Welcome

Having passed my Biblically allotted three score years and ten, I find myself looking back at my life as a kind of pilgrimage on which I’ve been surprised, humbled, challenged and changed, trying to apply some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way towards whatever awaits.

Phillip Cousineau says in his book, The Art of the Pilgrimage, “Pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise, an act of devotion to find a source of healing, or even to perform penance. Always it is a journey of risk and renewal.” Although I’m a religious retreat junkie who’s traveled to monasteries and retreat houses from Maine to Israel, my real journey has been to find healing from growing up in an alcoholic family and from the death of my eighteen-year-old daughter. Given my overdeveloped sense of guilt, I suppose I’ve also been performing penance for what, as the Book of Common Prayer says, I’ve “done and left undone.”

So this blog isn’t an account of walking the Santiago de Compostela and the eccentric personalities I met along the way, or of ascending the Way of the Cross in Lourdes on my knees and coming away cured of COPD. Rather, it’s a collection of reflections and stories about one person’s journey with the mystery he calls God.