(Not) A Heroine's Journey

On pilgriming, prayer, patriarchy, and procrastination (part 1)

Journeys take a toll. This is true regardless of the type of journey taken, and one doesn’t need to overextend the analogy between literal tolls and figurative ones to make the obvious point: all journeys have costs. All journeys require payment of some sort or another. You take time, money, energy, attention, etc., and expend those in some exercise of exploration or movement or both. If you are trying to get from Point A to Point B, actually or spiritually or in any context, there’s a cost.

This is the trade, of course: you incur the costs of a journey because there’s some benefit; this is presumably a benefit that exceeds the costs, but not all of us are good at math and so you often don’t actually know whether or not you’ve netted out in the way that you hoped until the journey’s done and the tolls are tallied against the distance you traveled. Sometimes the toll is still being extracted after the journey’s done; there’s jet lag, literal and figurative, the exhaustion of the body and spirit as they work to adjust or readjust to wherever they’ve landed. They, you; in any case, sometimes there’s a crash.

All of which is to say, having done my pilgrimage,¹ I had to take some days to recover and do some balancing of physical and emotional accounts. The spiritual-ish term for this is integrating, which is kind of like processing in therapy; I’m tempted to call it work except that it’s not, like, work-work (“the work of making sense of the thing that happened,” I wrote, and then deleted because I was writing it from bed with a stack of cookies on my lap and work felt like precisely the wrong word). It’s actually, in some respects, a kind of avoidance or procrastination, or at least it is in my case; I’ve basically been lingering in a kind of spiritual waystation, an antechamber to real life, reorienting myself to the world in which I scoop kitty litter and worry about bills rather than sing in yoni caves in the south of France. I am slow-pedaling my re-entry back into real life, as it were, negotiating with myself the terms of my commitment to “reality,” whatever that means. The “integrating” part is the part where I am supposed to weave the threads of the spiritual and the mundane into that negotiation, but mostly I’ve been catching up on work and napping and watching Slow Horses on AppleTV. Also—trying to figure out how to write about all of this. Because for me, the work really starts when the writing starts.

---

The first couple of days of the pilgrimage, I wrote easily and readily, if you count short social posts as writing, which I do. It wasn’t work; it was spontaneous expressions of my genuine, prideful glee at doing the thing. I posted stories on Instagram, adding commentary to images from London, Paris, Marseille. I wrote about the witchy bookstore in London, the tattoo that I impulsively got in Chapel Market, the baguettes in Paris, the rainbow just beyond the train station in Provence that felt like a portal to the heart of the experience that I was pursuing. I posted umpteen pictures with as many words, scattering them like postcards to the universe. Xoxo wish you were here! Then I found myself in the heart of the experience that I’d been seeking and the impulse to publish words fell away. From about the third day to the last I only posted captionless images, saving words for my journal and for conversations with my fellow travelers. 

One exception: on the second to last day in Provence, in Sainte Baume, I posted a picture of myself with these words: “heart full, like for real”.

I don’t often post pictures of myself. And I pretty much never post pictures of myself without my glasses. I can actually tell you with certainty the only two other times that I’ve shared a picture of myself glasses-free in the last decade — once was when I was having a minor nervous breakdown deciding whether or not to leave my job at Disney (I caught myself in my own camera looking very moody and it was a vibe that I felt called to vaguepost); the other was when I was extremely high from having my wisdom teeth extracted. Which is to say, I seem to need to be in some kind of altered state to expose myself fully on camera, which is what baring my naked face without glasses feels like.

I don’t actually know if I was some kind of altered state when I posted the photo below; maybe I was? I was on a pilgrimage, after all, and I had absolutely experienced more than one kind of spiritual high a few times over by that point, but the circumstances of the photo were fairly mundane: me, taking photos of the rising sun from the balcony-like window of my room, nothing that my reflection in the adjacent illuminated glass was sort of interesting, if not lovely, and wondering if my actual face would look that interesting in the full illumination of the sun. So I took a selfie, and that selfie made me look like I was lit up from both outside and within, which I liked, so I posted it with the only words that seemed to match.

Heart full. Like for real.

How do you write about what it feels like to have your heart filled to brimming, when the brimming feels indescribable? I love the word ineffable, but there are actually few experiences that are really, truly ineffable, and so the word itself slips away, never suited to the real experience, until the moment that is truly ineffable and then the word is perfect but also not, because it by definition resists companionship with any other words, and so there you are, in an experience that begs poetry but can only hold one imperfectly poetic word, ineffable. Unutterable, unwritable. 

---

Perhaps all there can be is the narrative of the postcard: here is where I went, here is what I did, wished you were there.

I went on a pilgrimage. I am tempted to add, “of sorts,” qualifying it and hedging it, because of the Eat, Pray, Love of it all, but I won’t, because one of the objectives of this journey was to travel past my own mountains of cynicism. I went to the south of France, which you wouldn’t ordinarily think of as a pilgrimage destination unless you are pilgriming in devotion to cheese and wine. But there’s a lore there, a lore about Mary Magdalene, and it is (as I explained in my last post) a lore that has long attracted me because it is a lore about a woman as a seeker. 

There aren’t a lot of stories about female seekers, in no small part because for a very long time — most of recorded human history, as it happens — women have been expected to remain pretty strictly in place. In the home, mostly; the private sphere of care and family, which is a very fixed place. Whenever women have been encouraged to seek the kingdom of God/the gods under any faith, that seeking has ordinarily been expected to remain restricted to prayer, to soul-searching as it were, and even then, it has generally deemed best that they not to search too deeply. When women have ventured beyond the strict confines of their assigned place and embarked upon journeys of discovery (and they have), their stories are usually ignored, buried, or rewritten.² This is why the Hero’s Journey is such a limited frame for any idea of a universal story; this is also why the idea of a Heroine’s Journey is so fraught with difficulty—in a world where to be a hero is to quest, and only men legitimately, publicly quest, what might it mean to imagine a heroine who isn’t just walking a version of a masculinized path? Isn’t heroism itself just a function of patriarchy? (It is.)

Mary Magdalene, to me, is not a heroine, at least not in the patriarchally derivative sense; she’s something more interesting and more powerful — a seeker. Mary, under any version of her story, was a spiritual explorer: she had a quest, and that quest took her along a path to and with the man known as Jesus, and then beyond him—far beyond him, if you believe the stories, which I do. Where that quest took her in spiritual terms is open to much and varied interpretation. But in geographic terms (again, according to the stories) it took her to France, ultimately to a cave high up in the mountains, where, the stories say, she spent the last decades of her life fasting and meditating and praying. So that’s where I went, too.

I didn’t fast (see above re: cheese and wine). I did meditate. I tried to pray, but  failed. If I were feeling writerly, I would say — this is where the real journey began.

It was, though. It was where the real journey began. That’s a much harder thing to write than the postcard.

Quests and pilgrimages are not both the same thing, although they can certainly overlap. A quest is a journey in service of some mission or purpose: a traveler on a quest is seeking something, literally or figuratively, like a grail or a magical sword or the ability to use the Force. A pilgrimage, on the other hand, is an exercise or ritual of devotion; the pilgrimage itself is ritual, a kind of moving, physical prayer undertaken by a traveler who is usually seeking deeper connection to the object of their devotion.

My journey was (is?) a little bit of both. I keep calling it a pilgrimage, but to the extent that I was trying to trace the footsteps of Mary for my own purposes, it was also a kind of a quest. I had an objective that I was pursuing; my intent was not simply an exercise in ritual devotion. But part of the objective was to discover whether or not I still had it in me to be devotional, and if so, in service to what. It was a pilgrimage inasmuch as it was a form of devotional ritual; it was a quest inasmuch as I was in pursuit of a kind of holy grail — the cup of my own faith. 

I like to think that Mary Magdalene did something similar, especially after the death of Jesus, especially after she arrived in France. The stories say that she landed, preached, and performed miracles, and in so doing laid the foundations for Christianity in Europe. But the stories also suggest that she did that only for a relatively short time, before disappearing into the mountains to be alone. Alone, I think, in search of the cup of her faith, the grail into which to pour her love and her belief and her hope. This grail, of course, could only be found within her,³ and could only be discoverable through prayer.

I am very bad at prayer. There’s a lot to be said about the whys and wherefores of that, but for the purposes of a Substack newsletter, I’ll just assert it as fact. I don’t believe in intercessory or petitionary prayer in the traditional sense, and I was never comfortable with the “are you there, God, it’s me Catherine’ model of dialing up heaven just to talk.⁴ Also, I am very easily distracted, even — especially — within the controlled space of my own mind. So all that I have ever been able to do, really, is recite prayers and bits of scripture that I know by heart, sometimes poems and (in adulthood) fragments of philosophic texts, and, very occasionally, song lyrics.⁵ I basically just run through words that make me feel a way, and direct them in the general direction of the universe or the heavens or whatever, and hope for the best. If there is such a thing as being prayer-typical, I am prayer-divergent. I am prayer-DD.

You don’t have to pray on a pilgrimage, and I didn’t go into this one expecting to. But I discovered pretty quickly that this quest-pilgrimage-journey was going to require a descent into the cave of prayer, and that meant that my prayer-divergence might show up as a disability, like a weak ankle on a rocky hike. And — spoiler alert — it was exactly that, until the moment that wasn’t. It took a descent into a literal cave to reach that moment, but that’s the story that I’m going to tell you next time.

---

Somehow I’ve managed to write over 2000 words without telling you much about the pilgrimage itself, but that’s about par for this particular course, I think; like I said, I’m still only just emerging from the waystation or the antechamber or whatever the procrastinatory space where I’ve been avoiding the substantive work of real life, which is in no small way the work of writing. You might expect the opposite, right? Writing is an escape, a means of flight; words can keep your feet from touching the ground. It certainly can be that, sometimes, but more often it is really, really not, at least not when you are doing it in the mode of storytelling; that is, when you are writing to tell or to share. Then it is the opposite of escape, because storytelling is (should be?) an exercise of planting your emotional/spiritual/creative feet on some ground and rooting yourself there, in whole or in part, and calling the world to come around to see what and how you are growing. When you are storytelling you have to fix yourself somewhere, if only for a time, so that someone can stop and listen. You can’t be in flight, because nobody can catch a story that is flying away. However difficult a journey might seem, it is sometimes much harder work to stand still and nurture something in one fixed spot. Which is what I am trying very hard, if awkwardly, to do.

Coming up: singing in yoni caves, mopping in cathedrals, and jumping over the rose. Later: alien mountains, secret fairy grottos, and baptizing oneself.

1. Am I really done? This is an open question.

2. This most obviously applies to Mary Magdalene, who was falsely characterized as a prostitute and (worse, I think) a mere follower, trailing Jesus and the apostles out of gratitude, rather than an apostle and spiritual seeker in her own right. But the practice of erasing or rewriting women’s journeys is even older than Mary: Eve, of course, journeyed to the heart of the Garden and found knowledge; we all know how that story has been reframed. And did you know that the first extant account of a Christian pilgrimage was written by a woman — The Pilgrimage of Egeria, or Itinerarium Egeriae? You very probably did not.

3. This is, of course, at the core of her gospel—the path to heaven resides within us, accessible through the nous (from the Greek, mind or consciousness. “There where is the nous, lays the treasure.”

4. After my family converted to Catholicism, Mary (mother) became an easier focus of prayer for me; also, I really liked the rosary.

5. The morning that I got the call that my mom was dying and I was racing to her side, I said the Lord’s Prayer and a bunch of Hail Marys, recited fragments of some e.e. cummings’ poems, and sang the song Tomorrow from Annie. All in my head, of course, although I probably mouthed some of it.