I. PREPARATION 

Smell the sea and feel the sky

Let your soul and spirit fly

Into the mystic

(Van Morrison, “Into the Mystic”)

Some people are called into pilgrimage as a journey to a particular locus of spiritual power. The path is shaped toward encountering God deeply through a particular place or person.

My call to pilgrimage comes through the ear. It is the summons to leave behind my net and be carried by grace as I learn to LISTEN to the essential giftedness at the heart of all things. 

This is a call to get outside of my daily routine and security, to adopt a pilgrim heart. To make the transitory road my home, inspired by the Son of Man who had nowhere to rest his head. (Matthew 8:20)

Throughout the last two years spent with the Community of St Anselm in London and the Community of Chemin Neuf in France, I sought a clear vocational call to ordination or religious life. It did not arrive.

What arrived instead was a constant reminder that I’m called to bear witness to the giftedness of all things, through song. I am called to contemplative and community-building practices of music. As such, I have applied to divinity school to study at the intersection of theology and the arts this coming fall.

But first, a call to get grounded in pilgrimage.

This pilgrimage is a journey into the heart space I feel God calling me to occupy as I begin my studies: between my Catholic tradition and ecumenical call, between the Western classical music I grew up playing and leading, and all the possibilities for sound and listening that I have barely begun to explore.

Open your mind to the wisdom

When you try for the kingdom on high

By his grace, by his grace

(Van Morrison, “By His Grace”)

I will travel to monastic and urban communities around the US and in Western Europe, between January 25 and sometime in early August. Through a mesh of experiences, from retreat to interning to volunteering, I will meet creative music ministries and mentors. As I seek the kingdom of Grace that pours generously into the world through voices joined in song, it is my desire to be open and receptive to all the incredible teachers who will cross my path.

I am beyond grateful to the Forum for Theological Exploration for the inspiration and the funds to imagine this. I am also filled with love and gratitude for everyone who has granted me their vision and wisdom as plans began to take shape. In advance, I am also grateful for all those who will host and help me along the way.

II. REFLECTION

“Journey of the Heart” Slideshow

Click above for a slideshow of pictures, songs and other tidbits from the journey.

Reflection written April 10-11, towards the end of my solitary 14-day quarantine at a home in the woods.

I began this journey in search of a few things:

• My voice as a musician, in particular around contemplative practice
• My place in the broader church, in or between my Roman Catholic home and the many churches in which I find life
• Grounding in a prayerful life of the heart in preparation for theological study, and discerning if I need to defer studies for a year or so to continue this formation

I made it through the US portion of this journey, and was unable to continue on to the European communities I had planned to visit. 

 

When I look back at these past two and a half months of pilgrimage, I am moved. What seems an abrupt ending to my travels has become a boon of retreat and reflection. I say this acknowledging the suffering and uncertainty of our global community at this present moment. I can see, at the same time, how God has faithfully led me toward the voice, belonging and clarity I sought. This has of course unfolded differently than expected, and culminated in two weeks of quiet isolation.

 

The journey began at Holy Cross Monastery, a week of grounding amid nature and the Benedictine rhythm of prayer. Among all the psalms and chants, and rich Eucharist in the round, I was most touched by the holy silence, the space for mystery, that penetrates all of this. The sound and ritual and gesture became, in my heart, a vessel holding the space for God’s Living Presence to animate all of life. Music and silence also poured into one another throughout my walks in nature. I spent time immersed in Van Morrison’s mystical “Hymns to the Silence,” and Paul Winter’s vibrantly profound “Missa Gaia” (Earth Mass). Conversation and Sufi practice circle with the Reverend Matthew Wright drew my attention toward opening my heart to God–and there I heard that whatever was to happen on this pilgrimage, all that needs accomplishing is finished already.

For an additional reflection on “Hymns to the Silence,” click here:

https://singanew.com/2020/04/19/hymns-to-the-silence/

 

I journeyed on to Bainbridge Island, Washington, spending one night en route with a friend who’s a devout Catholic. Emily’s clarity about Catholicism as a powerful devotional path in which she gives herself and is given life was eye-opening. As one of the aims for this pilgrimage was to explore my relationship with Catholicism, her way of living it out opened my heart past some of the grudges and prejudices I hold.

The next week was spent living fully in the bounty of friendship, music and the Bainbridge land. My friends’ lives are led by love for one another and creation. We sang and danced (“Creepin’ In”), we laughed and cried. We attended an intimate mid-week Eucharist with healing prayer. I held an infant for a good 45 minutes and was floored by the consciousness of this other human being in my arms. I also met Ann Strickland, a community music leader whose Kirtan chant remains in my heart. She encouraged me to take on a daily chant practice– Taizé even– as the way to welcome my voice.

 

Seattle brought new lessons about love: that how much you ‘like’ or ‘identify with’ someone has no bearing on how you love them in Christ. Attending Eucharistic adoration (to songs such as “A Little Longer”) and a women’s Bible study brought simple reminders of the power of plain, honest prayer.

In Portland I met a man on the street, a hungry prophet who accepted snacks and prayed for me with searing insight into my life. My next teachers were Nadia, a progressive maybe-not-Catholic anymore with whom I share many questions and wonders, Ruthie, a prospective divinity school student who holds such equanimity and grace around the pain in the Methodist church split, and a man on the bus to Woodburn who introduced me to how he listens open-heartedly to death metal.

 

When I think of my five days at Mount Angel Abbey, I see the green of the broad trees that inspired these words:

They hold me in their space. They are gently alive, beacons of blessing, transforming moss and air into strength. They shepherd my path up to the abbey– STILL in their wisdom, like the Benedictine stillness. We are not here to make life sacred but to live incarnate that Truth that all already IS sacred– to bear gentle witness to that mystery as God gently reveals it to us.

My meetings with music thanatologist and scholar Therese Schroeder-Sheker taught me to look for the gift where I feared there was none, to give the practice of Lectio Divina a place in my life, and to claim my name Gabriella in making the annunciation scene a heart home.

 

The train that brought me from Portland to Oakland lasted about 19 hours, most of them sleepless. But I arrived in sunny California with Joni Mitchell in my heart and thoughts around the “liturgy of daily life” being what I seek. In San Francisco I was most struck by the spirit of parks and the loving generosity of Martin’s, a Catholic worker free restaurant. The morning I witnessed prayer at Grace Cathedral due to a private function there, I wrote:

I came to find God this morning in the cathedral but God found me in the park, in the midst of these people celebrating life together, with intention and calm. In the liturgical life of the city punctuated by smoke breaks, coffee cups, and crossings with strangers, masked by cars and trains and the frantic chug of production, always more– this park is a sanctuary of stillness, a holy ground.

It was sitting there in the park and scraping plates at Martin’s that I felt integrated into the life of the city in all its diversity, in its poverties of body and attention and spirit. I saw in the eyes of those to whom I handed tea and meal tickets the hunger I felt– for righteousness, for knowing God.

Out of all the hymn singing and circle singing I attended, I was most touched by the generosity of a community choir leader who sat with me over coffee. She imparted wisdom about the magic of giving all your energy–power and vulnerability– in rehearsal, and the magic of holding the silence for listening.

 

Green Gulch Zen Center and Farm in Maurin County was like a magical summer camp where I relished being a beginner. The foreign ritual was beautiful to me: waking up at 4:25 to pile on layers for meditating two forty-minute blocks in the cold zendo, followed by a service of bowing and chanting (including The Heart Sutra), then cleaning tasks, all before breakfast. By the time of my post-breakfast walk past the gardens and steaming compost heaps, I felt so alive. Ash Wednesday I improvised solo liturgy at the beach. I sang my offering into the sea, crossed a stream barefoot to remember my baptism, coming up to “Wade in the Water.” There were religious tensions for me that week being amid Zen practice; there were also cultural tensions, like my urge to sing and dance while washing dishes, when we were to be silent. Yet in all, the woody smell of the air, the cups of tea at the designated Silent Table, long mountain hikes overlooking the sea, the hands of the Zen master gently pressing my back in Zazen and the warmth that remained– the time was healing, sacred, beyond words. The Zen sense of being where you are, sharing your feeling with that which surrounds you, resonated in me as a way of imagining prayer. Sharing our feeling, our heart, with those for whom we pray.

 

My few days with Aunt Susie and Uncle Michael in Redwood City were full of laughter and line dances. My heart after the week of Zen felt an open yearning for the calling of love. I was so strongly convicted of the power of musical practice to keep me open to my belovedness in God, and my call to reveal to others their belovedness. As Susie said goodbye to me the night before my early departure, she brought buttered cinnamon raisin toast right to my air mattress.

 

At the Zen Center I hadn’t cried much, but in Minneapolis I did. The life of loving devotion was palpable in both places, but in the Twin Cities it burst through and over my heart. I cried as the music ministers at the Episcopal church described their winding, providential paths to their ministry. I cried when one of the healing ministers talked about living in ‘hope, not expectation.’ I cried at dimly lit compline with my host family and their dog; at paintings in the art museum in front of which I wrote poetry; at the little girl at church who let me lift her up to wash her hands and sing the ABCs together. The nuns I visited had been called out of their convent life and into a neighborhood. They celebrated a living room Eucharist with a plain-clothes priest, a service that became a sharing group in the middle. Whenever their doorbell rings, they answer Jesus. It turns out that Jesus brought Dairy Queen for everyone the afternoon I was trying to fast! “Sometimes we give something up to God and God just desires to give it back to us,” one of the sisters laughed as she drove me home.

Joining the Twin Cities Community Gospel Choir for a night was a powerful witness of an ecumenical breathing body that preached the gospel with their whole selves. We rocked out to songs such as “I’m Not Tired Yet.” I was blown away when a white woman younger than me energetically led a couple songs. There is hope for my future with gospel– O Happy Day! The morning of the day I left, I brought all my myriad longings, experiences and questions before a rose window in the St. Paul Cathedral. From my week of Episcopal and Lutheran church, nuns and voice healers, back to my Catholic home:

And here now is Compass. I am untethered from an ideology or philosophy to explain away life, from certain knowledge. I am just to practice this Surrender each day from where I am — in the midst of these geometric shapes that give definition to my chaos. All this fighting, dissolved by grace. I am not asked to be better or superior, or even right, but just to stand in this very in-between where I find myself, with the One who is Here whether I recognize her or not. “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you (John 21:17).”

 

That evening, I landed in New York just as coronavirus was becoming apparent there. This night with Emily brought talk of Dorothy Day, and the next morning I began to read her autobiography (The Long Loneliness) before meeting Em that evening for mass at the Catholic Worker House on 1st Street. My internship with the Church of the Village was a baptism by fire in the richest possible sense. I had a late dinner meeting with Katie, who serves as Chair of Worship, that first day I moved into GTS. The next day, we were on at noon with a contemplative service. We arranged the space, prepared to livestream it without any prior notice, and used a song and meditation I’d written that morning. This was the joy of my internship there, powered by the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit, as well as the stillness of God from which these inspirations often sprung.

 

I was in Chelsea those twilight hours of normalcy before the disease (dis-ease) shut everything down. I felt alive, elated: taking the 1 Train up to Inwood Park to walk and talk discernment with a Franciscan friar who is a spiritual companion; stocking up at Trader Joe’s only to be blindsided by the fact that now I had to carry the 42 items back to my apartment; singing “Chelsea Morning” as I ran down the Chelsea Piers. That weekend was ignorance and bliss. We came to the Tree of Life at church, where I led an embodied-tree meditation and finally in person met Jorge, who serves as Minister of Worship Arts with great joie de vivre. At post-church brunch with bellinis, the erudite guest preacher and worship arts leaders affirmed my wrestling with God over my desire and readiness to study theology. I providentially connected with a child-hood friend and her mother, who happen to now live across the street from church. We talked of God’s presence in life and music, watched birds in Washington Square Park, ate at a French restaurant.

 

The shut-down began, as did my sense that I was where I was meant to be. As each day brought less in-person and more on-line contact, Jorge brought fabrics, pictures and musical instruments to my dorm. I found my way into a rhythm of dreaming up and live-streaming contemplative services and moments of my internship from my room. My white-walled space filled with poetry and candles and music. On one side, I danced and did yoga; on the other, I wrote and prayed and Zoom-called. The time I had been desiring before I started studies, to find my own rhythm of daily devotion, had arrived. There was no way but creativity, and here I felt home:

Somehow my life and I are reunited. Somehow I am back in one piece.

Tasting the honey on my sandwich, this journey back to childhood, to joy…

All the meandering and hardship I carried becomes sweet. I am trusting again, bare feet on sand, waiting for my life to sweep me away, to get lost in God.

 

I had been seeking my voice; now I just had to use it. It seemed that every day there was a new grief cracking open, a new sign of holy Presence within. I was summoned not to pray away pain but to bear witness to the essential giftedness at the heart of all things.

 

I did not want to leave my prayer room and return home. I suppose pilgrims never get to plan all their steps. This was a final ‘cracking open’ in New York, a sudden departure to quarantine for two weeks before going to meet the Risen Lord in Galilee, among my family, on Easter. Just when I was finding Jesus in New York, of course I was told, ‘Do not hold on to me; I have not yet ascended to my Father.’

 

At this home in the woods without WiFi or cell service, I am called to “Stop searching and be.” With this I feel I can enroll at Boston University School of Theology this fall without seeking more formal formation of my heart. My little prayers, songs, poems, walks are enough for God to use me as I am. For now, my heart has found the seal of belonging to my Abba.