Rebranding, The Soul

Camino de Santiago

The Walkabout

Route for The Camino de Santiago, The Way of Saint James.

I’m a proponent of pilgrimage.

Travel, by itself, doesn't mean much. I know that Mark Twain said it was fatal to bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and maybe in his day that was true but, personally, I've known quite a few people who've traveled the world and yet somehow never seemed to go anywhere.

Easy to do.

Increasingly, every city is the same city and, in America at least, you can drive from sea to shining sea subsisting on the same handful of chain restaurants and hearing nothing but the same vague "Interstate Accent", a manner of speech which belongs to nowhere in particular. Once upon a time, you would've at least been forced to listen to the local radio on your journey, but now, with streaming services available on every square foot of the continent, no traveler ever need sully their mind with new or novel content. Spotify the whole way amirite? And where do they shop in Florida? Publix. Where do they shop in California? Trader Joes. In some respects that's rapidly becoming the extent of the differences between Place: the sign above the door where everybody goes to buy the exact same bottle of Heinz ketchup.

57 varieties.

To be sure, Globalism has its perks. One of the negatives though is the flattening out of Culture, mass media and the global marketplace being something of a steam roller, smushing everything and everyone down into the same, easily fungible paste. I grew up in Alabama for example and, whenever I tell people that they always answer back with some version of "Oh! But you don't have an accent!", as though I'm supposed to sound like Foghorn Leghorn or Colonel Sanders. And you know my grandfather, maybe, really did sound a little like that. But unlike him of course I was raised on television. My accent is the accent of The Red Power Ranger and my folklore is whatever came to me from Nintendo. If you're not careful therefore, it's very easy these days to spend your entire life within The Grid, that vast network of highways and train stations and airport terminals designed to deliver you seamlessly from one mass produced environment to another, as if you were a package in the mail. Twain was born in 1835, and back then I imagine Travel was a little more difficult. Today though, Travel has become so easy that you actually have to be intentional about it if you really want to get somewhere. Otherwise, you can very easily jet-set thousands of miles and yet never be challenged. Never get out of your comfort zone. Never grow.

Sad.

The opposite of that is pilgrimage. Purposeful, intentional travel off the beaten path with the intent of nourishing your soul.

It doesn't have to be religious.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a religious person and I think that if you're up for it a pilgrimage to a cathedral or a holy mountain or something like that can be immensely valuable. If you're not though... maybe just a pilgrimage to a local landmark would do just as good. A journey to a certain natural beauty somewhere that calls to you perhaps, a certain grove or a waterfall or a special tree. Maybe for you the most nourishing journey you could take right now would be to go see the place where your grandmother was born. Maybe back to the town you grew up in. Maybe, right now, the best choice for you would be simply down the street, a small pilgrimage to look one last time at the old apartment and to process all the feelings from a past that you’ve been running from. Maybe, the best pilgrimage would simply be to go and see your dad.

I don’t know.

I can’t tell you where you need to go and even if I could you wouldn’t need me to. You already know.

Want of a destination is not what’s keeping you from moving.

In the Middle Ages people loved pilgrimages. Went on them all the time. We have this notion nowadays that everyone back then was an ignorant serf who lived and died without ever seeing beyond the borders of his farm, and some of that did happen, but at the same time men and women have always had itchy feet. The pull of the unknown, the desire to see what might lay just over the horizon, has always been with us and, in the end, human beings are always going to want to move. It's in our nature. If we were meant to stay in one place, we would've been born with roots.

Pilgrimage Routes in the Middle Ages.

Horse? Foot? Ferry? Men and women got around a lot back then, and not just the wealthy ones. Pilgrimage helped you get to Heaven after all, and, in some places, was considered just basic common healthcare. Relics held in this or that shrine or chapel were often rumored to have special power, and so a poor woman struggling with infertility or a man suffering from a lingering cough might sometimes cover impressive distances looking for a blessing or a miraculous cure. Prayers offered in your own home were fine but... how much better, how much more a sign of your devotion to God if you were willing to walk a hundred miles to pray instead? God would hear that better, wouldn't he? That was the thinking. Maybe it worked.

Of course, there were a lot of non-pious reasons for pilgrimage too. Some of it honestly seemed to be little more than an excuse to go on vacation. A suspicious number of "miraculous" shrines were located essentially on the beach for example, so it's likely that many of these trips were perhaps only one part piety and three or four parts wanting a day off. Even so, at least the idea that there were reasons for travel other than Business or Pleasure existed, and there was a real sense that navigating the physical world could help you navigate the spiritual one as well.

I believe that.

Such has been my experience.

I don’t personally think that the spiritual world is much different from the physical one. There's a lot of overlap. A lot of places where they touch. We need the same sorts of things to travel in both, and in both realms there's always that uncomfortable divergence between where we are and where we'd like to go. We're always wandering in the wilderness... searching for The Promised Land.

Scallops and What it is I’m Doing

One of the most well-known and beloved pilgrimage routes is The Way of Saint James, however, you must know that calling it "The Way" is a bit of a misnomer. "The Ways" would be more appropriate. You see, The Way of Saint James is more of a suggestion than it is a hard-and-fast route, and there many off-shoots and on-ramps branching off of it along the length of its course. Depending on where you want to start and where you want to finish, The Way can be anywhere from a measly two-hundred miles to something approaching a thousand, and take you through Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. One route even takes you to the U.K. Every year some 400,000 people walk all or part of The Way, making the trip on foot as their ancestors did before them to the basilica in the Northwest of Spain where the Apostle James is said to be buried. Is he? Probably not. As skeptics will take pains to point out anytime The Way is discussed, it's highly improbably that Saint James (San Iago in Spanish) ended up in Galicia, especially since The Book of Acts in the Bible records him as having been killed by King Herod in Jerusalem. Then again, what the skeptics don't understand is that historical accuracy was never really the point of such things. "Facts" don't drive us.

Narratives do.

And all the facts in the world are kind of useless if you don’t have a story to hang them on.

The Christian world has always been replete with icons and relics of dubious origin. As the saying goes, there's enough pieces of "the true cross" out there to build a bridge out of. But... such things give us something to do. Something to quest for. Something to meditate upon. Relics are special because we make them so… and our journeys can be likewise, if we decide to let them. Tying your story to a physical object via a relic, or, through pilgrimage, tying it to the physical land, is one of the ways we connect ourselves to The Earth and to History. To Time and Place. To our ancestors and to our kids. It's one of the ways we weave our own narrative into a larger whole and, hopefully, one of the ways we connect our story unto God's.

The Scallop Shell. Symbol of The Way of St. James

Since almost the beginning of The Camino de Santiago as a defined route, pilgrims along The Way have carried shells like these as talismans. Found on the shores of Galicia where James's Basilica is, pilgrims who'd completed the journey often picked one of these up off the beach as proof that they had made it. You know, something to show the folks back home. "Look! I did it! I made it all the way!" Over the course of time, naturally then these shells took on a metaphorical significance. It was hard not to notice that the patterned lines covering their exteriors came from all over the place... yet all converged at the same center. Had not they too, the pilgrims, come from all over? From Britain and France and Portugal... only to all arrive at the same place? For the pilgrims of old the shell rapidly therefore became an allegory for the spiritual life. The great mystery that somehow all of us might be on different paths... but strangely, somehow all on the same Way.

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” — Jesus. Bible, Gospel of John, 14:6

Modern day trail marker on The Way. Note the stylized shell symbol in yellow.

I've struggled for a long time to figure out exactly what it is I'm trying to do. My "internet career" (what a horrible phrase) has been years in the making and yet somehow I've spent most of that time in something of a confusion. As I alluded to elsewhere, I've always known I'm a Sense Maker, someone with the gift of words whose job it is to help others put together and integrate the stranger, more esoteric, and mysterious parts of their lives but… I've never known exactly how to present that. How to get that idea across to others, or even to myself. Sense Making isn’t really a defined “job.” You can’t get a degree in it and it doesn’t have a booth at the career fair. It’s more of a calling. One that can be difficult to describe.

For years I've struggled to find the right model. The right analogy for this project. In the past I've described what I do as a kind metaphysical blue-collar work, a "worldview repair service" which sought to fix cracks in people’s philosophies the same way a guy named Mack might try to fix the cracks in your foundation. Other times, I thought maybe this was more of a "community building" service. A call-to-arms of like-minded people who would be stronger together standing against The Darkness. Once, briefly, I modeled my work after John the Baptist, identifying strongly with both the itinerant preacher and the voice crying in the wilderness.

Never liked eating bugs though. That was model was never going to work out.

Recently however, in conversation with one of the long-time listeners of my podcast, I was given the perfect analogy:

This is a Gas Station.

That's what I do. I run a gas station.

This blog. My audio shows. The podcasts and the videos on YouTube... it's all a pit stop. This is a metaphysical Chevron for the spiritual road.

I'm perfectly fine with that.

The Scallop Shell.

For better or worse I've spent my life on the road and gas stations are near and dear to my heart. I've gone days at a time eating nothing but what comes out of their hot boxes. Spent long miles through the desert at night, broken up by only the occasional shower at a Love's. I'm intimately familiar with every service station East and West along I-10 and my wheels are extremely familiar with every stop along Interstate 65. What my friend helped me realized was that Churches and Temples and Religions are very keen on telling people where they ought to be going, what their destination should be...

But not so good about helping them out along their way.

That's my job.

That's the service I'm seeking to provide, metaphysically, without the lingering odor of gasoline. I provide maps. Directions. Refreshments and things to chew on and a place to empty your trash. Maybe even, if you need it, a spot to pick up a spiritual pocketknife if you know you're going to be headed into a bad part of town. Sense Making, you see, is fundamentally about helping others on their Journeys, being there when they get lost and confused. That's why I have to write about hard topics. Difficult and confusing things. Not so that I can show you The Way... only you can know the path you're supposed to be on... but so that, when you're confused about your next move, you at least know there's a place to go that's already tried to map the territory.

With that in mind, in order to more clearly elucidate the nature of my work (to myself really more than to any of you), Holy is He Who Wrestles will soon be undergoing a re-brand. Soon, it will simply be called Soul. Like this:

For Wherever Your Journey Takes You.

Now of course, on your end nothing technical changes. The substack will still be here in the same place and none of the urls will change, but, if you start seeing a new name in your inbox or new icons on your feed, I didn't want you all to be confused. I think, maybe, this crazy project I've been up to for years is finally starting to coalesce into something Real, and I hope, also, that this clarifies what it is I'm trying to give you. The world is full of people trying to tell you what your spiritual destination needs to be, and, if you need that, such people are in no short supply. Frankly though I think that such a thing can only ever be truly known by the individual, and I wouldn't dare to try and tell you otherwise.

What I can do though is be there for you on whatever path you’ve decided to take. I think that’s why God put me here. I’m a voice crying in the wilderness because the wilderness is where people get lost. I’m erecting a big, illuminated sign in the darkness that you can see for miles, even if you’re far off the road. A sign that says, “Help Here.”

I hope that analogy makes sense.

And I hope you'll all be along for the ride.