This pilgrimage has taken an unexpected turn.

After a beautiful array of time spent between monastic communities, friends and family, I arrived at Newark International Airport the evening of Monday, March 9.

I should have foreseen that I was arriving just as coronavirus was taking hold here, but I arrived anyway…naive, hopeful, ready to jump into my new space at General Theological Seminary and my worship arts internship at The Church of the Village.

It soon became clear that this temporary home would become a more permanent Home. It would be more than just a campsite from which I trekked around Manhattan and visited different churches and community groups.

In a strange way, the anticipated European leg of my pilgrimage (I was hoping to travel to Taize, followed by the Northumbria and Iona communities) had always seemed far-off, more possibility than impending reality. Strangely, I do not feel too disappointed to cancel or postpone it. I am supposed to be here now, on this rainy day in Chelsea.

I’ve fallen off the edge of the blogging world, as seems to happen whenever I commit to blogging on the go. I have to face the facts: I don’t travel blog. I travel letter-write and phone call, but I just don’t do mass communication from the road.

But landing here, I’m no longer on the road. I’ve been called off the road onto this detour of creating a space of prayer and creativity in this white-walled room that I slowly want to fill with poetry.

This is the next part of my pilgrimage, a part I never could have foreseen but I feel God is unraveling with me. It’s a pilgrimage of finding my “community of one” in which I am never alone. I’ve experienced such rich hospitality from all who hosted me since late January. I lived a plethora of precious lifestyles with different communities of the heart. I was continually struck by the diversity of daily devotions I practiced with my host families and communities: prayer, gardening, preparing food together, singing, meditating, walking, baby holding, kitty holding, playing fetch. Now it’s time for this inspiration to become flesh in my own life…to take up devotional practices in this time “set apart” for isolation.

I am beyond blessed by the ways that Church of the Village is providing for me emotionally, physically and spirituality. My room is filling with books and implements of worship on loan. Neither party in this internship could have foreseen that this would be a crash course in livestreaming contemplative services.

In such a time of crisis (*time of choice; time of turning), there is so much possibility…we are truly thrust into this time of creativity, unknowing, real grappling with our mortality. I do not mean to romanticize the suffering that we are undergoing globally, but to assert that this is truly a time of both/and…great loss and great possibility, I believe.

Accompanied by Joni Mitchell (who herself used to wake up to Chelsea mornings), Rublev’s icon of the Community of the Trinity, the friends and family who surround me virtually with their love, and all those who watch and wait (check out an upcoming post on “waiting”), I ask for openness toward God’s spirit moving here.