Displacement
the way home for the modern wanderer
The Way
What is a vocation? A call, I’m told. Its the call God gives you to a particular path to holiness in your particular life. We all tend to think of it in more practical terms though, and usually treat it as something on the other side of youth where I find my forever-role. Good, well-read Catholics that we are, that of course means married lay person, priest, or consecrated religious. Three distinct categories. You just need to figure out which one God wants. You should probably do that sooner rather than later too, or you’ll have to continue being sad and disaffected for even longer.
I wonder if its really the end-goal you treat it as though. It seems to me it may not be. In fact, “finding my vocation” is almost certainly just the beginning, if it is in fact one of those permanent three1. There is some kind of consecration and vow to make once I “find” it, which does permanently change my relationship to reality, but insofar as a vocation is a path — the best path — God has laid out for my salvation, and insofar as it is an entrance into the specific relationship He wants to have with me, I am already engaged with it by setting off to “find” it.
I haven’t found it. I haven’t made the promise yet, as desperately as I said I wanted to in The Complexion of Reality, but if I am consistently and persistently following Christ wherever He wants me to go it seems I am already participating in the call. I am responding to it, whatever the permanent commitment turns out to be, by setting out to find it. If you follow Christ wherever He goes, without reservation, then you’re already on a vocational path. Your call for that moment is to continue walking in the life He gave you, even if it doesn’t have all the dressings you think it should. I, at the beginning of this year, asked for my vocation with not a little boldness2, and God responded with an unchanged call to follow Him on pilgrimage.
I often think about what it means to understand the “nature of a thing,” and ultimately, the nature of reality. My arrival at this unintended, partially intuitive reconstruction of the Neoplatonic nous (as far as I understand the term), has lead to hours of fruitful reflection of the nature of many things I do and experience. All of them, of course, understood through countless steps on the pilgrim paths of the world, and it is the nature of the pilgrim that I have come to understand best, I think.
The pilgrim is moving through the land. He comes from afar across many boundaries and through many realms to find wherever he’s going. This foreigner’s constant motion is both a tremendous burden and the rain watering all that bears fruit along the way. The Via Crucis is long and winding, and must pass through the definitive death and burial of the cross and tomb; but, like the dark, descending steps of the final few meters of the Camino, it emerges again into the glorious, blinding light of the Father’s house and the joy of many friends. The cliche is wrong about journeys and destinations. “It’s about the journey, not the destination” is not true. It is about the destination. The journey is necessary and matters, because without it you would never get there, but you set out a journey because you have somewhere to go. The pilgrim is a pilgrim because he’s going somewhere. He is a particular person, going to a particular place, along a particular route. To be more specific, I, Ryan Brady, am a pilgrim, and whether on the road to Chimayó, the Camino, or the Via Benedetto, each and every step is leading me towards a sacred place (there’s no such thing as a sacred “space”), which is simultaneously that particular holy place, a reminder of my own home, and, in the most real sense, an image of Heaven itself, my final home. “As above, so below.” These realities of pilgrimage exist both subjectively and objectively. If that were not the case, I would be everyone, and therefore no one; I would belong everywhere, and therefore nowhere, and the world would still be a formless void. Either the pilgrim is a person, or he is nothing. Either he is coming from somewhere, or he’s not going anywhere. Either his destination is home, or it is nothing. Could the pilgrim love if this were not true? If Heaven had not touched earth?
In this age of abstracted, detached, generalized “love,” pilgrimage is a jarring plunge into the particularity that you must know if you are to ever truly love. If you don’t get it the first time, sign up for two straight years of dozens of them and you’ll see. The modern “global citizen” travels the world only to find out that he’s not nearly big enough to love every place like it’s his own. “The world” is not your home. Your home is your home, however long you’re here, and hopefully you embrace it. You have been given an icon of Heaven, and most of us cannot see it. You have to love the particular before the universal. Your home is not God, but it shows you His face.
Home
I have reached the end of year two longing for home more than I ever have in my life. Seemingly gone are the days of my transcendent joy at the wonder and adventure of far away lands. Now I look on the beautiful streets and towers of so many lovely places and think of nothing but how they are someone else’s home, not mine. There’s a childish homesickness that manifests in tantrums begging to go home because home is comfortable, but I’ve lived half my life out of a bag since middle school. I am not uncomfortable traveling. My homesickness has matured and hardened into something much stronger than a child’s flailing arms. This isn’t about wanting to be loved at home. I am loved in many places. Mine is a homesickness of wanting to love. Sure I can love the beautiful, lovable mountains I climb, paths I walk, churches I pray in, and houses I visit, but I pass by too quickly to love them in any way except the universal sense in which I love all things because they exist in God. This is good, but I long for the particular after a lifetime of resting in the universal as I’m tossed about in a sea of constant change. Experiencing the world as an enormous panoramic window through which to behold God has exhausted me. It has sapped my joy in an endless, impersonal overload of so many good things that I can’t truly sit down, rest, and love any of them with the fullness of gratitude and wonder they deserve. Children are more than satisfied with the smallest of backyards because they don’t think themselves as big we do, and in their humility they return to love the same acre over and over again. I pass over the mountain and its gone. There is no chance to get to know it. I spend weeks with a new group of friends, and then they’re gone. I marvel at the soaring spires of countless cathedrals, and then I continue my walk; led ever onwards by a God who comes to me very much like the stag in Song of Songs. He bounds over the hills, and, ever elusively, peers through the lattice of my window — except I don’t have a window. I was given the entire world in such overwhelming fashion that I have been crushed by it, and have begged for home from beneath this burden in every moment of rest. Still, off He goes; over and around every twist in the road at a relentless pace, calling me out on trip after trip, to new house after new house3, insisting on this adventure that I did in fact ask for but am now humbled enough to admit I did not understand.
And so I find myself a dis-placed person in the world, saying with the Demoniac of Gadara in Anthony Esolen’s The Hundredfold:
"I am a displaced person in the world Am out of joint with time, have worn too thin For elders of centurions to see As I walk on the borderlands of being, Threading a line between this threshing floor Where Rome is bundled with Jerusalem And both shall meet the flail, and then the fire"
The world and its happenings, my friends and their lives, my plans and desires pass by unloved in my resignation to Christ’s relentless pace. I have become nothing but a pilgrim. An attentive friend, I am not. A culture shaper, as my advertising major self thought, I am not. Some worldly leader in our tumultuous moment, I am not. A spiritual guru in a world of many who need me, I am not. I have been left without words, without sight, and without any understanding of where I am going. I am a quiet, blind, confused man following a God who’s always just out of reach. I follow Him over mountain and hill, through valley and field, and to where? He has left me with nothing. I have no time to enjoy the pleasures of this world even if I wanted to. He has unmasked those passing illusions. Vanity of vanities! I plod along after Him, sometimes I run, still a sinner but as attendant as I can be, a pilgrim of hope without knowing what that’s supposed to mean. Where, o'God, is my home? You have driven me out on every occasion, insistent that I’m needed on the Way, and I have followed you every time. And so I remain here, given fleeting rest in this dry, tawny wasteland beneath those great towers called the Rockies, and I wait for your call. “Come after me,” I hear again and again, and on each peak I climb, each shrine I enter to speak with you, I drop everything I still have, and you leave me with only what I need.
Now, only two images remain; a vast green garden, and grey waves on the shore of the sea.
To be continued.
semper in statu viae
Ryan
I’ve recently become rather skeptical of the “three boxes” way we think of vocations in the Church thanks to the letters of Sebastian Morello and Peter Kwasniewski, shared at the end of the former’s book, Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries.
I have not had the same bedroom nor the same house for more than 11 months in 8 years, to say nothing of the 50/50 time I spent going between my parents’ houses as a teenager.