Jane Christmas, What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim (Vancouver: Greystone, 2007):"The Camino does that to you. It Preys upon your conflicted self. It forces you to make decisions when your spirit is at its weakest. . . . You constantly think about quitting and going home. That single issue gets debated and rehashed by every pilgrim" (219).
"A pilgrimage is not about punishment but about making an intentional decision to look at the world with fresh awareness and to consider your place in it. A pilgrim defines her own pilgrimage; maps are guidelines, not prison sentences" (221).
"The pilgrim life is a largely artificial one; you exist in a bubble of camaraderie, pain, and poverty, of shared purpose" (286).
"You can't be certain when or if such serendipitous moments will happen, but it helps if you leave yourself open to the random nature of life unfolding. What you can stake your life on is this: there's an adventure waiting around every corner. Of that I am certain" (295).
And the following, from a journal entry of mine, 27.11.2007, on my most recent brief pilgrimage:
"I keep hearing in my mind's ear something Peterson Toscano said on a program I watched recently, a video of a conference for survivors of ex-gay 'ministry.' He said that our story is extremely powerful, when we tell it.
So why am I here? To learn to tell my story. To spot my story. To follow threads that tell me I have a story.
So much conduces to delude, to convince those of us shoved to the margins that we don't have a story. Story empowers. It frames existence. Better, it provides a skein that gives meaning to the disparate threads of existence.
For those whose story has the power to challenge the dominant narratives, it's crucially important for the makers and keepers of the dominant narrative to try to thwart our ability to see strands of meaning in our marginal lives. It's important to keep us from retrieving those strands and weaving them into a coherent narrative.
It's important to convince us that our lives have no meaning except that imposed by the makers and keepers of the dominant narrative. If we are to have stories at all, we must accept them as given to us, imposed on us. And those narratives will naturally distort the significance of our real stories and subject them to normative social meaning."
"It's important to convince us that our lives have no meaning except that imposed by the makers and keepers of the dominant narrative. If we are to have stories at all, we must accept them as given to us, imposed on us. And those narratives will naturally distort the significance of our real stories and subject them to normative social meaning"
ReplyDeleteThis is quite an opening sentence for me Bill. Lately I've been kind of wondering what my own bizarre pilgrimage is about. It might just be about taking on the "makers and keepers of the dominant narrative." I can't believe for one second had Jesus been in control of His dominant narrative that gay bashing and marginalization would have been part of his narrative. Nor would an imperial papacy.