Pilgrimage

The annual pilgrimage at Provincetown is complete. At because Ptown is not a Mecca or axis mundi. It is not a specifically holy place like the Jewish Temple or Church of the Holy Sepulchre. No relics of bone or flayed skin or saints skulls Ptown, while a sweet and beautiful place in its own right, is still a place.

What justifies the signifier pilgrimage is that the Roundup is the only time of the year that I experience a sense of complete safety, inclusion and, not to sound too sacharine, unconditional love.

That makes departing from the Roundup inevitably sad. Letting go each year the sense of community and inclusion is always to feel twinge of grief.

The power of these five days is evident in that I will for the next few mentally float back to the view of the harbor at sunrise, the dinners, the workshops, the comradship and companonship of so many. It is the closest I come to a monastic experience of communal immersion.

To merely walk out the door and immediately step into a flow of spirits all loose and flowing and safely settled in our own little safe harbor is an experience that is worthy of longing. It is the closest I have come to knowing Peace on Earth.

Ashes to Ashes

Seeing the ashes on office workers last Wednesday reminded me of how much I am out of touch with the religious calendars. Ash Wednesday is part of the calendar along with all the notable days up to and including Easter.

We have really two religious periods by and large in the Xian branch of religion: Advent climaxing in Christmas and Lent climaxing in Easter. One is celebratory and weighted with a ton of trappings. The other, lighter, far less gravitation force, much more contemplative – appropriate given the subject matter.

Filling it out what we have is the buildup starting just before Thanksgiving now, rising to its peak and denoument at Christmas and New Years, followed by a lull, followed by a lift somewhere in February or March to remind us that Easter nears. Along with Easter coming closer follows Spring. For any in the north that is the resurrection that is felt in the bones: when Winter finally loosens its grasp and Spring, full or meek, is still sovereign.

Then the rest of the year is a religious summer, a vacation from the froth of Christmas and the great solemnity of Easter.

Are they sufficient? Are these religious festivals, ending the old year and beginning the new sufficient to the soul’s need? Do we need more religious holidays?

Some would be cry lunacy to wonder whether more religious festivals are needed. Isn’t it under the guise of religion that we so often show our worst toward the stranger our neighbor? The one we don’t understand?

Perhaps then what is needed is a religious festival which, pardon the reference, could be part of the tradition of “festivus.” Only it would be a religious festival that does not use the rituals and formulas that more or less anchor human culture back into various levels of ancient past. Instead it would use the essence of the present to help us see where, what and who we are today.

Most of us have a hard time looking at ourselves. Is it any easier to do collectively? But if we were able to draw essential pictures of where we are, incorporate them into the projections liturgy and ritual, perhaps we then would be more able to more fully grasp out collective identities.

This is not a replacement for the religions of that tie us through the centuries. Instead it could be practice that happens within the religious structures but which allows us to step outside ourselves in order to examine ourselves.

Pie in the sky of course. Exepting the minority most religious leaders and followers are terrified of the anxiety that accures to stepping outside the comfortable, well trodden traditions and customs. Better to look to the same mirror and effectively repeat the same words and actions, no matter how rote they become, then to use the power of the religious instinct to actually ask who are we today and where are we going?

Religion is many things, it is binding, it is worshipping a deity, it is projecting outside one self and into a larger whole.

Can we truly project ourselves and into a larger whole if the larger whole is the shell of the past? We read don’t pour new wine into an old wineskin. Are we takingt the wine of our lives and pouring it into old wineskins when we limit ourselves to old rituals that are ignorant of the substance of what surrounds us today?