By: Mary DeTurris Poust
Our world demands that we be productive, hit benchmarks, achieve goals. I’ll be the first to admit that I am always ready to take on a new challenge, sign up for a new class, or earn yet another certification in my eternal quest to make “progress” in this life. Unfortunately, that Type A approach can bleed over into our spiritual lives as well, and before we know it, we’re turning the path to God into an Olympic-worthy gauntlet. All that changed for me when we went through the COVID pandemic, and daily life as we knew it was stopped in its tracks. Still on a quest to do big things, I decided to attack a large portion of my backyard that had been given over to weeds and occasional wildflowers. This would be my meditation garden, I declared, and I began the arduous process of pulling weeds one by one so as not to lose several protected species that grew amid the garden mayhem.
Every time I was went out to this patch of weeds, I imagined the finished product. I even put a meditation bench at the end of a hastily thrown together paver path so I could see the “goal” of this effort. But as the hours and days went by, and my back ached and the weeds grew as fast as I pulled them, I began to feel a shift. My meditation would not begin once the garden was perfect and I was sitting on my perch looking out at my accomplishment. No, if this were to be a true meditation garden, the effort had to become my prayer. The journey itself had to become my goal.
The spiritual life is very much like my meditation garden. It is always in progress, never complete. We can read every book on spirituality and never figure it all out. We can become champion pray-ers and find ourselves on the proverbial mountaintop one day and then plunged into a pit of darkness the next. The pilgrimage we are called to walk day by day is not linear; it twists and turns, hits dead-ends and bogs, forces us to confront demons and court doubt when we think we cannot continue. This is the beauty of the spiritual journey. We do not need to make “progress.” We only need to begin again each day, from wherever we are at that moment.
St. Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” What a beautiful image. When we hop off the hamster wheel of achievement and settle into the sacred rhythm of our daily life, we become pilgrims on the way without ever needing to leave home.
For more from Mary DeTurris Poust use the link below to register for her upcoming retreat “The Journey Is the Goal: Learning to See Our Life as a Pilgrimage”