The Sacred Journey by Charles Foster explores the “ancient practice” of pilgrimage, offering both traditional and more abstract avenues through which to act the pilgrim (or at least think like a pilgrim). Foster does not attempt to “defend” pilgrimage. He does not offer a historical overview of the practice, and he does not provide many practical steps toward living pilgrimage. This isn’t a “practical” book.

It is, however, a beautiful meditation on the pilgrim life.

Foster’s book illuminates so much of what we suburban Christians are missing out on while we drive our comfortable cars— when we live in the same city for the whole of our lives, when we exist totally in an air-conditioned, cushioned, familiar world.

Pilgrimages teach us the beauty of a journey. They teach us to embrace messiness and simplicity. They connect the body and spirit. They remind us that we do not belong, that (while on earth) we are not home.

I love Foster’s chapter on “thin places,” places where, for whatever reason, God seems closer, “where, if you [are] quiet enough, you [can] hear the murmurings of God.” I have decided that the sea is my thin place. And I have vowed to visit Jerusalem.

But this book didn’t just make me want to travel. It made we want to live like a traveler, to pack light, to make tentative plans, to make room for the unexpected.

Foster reminds his readers in achingly lovely language that pilgrimage is more lifestyle than practice. We don’t just make pilgrimages. We are pilgrims.

P.S. This quote from early in the book is one of my favorite lines EVER:

“The kingdom is an eternal party, and it has already started. Everyone’s invited, but almost nobody comes. It’s perhaps not surprising. We’re told that if you come you’re likely to be killed. But who cares? If you get killed for dancing, you’ll just carry on dancing forever.”

Yum.

I’ve only recently begun calling myself a writer. The title is still stiff and slightly uncomfortable.

I was talking to a friend today and confessed that I hate the actual process of putting words on paper. (This blog post, in fact, is an attempt to avoid writing for a quickly approaching deadline.)

Writing—putting ever-changing, never-standing-still ideas into neat little sentence rows—exhausts me. It’s hard and painful and takes more discipline than I can usually muster.

I do not call myself a writer because I like to write.

I call myself a writer because as painfully awful as writing is, I can’t help doing it. I feel compelled to wrangle my rowdy, wandering thoughts, to make something consonant from the loud dissonance in my brain. It’s not a choice. I have to do it.

But I don’t have to do it. I can stalk people on Facebook, or post to Tumblr, or pick out throw pillows on Etsy.

I will write eventually. It’ll break out of me at four in the morning or at a stoplight or while I’m trying to get my daughters in bed for a nap. I’ll stop everything and write. It won’t be easy now just because the ideas have started boiling over the rim of the pot, but it will be unavoidable.

When it’s done, when the article is written or the poem seems finally perfect, when I see my ideas in formation, all orderly and clean, I am satisfied like a housewife putting away the last piece of freshly washed laundry or like a builder surveying perfectly straight rows of bricks.

It’s the product that makes me love writing, and the work that makes me hate it. But it’s the indomitable compulsion to write that makes me a writer.