise is an “an elusive place where the anxieties, struggles, and burdens of life fall away.”

Now, this is a definition I can get my teeth into. Isn’t this where we all want to go, regardless of our spirituality, religion, or lack thereof?

But I still ask: where is this place and what does it look like?

My answer comes in remembering that after my daughter died, the only way I could visualize her was in a photograph album somewhere between one week and eighteen years old. Gradually, however, as I began, through meditation and counseling, to develop a new relationship with her, I began to imagine her in a stone cottage on a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean, painting, sculpting, and cooking gourmet vegetarian meals. Then, one day I was sitting in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, having coffee and picturing her at a potter’s wheel, when suddenly, I knew she was sitting beside me. I felt her hand on my shoulder. It was one of the most “real” experiences I’ve ever had.

These days, I can easily forget what Laurie looked like during her life here on earth (coming upon her photograph now will sometimes surprise me). Rather, my daughter is more like the air I breathe, unseen but vital to my life, no longer living in some distant land, but always with me.

You may say—and some people have— “It’s all in your head. It’s merely your imagination.”

Yes. But.

I think imagination is not in the head but in the heart. And there’s no “merely” about it. As I think about it, through imagination, I’ve experienced both hell and heaven. (How many times, I have a made a situation worse, hellish, actually—an operation, an argument, a power outage or a frozen pipe—by imagining the worse-case scenario, “awfulizing,” as 12-steppers say). But then, at least lately, if I can shift my focus, my imagination, to God of my not Understanding, grace happens.

So, what is my “imaginary” picture of paradise? As when I first envisioned Laurie, my paradise would be overlooking the ocean (got to have water!), on a bluff, surrounded by spruce, pine, and fir trees (complete with smells). I would have a cabin—wood, I think, with a lot of windows, at least one circular, framed in stained glass. A stone fireplace…bookcases…leather chairs… music (lots of music)….

And where is it?

Obviously, dummy, it’s right here. In front of my computer in what I call my cave, in my house, in my town, in my state, in my country. My destination these days should be to the here and now of this imperfect world, but the here and now of this imperfect world seen through the divine gift of imagination. Laurie came to me in the middle of the gassy fumes and dirty snow of Harvard Square to become this constant, vital, presence.

So I conclude paradise is a state of mind, and my pilgrimage a journey toward recognizing the divine in both the hell and the heaven of the everyday.

This state of mind is for me, and I expect for all of us, a never-ending work in progress, one which involves challenges and doubt at least as much as stability. It involves letting go of old habits, compulsions, and preconceived ideas: heaven is for “good” people, hell is for anyone I don’t like…I can find my daughter only in old photograph albums…I need to go to Jerusalem or India or the South Sea Islands to find paradise. Instead, it involves discovering serenity in the midst of confusion, trauma, and disappointment. It involves wonder and imagination and creativity.

All challenges. But as I think about it, I can’t imagine paradise, either here or in some afterlife, without having a challenge. I certainly don’t want to spend eternity just sitting in my heavenly log cabin looking through stained glass windows at the ocean and listening to early Elvis.

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For the past ten years, Mary Lee and I have provided a second home for our granddaughters, first Anastasia and then three years later, Beatrix. Both girls became part of our daily lives—a big part.

Last weekend, Anastasia and Beatrix left Maine to live with their father, who has moved to Oregon. It’s a huge change for them, and Mary Lee and I worry about the girls. But it’s also a major change for us. The girls will be back, of course, and we will do Zoom and FaceTime; we will become frequent flyers from one Portland to another. Still their absence will create a huge change in our day-to-day lives. Even when Anastasia and Beatrix weren’t physically with us, Mary Lee, especially, was thinking of things to do when they would be. Their toys, books, and crafts were as much a part of our house as our carpets and chairs.

 At the same time as we were trying to prepare ourselves for the girls’ move, our thirteen-year-old cat, Zeke, developed—overnight it seems—pancreatitis and cancer. After taking out a sizable bank loan, we’ve been able to make him comfortable, but he’s definitely not the same lively and free-spirited pet he was. I miss the sound of his racing around with his toys after breakfast.

Many of our friends are also suddenly facing changes, many of which are far more serious than what we’re dealing with. Several couples are now coping with Alzheimer’s or dementia in one spouse; two church members I’ve worshipped with for over twenty years—both younger than I— now come to the services with walkers; it seems as if every week someone I know goes into the hospital for a major operation; one man in my men’s group just lost his wife.

My geriatric pilgrimage is starting to feel not as if I’m moving through a new landscape, but that a new landscape is coming at me, faster and faster, like one of those painted panoramas unrolling while I stand still, my head spinning.

The other day, my 12-step sponsor asked me how I was. Well, I said, I’m walking more, I’m meditating more, I’m—

“No,” my sponsor said, “I didn’t ask what you were doing, I asked how you’re doing. How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” I said, “Mary Lee and I are talking a lot, I’m playing the banjo—”

“No, no! Look, close your eyes. Take three or four deep belly-breaths. Get out of your head and into your body. Breathe… Now, how are you?”

I paused. I breathed. “Tense. My face is tight. My hands feel as if they’re clenched. As if I’m waiting for the next shoe to drop. Or maybe it’s a boulder.”

Probably because of the way the future is hurtling towards me, I’m turning to the past, longing for what seem like slower and more stable times. (And why wouldn’t they seem that way? I know how events turned out.)  But I’ve always resisted being one of those geriatrics who lives in nostalgia for a past which never existed, and I really don’t want to stay lost in the 1950s for the rest of my life.

What I should be doing, of course, is focusing on the present, as all the contemplative practices I’ve learned over the past thirty-some odd years have advised. But while I can still be in the moment occasionally during my daily meditation, I’m not taking that focus from the meditation corner of the house out into the world.

 What else can I do? How do I navigate the now, especially a now that seems to be more and more out of my control?

There’s an old saying in AA: “to change a thought, move a muscle.” This week, I started working with my Feldenkrais instructor on relaxation exercises, trying to soften the tension in my arms and my face. I’ve also begun practicing what I’ve come to call “geriatric walking”: walking not to get in any particular number of steps or to close the rings on my fancy watch, but paying more attention to the world around me, stopping frequently, breathing deeply, and noticing the lessons Nature has to teach me about change.

Thanks to a Christmas windstorm, trees have fallen across two different places on a well-worn path in the woods behind my house, which means I must learn how to climb over tree trunks.

The pond by that path is icing over, and every day I’ve watched ducks swimming in circles, trying to ward off the encroaching ice, much the way I’ve felt lately as if I’m running in circles trying to ward off change. The ducks aren’t going to be able to keep the ice away all winter, and I’m not going to be able to hold back change, not matter how many Buddy Holly songs I listen to.

I’m also reading about change, and last week I read a letter from Brother Paul Quenon, of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky to a friend contemplating a major vocational shift, in which Brother Paul wrote that just as monks make a vow to “stability of place,” he thinks they need to make “a vow of commitment to change—a vow of un-stability (his italics).”

And New Year’s Eve, I made a recommitment to seeing my life as a pilgrimage. To being the one doing the moving, even if I’m not moving the way I used to. To having a destination, a goal, a place of spiritual significance. And to be guided by my Higher Power, that God of my not Understanding, trusting, as the hymn says, that the Grace which “brought me safe thus far” will “lead me home.”

I’m not yet sure where the journey will take me next. I want to be more active in helping others through my 12-step work, talking with others—especially men—about grief and loss, and about the value of seeing life as a pilgrimage toward a closer connection with one’s Higher Power, especially these days, when, as Thomas Merton wrote, “the whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God.”

Because we 12-steppers love our acronyms, I’ve created one for CHANGE: “Contemplate How Action Needs God’s Embrace.”

Otherwise, I think we’re all just ducks, swimming in circles, trying to ward off the inevitable.

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The other day, I was in our local bookstore, talking to the owner, Gary, about my new book, The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales From the Journey, now available just in time for Christmas (hint, hint) from this website, independent book stores like “The Gulf of Maine” in Brunswick, or, as a last resort, Amazon.

Now, Gary is a true pilgrim who’s made a lot more pilgrimages than I have; he’s even taught a course called Pilgrimage. When he started talking about the relics he’s seen on his travels, I realized that in the seven years I’ve been writing this blog, while I’ve written about the stones I’ve collected and a snakeskin I cherish, I’ve never written about relics.

So, when I returned home, I did some research, beginning with what constitutes a relic. The word is connected to the Latin, reliquiae, which refers to the fossil remains of animals or plants. In a secular sense, a relic can be a remnant—even a person—who belongs to an earlier time but has survived into the present. Usually, however, we use the word to describe an object or article of religious or spiritual significance from the past consisting of either the physical remains of a saint or other revered person, or something closely connected to that person which has been preserved for the purposes of veneration.

The veneration of relics is a big part of religions such as Christianity and Buddhism. One of the first recorded uses of a relic is in the Bible’s Old Testament, when the prophet Elisha picks up the cloak of his mentor Elijah, who has just ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire, and uses it to strike the Jordan River, parting the waters so he can cross. In the New Testament, handkerchiefs that the Apostle Paul had touched were applied by others to cure the sick. By the Middle Ages, veneration of relics was a common practice in the Christian Church.

The worship of relics, however, got out of hand. I recall reading somewhere that if all the pieces of “The True Cross”—the cross on which Jesus was crucified—were gathered, you’d have enough wood to build a city. In graduate school, I read Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories told on a fictional 14^th-century pilgrimage to the shrine of the martyred Thomas Becket in Canterbury, England. One of the pilgrims is a pardoner, a seller of relics. Perhaps because he’s drunk or perhaps because he’s an egomaniac, he reveals that his relics are sheep bones and other fakes. Later, after a few more drinks, he tries to sell his wares to the audience anyway.

Influenced, perhaps, by Chaucer, I’ve always disdained relics as phony and venerating them as foolish. I remember going to the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre in Quebec and snickering at what’s supposed to be a 4” portion of the forearm of the mother of Mary encased in a glass reliquary. And a couple of years ago, when Mary Lee and I visited Cologne Cathedral, all I could think of was how in hell the bones of the Magi (I grew up calling them the Three Wisemen) wound up in Germany. (It’s a long story. Look it up.)

But maybe because I realize that I’m a sort of relic myself these days, belonging to another time, surviving into the present—a relic who wouldn’t mind a little veneration—I find myself reevaluating the practice of revering relics. I wonder if making a pilgrimage to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre is all that different from going to Ford’s Theater Museum to see the blood-stained pillow on which President Lincoln died. What about the millions who pilgrimage to Cooperstown to see Babe Ruth’s 35 ¾”, 38 oz. baseball bat, which he notched every time he hit a home run?

Which has me thinking: have I ever revered a relic?

And looking around my office, I discover the following:

—Five paintings and one wood-burning done by my daughter before she died.

—A letter holder my father made for my mother when they were going together in high school and a wooden plate I remember him carving before he spent his evenings drinking and watching TV.

—Two banjos: one bequeathed to me by my friend Margaret, who was probably the closest things to a saint I’ve ever known; and one I bought from my recently deceased friend Jim, whose obituary described him as an internationally renowned legal scholar and “unrepentant” banjo player.

—A pencil holder decorated in hieroglyphics that belonged to my late father-in-law.

—At least ten different joke-books written by my old basketball and baseball teammate, Scott, before he died of cancer.

At lunch, I look around the dining room and behold a candle box and two cup holders Dad made during his retirement and a collection of demi-tasse cups that came from my mother-in-law. Various pieces of china from Mary Lee’s family sit in a china cabinet that used to belong to my grandmother.

(I’ll spare an inventory of the living room, the family room, the bedrooms, and even the bathrooms. You get the idea.)

What does that tell me about the value of relics?

I realize the relics I’ve identified in my house probably serve the same purpose as the Eastern Buddhist home altars and shrines to the family dead. Relics link us to the past, which, as I’ve often written, is where my hope for the future lies: in the love that we experience from family and friends that continues even after their deaths, and which shows me that no matter what happens to this country or to me, love is stronger than death.

Relics remind me that my Episcopal branch of Christianity considers all of us saints, and that I keep relics as reminders of the goodness of the saints in my life and their role in God’s work. They inspire me to pray to God of my not Understanding to live the same kind of grace-filled life they did.

I’m also thinking of Bob Dylan’s line: “… it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Relics, it seems to me —whether the relics we pilgrimage to or those we have in our homes—are a pretty good indication of who or what we serve. (I’m thinking now of the millions who travel every year to Graceland and the Super Bowl, or collectors, such as the guy who paid $382,000 for the transaxle from the Porsche 550 Spyder in which James Dean died.)

So, of course, I have to ask: what relics do you venerate?

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“The Road goes ever on and on,

Down from the door where it began …”

—The Lord of the Rings

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Seven years ago this month, I published my first Geriatric Pilgrim blog. As it turns out, this is now the month that my book, The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey, based on fifty of the 130 reflections/musings/essays/memoirs/whatever I’ve posted over the last seven years, comes on the market.

When I decided to pull these essays together, I thought it would be a simple matter of picking out the ones I liked best and putting them down in the order they were written. Instead, creating this book became its own pilgrimage, and like any pilgrimage, the journey was both more difficult and at the same time more rewarding than I’d expected.

Writers about pilgrimage agree that pilgrimages are about the often-uncomfortable experience of beginning again.  The first thing I realized as I read over my blogs is that a lot has changed since November of 2015. Barak Obama was still President of the United States. Few people wore masks except on Halloween or to rob banks. When we talked about getting our shots, we meant flu and shingles shots. Women’s right to abortion was taken for granted.

I, too, have changed. Looking at my first blogs, I saw that I was concerned, possibly even obsessed, with the differences between pilgrimages and vacations, but that over the years I’d discovered that any journey could be a pilgrimage. In 2015, I’d just started attending Al Anon meetings but had not begun attending the meetings of Adult Children of Alcoholics, meetings that opened my eyes to years of denial about my alcohol/anger-fumed childhood.

In those early writings, I worried I wasn’t a good grandfather to my, at the time, four grandchildren. I fretted about my deteriorating back and that I was four inches shorter than I’d been in high school and that I could no longer put a basketball in a hoop. And, as I had since my daughter’s death, I was struggling with the way my body chemistry changed this time of year, because the lengthening shadows and 4:00 p.m. sunsets reminded me of when I was living at the Ronald McDonald House in Bangor, Maine, and watching Laurie die.

Those feelings, too, have changed.

I decided to rewrite these blogs to reflect where I am and who I am now: an 80-year-old man working his 12-step programs, grateful for his now five grandchildren, for his health, which, thanks to a repaired heart and an exercise program that has relieved much of the back pain he’s had since he was in his early thirties, is in some ways better than it was seven years earlier. A man who’s learned to navigate the emptiness left in his heart by his daughter’s death, and to recognize and be grateful for the numerous graces which he’s experienced on his journey over the last seven years.

All of which meant that I felt as if I were beginning the writing all over again. Many of the revised musings that make up The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey are almost complete rewrites. For some of them, I combined two, even three earlier blogs. Even some whose whose content and structure remained the same took as long to revise as they did to write because I saw sentences that needed to be simpler or that I hadn’t used the right word.

And then there was putting these essays in an order that made sense. I no longer wanted to set them down in the order they’d been written. I decided to put all the physical pilgrimages Mary Lee and I made together—all the St. Cuthbert’s Way essays with each other, all the Iona essays, etc.—followed by those dealing with my internal journeys—all those directly dealing with Laurie’s death, all those on aging, a collection of living with COVID essays ….

 Bleech!

So, I took a deep breath and began moving the pieces around like a mosaic, trusting in my intuition. I hope it works. If not, well, it’s hard to get good help these days.

One important characteristic of pilgrimages is that they are made in homage to someone or something greater than ourselves. But as I re-read my earliest blogs, I saw that, although I never came right out and said so, I was chaffing at this relationship with my Higher Power. Yes, I’d been going on religious retreats for the previous twenty years; yes, I’d been meditating for that long; yes, I could honestly say I believed in God. But I was still angry at God for taking Laurie from me, still inclined to leave God behind when I left my meditation corner or retreat house, still judging other people (not to mention myself) as if I were God. I found that reworking these blogs for the book helped me focus on God not as a problem to be solved but as a reality that I’d experienced.

And that experience had been, I saw in rewriting my reflections, one of healing, which is another characteristic of the pilgrimage experience. Before I began posting the blogs, I read many books by writers who’d walked the Santiago de Camino from France to Spain or hiked or biked from England to Jerusalem or walked across Afghanistan or India in search of spiritual or physical healing. Pulling my blogs together revealed to me not only my physical healing from a blocked left main artery in my heart and relief from chronic back pain, but my continued healing from grief. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the pain of losing a child never, never, never goes away. But, as I’ve also written, healing doesn’t mean curing. Healing means being more whole. It means accepting that pain is part of the game, part of being human, part of what it means to love. Accepting my pain has meant that I no longer dread this time of year. Laurie’s death has become like the sky over my head: always there, sometimes storming, sometimes even a hurricane, but also sometimes bracing and beautiful.

And by recognizing my healing, I’m far more likely to write about my experiences as a way to pay homage to—in the words of Dag Hammarskold, former Secretary General of the United Nation—“Thou whom I do not know but whose I am.”  

Which has given me hope. Looking back at my life through these blogs, I see I’ve survived growing up in an alcoholic family, a dysfunctional first marriage, the death of a child, heart disease, and countless stupid decisions to find myself eager to get up every morning. And I realize I’m just one illustration of humanity’s God-given capacity not only to survive famines and plagues, wars and tyrants, but to flourish.

Finally, pilgrimages are about relying on the kindness of those we meet on our journeys. One thing I didn’t change in writing the book is my gratitude for the aid of others: friends, family, teachers, spiritual directors, sponsors, who’ve always appeared when I’ve needed them. Not only is The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey an homage to my Higher Power, but to my wife Mary Lee, who’s been my companion on just about every retreat and pilgrimage I’ve made, including the writing of both blogs and book.

I am blessed.

And, as Phillip Cousineau writes in his classic book The Art of the Pilgrimage—he calls this “the pilgrim’s law”—“You must share whatever wisdom you have been blessed with on your journey… The story we bring back… is the gift of grace …”

Which I keep trying to do, along with the wish that you will be inspired to see your life as a pilgrimage, one that will give you hope and healing.

See you along the road.

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Tell the truth but tell it slant.—Emily Dickinson

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A few weeks ago, about an hour after sunrise, I took a walk through the woods. The air was crisp and the only sounds were of my footsteps crushing the occasional acorn and the breeze blowing the leaves of the trees. Ethereal light ribboned the trunks of the elms, maples, and birches.

Ever the old literature teacher, a line from an Emily Dickinson popped into my head: “There’s a certain slant of light.” When I got home and looked up the poem, however, I found that she was describing light on winter afternoons that “oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes—”

For me, the September slant of light lifts, like the lightness of a Celtic harp.

Why Celtic? Probably because I hear one when I think of the Scottish island of Iona, the most spiritual place I’ve ever visited— in large part because the light there seems to shimmer, casting heather-covered rocks in an unearthly glow. I’m also uplifted by sunlight through trees, whether it’s here in the woods behind my house, or through towering redwoods in California or the gnarled maple trees over my family’s cemetery plot. And ever since I was a kid going to church with my parents, light shining through stained glass has always lifted me into another reality.

Light figures heavily in my Christian faith. “Let there be light,” God says in the first chapter of Genesis. “I am the light of the world,” Jesus says. “Praise the Lord, I saw the light,” sings Hank Williams.

 But the light I love, I realize, is indirect or diffused light. Direct light, whether it’s the sun beating down overhead in Israel or the Arizona desert or overhead lights—especially those damned florescent things—is both physically and emotionally painful, especially after my cataract surgery.

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I can’t think about light without thinking about the work of Edward Hopper. For me, his slants of light are what turn his paintings into stained glass windows into another—deeper— reality. One of my favorites is “Rooms by the Sea.”

Hopper once wrote: “All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a wall.” In this painting, trapezoids of sunlight on two of these walls illuminate what I see as liminal space between the sea and what appears to me to be a living room. I note that this space takes up more area in the painting than either the sea or the furnished room. I chuckle at the irony of a light switch highlighted by sunlight. Seeing no visible steps between the doorway and the ocean, I feel both linked to and separated from the natural world and the domestic world, with these two shafts of light as my connection. Perhaps because there are no people in this painting, I find myself pulled into the little rooms of my mind, with those two slants of light becoming my moments of occasional insight into a larger world.     

You may have a different slant on the painting, which gets me to the secondary meaning of the word: “to have or be influenced by a subjective point of view, bias, personal feeling or inclination, etc. (usually followed by toward).” The word “bias” sounds negative, but for me, whether it’s in painting or music or writing, it’s the slant that produces shafts of illumination what I need to light my way on my pilgrimage. Otherwise, just as direct sunlight can give me a headache, too much information can be overwhelming. In both cases, I can’t distinguish between blemishes and blossoms, imperfections and purity.

Which is why I prefer essays and memoirs to journalism and biography: the writer’s slant is more important than the writer’s subject. I’m learning about the author, his or her encounters with memory, not about the subject or what the author did. I know people who don’t like memoir because they feel the authors are solipsistic, self-absorbed. For me, the less successful writers of memoir are not self-absorbed—or I would say, self-aware—enough. They focus on the writer’s accomplishments or their suffering without going into who their accomplishments or suffering have made them to be. One of the paradoxes of art, it seems to me, is that the more deeply artists explore themselves—their slants, if you will—the more universal their work becomes.

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Of course, slants of light change. The trees I’m looking at outside my window as I write this in October are different from the trees I saw on my walk a few weeks ago: the ribbons of light are gone; the tree trunks are entirely in shadow.

I think of how my own slants on things have changed over time. Up until a year or two ago, I used to spend hours watching sports on television. While I can still root for my New England teams, I can no longer watch them on TV. My slant on the games themselves (especially basketball), the politics of sports (especially football), and the commercialism of sports (especially all of them) have driven me—literally—to minor league, college, or high school sports events.

My slant on God changes daily, even hourly.

My twelve-step programs are helping me change my emotional slant on life from anxiety to curiosity, from judgmentalism to acceptance, from pontificating to listening. My Feldenkrais exercises help me change my slant on my back pain, so that I no longer awfulize about every twinge, accept the discomfort, and try to be curious about ways in which I can adapt the exercises to my crooked, aging bones.

Pointing out to me that just as direct sunlight can be too much information; the same slant will eventually become old. Yes, the ribbons of September light on the tree trunks are gone, but now I get to see the October light on the leaves as they change color.

I even enjoy that slant of winter light Emily Dickinson found oppressive: to me, the long shadows of the trees on the snow look like Japanese calligraphy.

So whether it’s the writer’s slant on memories, or the visual artist’s slant of light on the canvas, the slant of sunrise on the Saguaro cactus in Arizona promising new possibilities, the slant of sunset off the Florida Gulf offering peace at the last, or the slant of autumn sunlight through the trees outside my window, I am—excuse the pun—both lightened and enlightened by these slants of reality.

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Every Fourth of July, my father shoveled shit. At least that’s what I remember, although our septic tank probably didn’t back up more than three times altogether. Still, in my memory, my father’s shoveling shit was as much a part of Fourth of July in the 1950’s as the intermittent popping of firecrackers during the day or the town fireworks display in the evening.

Nine or ten or eleven years old, I would watch my father methodically digging down three or four feet through the rocks and clay that lay under the grass in our back yard: stepping down on the shovel, lifting the dirt, pausing, turning the head of the shovel to drop the dirt where he wanted, then reversing the arc downward.

He talked to himself, his voice raspy from Camel cigarettes: “Goddamn septic tank (step down) … What’s the friggin’ use (lift up) … Work all week for chicken shit (turn) … Shovel more shit on the holidays (drop) … Some goddamn life” (swing down) …. He cursed this country’s education system for not preparing him for a trade, cursed World War II for taking five years from his life, cursed Will Franklin who’d stayed home during the war and made money in real estate and who was probably lying in the shade right about then, drinking beer.

On Fourth of July, when he shoveled shit and the sun rose to the top of the maple trees in the front yard, my father removed his sleeveless under-shirt. When the sun got directly over his head, he ran water on the undershirt and tied it around his head. When he got to the septic tank, he pulled a pint of cheap whisky from the pocket of his overalls, and took several swigs before using a crow bar to pry open the rusty cover of the tank. I stood in the shade of our apple tree, away from the smell, hearing my father’s distant, dry voice: “Jesus H. Christ from Baltimore! How much toilet paper do you kids use at one time, anyway?” Feeling then as if it was my fault that my father had to shovel shit on his only summer holiday, just as it was my fault for needing new shoes, my fault that we ate fried bologna while Will Franklin’s family ate steak.

Yet what strikes me now is that in some weird way my father was, if not happy, then at least content. Perhaps shoveling shit confirmed his conviction that God and Circumstance had conspired to make his life as shitty as possible. Beaten by his father until his mother took him and moved out, put in what 1920’s Massachusetts called a “Home for Wayward Boys” for four years while she worked in Grants and searched for another husband, taken to a small Maine town when she did remarry where he struggled in school and lived the rest of his life working sometimes two jobs to support his wife and three children, he was convinced he lived in a world of injustice—where life handed out unearned advantages to some and unwarranted disadvantages to others … like himself.

Or perhaps, in spite of considering himself a failure, he knew his family loved him, and if he had to clean up their shit, well, that was better than living in the Home for Wayward Boys or in an Army barracks.

Or maybe his spirits were simply jacked up by half a pint of rot gut whisky.

For whatever reason, I remember my father singing as he and I carried the shit, the smell dancing in waves over our buckets, down back of our yard to a ditch that ran to the river that carried shit from septic tanks all over town to the ocean:

“God bless America,

Land that I love

Da da da da, dum de dum dum,

Da da da, dum de dum, da da da.”

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         When I was going over my last blog before clicking “Post,” I lingered on the beginning of the sentence: “Looking at life as a pilgrimage has taught me to be curious…” If I’d read that sentence even a few years ago, I would have thought, So? What’s so special about curiosity? Now, however, I’d rate curiosity right up there with oatmeal, ice cream, and baked beans as keys to a long and healthy life.

            I’m guessing most of us started life being curious. I certainly did. I’m told I ran away from home for the first time when I was three. (The family story goes that that I wound up in a police station, and when my mother called the police who told her where I was, she rushed in to find me looking up from a magazine and saying, “Look, Mommy, a turkey!”) But after a series of spankings for running away, or for playing by the polluted river below our house, or for swimming in said river, or for playing in a large expanse of rubble known as “the Black Ash,” I began to see curiosity as a kind of sin, a crime against respectability and decency.

            When I hit my quasi-rebellious adolescence, my mother’s curiosity meant her snooping into my business. Questions like “Where did you go? What did you do? Who were you with?” used to set my teeth on edge as I replied: “Out… Nothing… Nobody special.”

            Although I remained curious—about sex, alcohol, the world outside of Yarmouth, Maine—the sense that I was committing some sin remained with me, not only against propriety but against my gender. Although I didn’t think about it at the time, I realize now I’d begun to equate curiosity with nosey women, like my mother. Years of domineering male coaches, two years working on a forest fire prevention crew and two years of ROTC had taught me that men, real men, weren’t supposed to be curious; they were supposed to follow orders and “be prepared,” as John Wayne and the Boy Scouts put it.

            After that, I don’t think I gave curiosity much thought until about five years ago. Certainly, looking back over those intervening fifty years, I can see myself being curious—I got three college degrees, divorced, remarried, traveled—but I never thought one way or another about why. I just did those things. Then, one day after I’d started working the 12 Steps, I was telling my sponsor how every year for the previous thirty years, as the anniversary of my daughter Laurie’s death approached, my body chemistry changed.

“Well,” said my sponsor, “what would happen if this year you stopped having any preconceived ideas about your reactions and decided to be curious about them?”

            Good student that I am, I tried it, and while there were some sorrowful moments, especially on the actual anniversary of Laurie’s death, I also had some joyful times—free from guilt—trimming the Christmas tree and watching the grandchildren get ready for Santa Claus.

            My sponsor gave me other ways to practice curiosity: going for a walk without a destination. Trying new foods. Asking more questions. Listening more and talking less. (Perhaps my greatest challenge!)

            Since then, I’ve tried to be consciously curious. Which this week has meant being curious about the word “curiosity.” And I’m fascinated by how the various uses of the word mirror my own experience.

            The world originally came from the Latin, cura, meaning “care, concern, trouble.” “Incurious,” on the other hand, used to mean “negligent, heedless.” And what’s interesting to me, especially when I recall my deep-seated feeling that somehow being curious was sinful, is to read that in the early Christian church, acedia, sometimes defined as spiritual sloth, sometimes as boredom (which I’d call lack of curiosity) was a major sin. Writing recently on acedia, theologian Frederick Buechner says, “To be bored to death is a form of suicide… to be bored is to turn down whatever life happens to be offering you at the moment… You feel nothing is worth getting excited about because you are not worth getting excited about.”

But then, as Maria Tatar writes in her book, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, western culture came to criticize curiosity. The Powers That Be­—i.e., the Church—saw curiosity as a form of snooping and prying, going where one doesn’t belong, disobedience. And of course, the good Fathers of the Church almost always connected curiosity with women. Witness Eve in the Bible, who, eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, commits “Original Sin,” or Pandora, who opened a jar (which somehow over the years became a box) filled with “countless plagues,” and loosed evil upon the world.

Jump ahead to the 19^th century, and curious women—Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, et al.— become subjects of a new literary genre, the novel of adultery. Besides dying for their infidelity, these literary heroines turned “curiosity” into a euphemism for “erotic” and “pornographic,” and, according to Etymology Online, the word is still often used to mean “eager to know, inquisitive …in a bad sense.” Think of the image of the old lady behind the curtain with her binoculars spying on her neighbors etched into our culture. (And of course, there was my mother.)

Today, however, we live in a culture that seems once more to value curiosity. Einstein supposedly said he wasn’t unusually smart, just “passionately curious.” “Be curious,” intones Tortein Hagen, President/CEO of Viking Cruises. Comedian and raconteur Stephen Fry, writes, “Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”

  I wonder if the difference between curiosity as annoying, even harmful, and curiosity as leading to extraordinary benefits to humankind doesn’t go back to the word’s early connection with caring and concern: whether one is curious to know solely for the sake of knowing—for puffing up our egos, often at the expense of others—or knowing for the benefit of others.

And my twelve-step sponsor tells me to be curious because curiosity helps me care for myself. It has. Curiosity keeps me open to joy, less withdrawn, walled up, isolated. I am less stuck in the past, which means less critical of the present. I have fewer resentments. Fewer anxieties.

Recently, one of my geriatric friends sent a video of a song, “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” by country singer Toby Keith. Keith wrote the song as a tribute to Clint Eastwood, who, on his eighty-eighth birthday, was directing a new movie, and who when asked how he kept going, replied, “I get up every day and don’t let the old man in.”

Now, I have a lot of respect for Eastwood (well, I’m not crazy about his politics), and the video is good, but instead of trying to avoid the Old Man, I think I’d rather invite the Old Man in for hot chocolate and ask him questions about how he’s coping with his age—the benefits, the drawbacks. We might compare a few notes.

            To pick up on what I wrote in the last blog, seeing myself as pilgrim prods me to be as curious about the various landscapes through which I walk every day as I am when I’m walking through Scotland or Tanzania.

            And that includes the landscape of aging.

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