Highways of the Heart
Lynne Elwinger, O.C.D.
Summertime is here! Travel is in the air! This season suggests vacations, visits to family, rest and recreation – in short, relaxing and renewing activities. This year travel is getting more attention than usual, due to the high cost of gas which has caused many to reevaluate their travel plans. People are checking out possibilities near to home instead of leaving for distant destinations. The local news media has even coined a new term for this trend – the “staycation”. As we are considering the deeper meaning of Carmel and the discovery of new (or rediscovery of once familiar) paths to God, the travel theme persists.
We seem to be a people perpetually on the road. Travel is in our genes and in our souls. I recently heard on a local radio program the story of a teacher from Minnesota who took a group down the Mississippi River one summer as a learning experience (many years ago). In the fall when he returned to the classroom, he found that it had become too small for him. He needed to be out on the roads again, and did in the ensuing years make many more such long trips.
Turned Into A Journey
The commentator said that that is how you know a vacation has turned into a journey. You return from a vacation and that’s the end of it, but a journey beckons you on and on forever. You never return from a journey. It may change forms over the years, but it captures you for life. For me that’s just how it is with the inner journey on the paths of the heart. An endless pilgrimage, taking many forms over the years, it always beckons onward toward an invisible distant horizon. This journey is a very central part of the life of Carmel, but is something any person can undertake wherever they are in life or geography.
We Never Travel Alone
Our loving God has graced us from birth with an inner landscape that holds places of refreshment, shelters from storms, places to learn, and places to be still. Each of us has this inner gift but often we don’t realize it. It can be as unfamiliar to us as the variety of “staycation” opportunities in our own backyards. The highways of the heart, lead us to a greater awareness of the Divine Presence within us and always available to us. We learn that God accompanies us in every circumstance of our lives. We never travel alone.
As we become increasingly at home in this interior world, we hopefully bring more and more of our experience there back out into the daily routines of our lives. All of us can recall glimpses we’ve had of this territory that we’re being invited to more fully explore. As we allow the grace of inner refreshment to embrace our days, our struggles become a little easier and our joys are expanded, our vision brightened.
To Walk As Pilgrims
Some discipline is required, especially in the beginning, to give the time and space needed to explore this new territory and become familiar with its possibilities. Reluctant to begin, we soon become actually more reluctant to leave our “staycation” spot to return to more active tasks. We have to learn to balance the inner and outer dimensions of our daily lives, allowing each to inform the other. But we are truly made for this - to walk as pilgrims through the days of our lives, empowered and refreshed and encouraged and strengthened by a profound connection with our God whose unconditional love surprises and sometimes overwhelms us.
Many times I have found
my way home in the dark
because my feet felt the road
when my eyes could not see it.
There is Something in us,
deeper than hands or feet,
that finds the way to the Central Reality,
and when arrive we know it.
Rufus M. Jones, 1944
God is always traveling the heart’s highways and byways hoping to meet us there. We are always being invited to take a time out to come home to ourselves and to our God, who eagerly waits for us like a parent waiting for a child to return from the first day of school. The life of God breaks into our world through us if we allow it. We may choose to leave the journey but the journey never leaves us, and sooner or later we will follow its call. As a people of pilgrimage, we are traveling deeper and deeper into the heart of God, taking the whole world with us as we go.
Sr. Lynne Thérèse Elwinger of the Resurrection O.C.D.