Pilgrimage and the Journey Home to Each Other
What personal or societal wounds are you being invited to confront, and how can you move toward them with compassion? In February’s “We Conspire” series, Journey Home’s founder Jon Huckins shares insights on how pilgrimage brings us closer to one another. By embracing contemplation, humility, and proximity to suffering, these journeys cultivate a deeper understanding of justice, belonging and our shared responsibility for healing.
Walking the Camino de Santiago is an ancient practice rooted in the Christian contemplative tradition. Pilgrimage creates space to move out of the head and into the body, to come face to face with ourselves, our physical movements an invitation to inward transformation. Journey Home’s Camino pilgrimage program fosters a community of belonging free of posturing and ego-driven performance. Accompanied by a “Faculty of Elders” that offers regular teaching, the cohort program cultivates compassion and invites sojourners to address their untended interior wounds alongside society’s collective suffering, culminating in a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago.
Journey Home’s border pilgrimage brings sojourners face to face with the human reality of society’s beauty and its brokenness. It brings people to the U.S./Mexico border and invites participants to see themselves as either complicit in that brokenness or core contributors to healing—and to feel the weight of that realization. The border pilgrimages meet people involved in multiple areas of the United States’s immigration system, such as migrants, Border Patrol, local faith leaders, immigration experts, and leaders at nearby San Diego or Tijuana shelters. These pilgrimages are not acts of charity; they are about extending solidarity and forming relationships arm-in-arm. The journey is not a paternalistic invitation to compassion. It involves linking up and recognizing our interdependent future and learning from one another.
“These pilgrimages are not acts of charity; they are about extending solidarity and forming relationships arm-in-arm.”
Much of Journey Home’s work utilizes the methodology of pilgrimage, which involves an intentional act of proximity—moving toward pain, suffering, and injustice, both within ourselves and in the lives of our neighbors—so that we can be transformed. When we adopt the posture of pilgrimage and open ourselves to the wounds within ourselves and those of society, we can’t help but be moved to compassion. Once you see, you cannot unsee.
Sometimes, activism is fueled by shame and guilt for being complicit in broken systems. Activism can also stem from a need to prove one’s worth. Reflecting on his experience, founder Jon Huckins says, “I did the work to confront society’s conflicts, but I realized I hadn’t confronted many of the conflicts within myself. If there is anything I’ve learned, it is that the healing of society comes through our individual and collective healing as we confront the conflicts and wounds within ourselves. They are not mutually exclusive, but intimately interconnected.” Compassion invites us to tend to our deeper interior wounds, to do healing work ourselves so we can show up to the injustices of the world, with conviction and generosity, in ways that are both invitational and inclusive.
Internal work and self-awareness shift our posture from hero to humble companion, emphasizing human relationships and proximity over disembodied arguments. Compassion is an experience where we allow ourselves to feel and to be moved. Like the Samaritan who saw the dying man and was moved to compassion, we feel something so viscerally that we must engage.
“Much of Journey Home’s work utilizes the methodology of pilgrimage, which involves an intentional act of proximity—moving toward pain, suffering, and injustice, both within ourselves and in the lives of our neighbors—so that we can be transformed.”
Walking alongside community in love and nonjudgment, rather than a manufactured sense of justice, is a posture of compassion and generosity. For Huckins, as someone engaged in the process of healing in order to contribute to further healing, the contemplative practice of silence and slowness—placing his hand on his heart, remembering that he is an embodied creature, and acknowledging that he cannot fix all problems—helps cultivate compassion.
He says, “In a world where things feel frenetic and broken, it’s easy to numb to the pain, injustice, and relational division.” Huckins encourages us to feel the relational fissure, to feel our own sadness, suggesting that doing so may invite us to walk toward each other rather than walking around.
Reflect with Us
We invite you into a posture of humility, allowing yourself to confront both personal and societal wounds with openness and compassion. What might you discover about yourself and your role in healing if you choose to walk toward suffering rather than around it?
Share your reflection with us.
We Conspire is a series from the Center for Action and Contemplation featuring wisdom and stories from the growing Christian contemplative movement. Sign up for the monthly email series and receive a free invitation to practice each month.