Pilgrimage-Christmas Eve

"Christmas Eve Pilgrimage," 5 x 7 #watercolor card

"These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." --Hebrews 11:13, King James version, others have "aliens, exiles, sojourners"

Where do you take or make pilgrimages to?
Isn't it interesting that in our sedentary lives where we think we own property, and indeed revel in it and are perhaps owned by it instead, forgetting that we're all pilgrims, we still make pilgrimages?
We see that especially at Christmas time, whether to family reunions or for religious purposes on Christmas eve. 
People of many different faiths make hundreds of pilgrimages a year to religious sites or down sacred trails. 
Why?
Maybe it is deep inside us that we know we are not permanent, in spite of our best attempts to hold on to time. Maybe it is because we are all seeking something better. Maybe it is because our spiritual ancestors--Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddist Kukai, and more made pilgrimages.
Pilgrimages have many different levels, not just a physical or spiritual journey, but a metaphor for life itself. They've fired the imagination of writers (Canterbury Tales, The Grapes of Wrath) and artists, influenced landscapes, been important in history, architecture, society.
Some pilgrimages are tainted with tragedy--The Crusades, The Trail of Tears, immigrants trying to escape poverty and tear gassed at our borders.  Others with exploration, The Mormon Trail, or with greed, The Gold Rushes, The Santa Fe Trail.
Pilgrimage is much alive today in repeated travels of all faiths and none, exploring the importance of place and journey, or merely traditional travels to specific places and times.
Perhaps we are less fortunate than Abraham, and his offspring, both by Sarah and by Hagar, who knew they were always aliens, strangers, because they lived in tents, and moved them a lot,
"By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob...."--Hebrews 11:9
By the way, the reason the English settlers called themselves "Pilgrims" was because their early versions of the Bible used the word in Hebrews 11:13. If they'd had a modern version they'd used a different word.
One of my pilgrimages is through dictionaries looking for word origins. 
"Pilgrim" as made a long pilgrimage as a word.
"Pilgrim" was first used about 1200 A.D. as pilegrim, from Old French pelerin, peregrin-- "pilgrim, crusader; foreigner, stranger," from Late Latin pelegrinus, fromperegrinus, "foreigner" (source of Italian pellegrino, Spanish peregrino), from peregre, "from abroad," from per- "beyond" + agri,  "country, land," from the Proto-Indo-European root *agro  "field." The change of the "r" to "l"in most Romance languages  appears to be a Germanic modification. 

The English term "pilgrim" originally came from the Latin word peregrinus (per, through + ager, field, country, land), which means a foreigner, a stranger, someone on a journey, or a temporary resident. 
It can describe a traveller making a brief journey to a particular place or someone settling for a short or long period in a foreign land. Peregrinatio was the state of being or living abroad.

Peregrinus was also used in the Vulgate version of the Bible to translate the Hebrew gur (sojourner) and the Greek parepidemos (temporary resident). These terms undergirded a central image of the Christian life. Christians were identified as temporary residents in this world whose true home was in heaven. 
I know, more than you want to know. But as I've undertaken this annual journey of daily watercolor Christmas cards, the  trip has evolved into a pilgrimage of words.
My pilgrimages increasing head for New Mexico, where on Christmas eve, tonight, hundreds of devout parishioners will make their own pilgrimages to iconic adobe mission churches. 
These thoughts, these watercolors, help make me aware that I am a pilgrim, a stranger in a strange land.

A season of beckoning trails

Snowfall in Santa Fe, today's #watercolor card

Holidays are seasons of traveling, in distances and memories, down old trails in our lives.
America, and Oklahoma, is a country of trails, and most of the old ones have been forgotten or paved over, but they still exist.
You can think of many...Trail of Tears, Chisholm Trail,  Santa Fe Trail, Route 66. Go to another section of the country and there will be others...The Natchez Trace, El Camino Real....
The Palace of the Governors at the end of the Santa Fe Trail in New Mexico, on the plaza, always beckons me. When there I have to walk down the long portico where Native Americans are selling their art. It seems always crowded with tourists.
But not at night. Then you can sense the almost haunting, definite magical 400-year-old history of Santa Fe. Especially after a snowstorm.
I took the photo below one Thanksgiving about 10 years ago, the inspiration for today's watercolor, though I painted from memory, what I feel, knowing it is not architecturally precise. That's not what matters when trails beckon emotionally.
For an earlier blog post and photos about the Santa Fe Trail from 2010, click "Santa Fe Trailings."

Homelands and immigrants at "Christmas"

"Homeland," today's 5 x 7 #watercolor card

We are children of geography...the pull of place grows deep inside, especially at this time of year.
I cannot imagine the desperation that forces thousands of immigrants to leave "home," to seek asylum, salvation, someplace else. 
As a so-called "Christian" people celebrating the birth of Christ who taught people to love and not be afraid, can we not in this time calling for love and peace, have compassion, and not hate or fear, for  those uprooted from their homelands? 
Or maybe we're not. Maybe Christmas should be renamed Materialismmas, judging by our selfish reactions in this time of turmoil for  people voluntarily who eave homelands because of poverty and hunger, or because of war and persecution and disease, are forced from them.

Maybe Christmas should be renamed Materialismmas

It's not new, of course, as our "Christian" ancestors did their best at genocide of native people. That included uprooting them from their homelands as with the Trail of Tears in Oklahoma, where the pull of place was and is sacred, and trying to "convert" them.
Fortunately they have survived, primarily because of the strength of their cultures, anchored in their religions, and as with the Pueblo people and other tribes, their sacred geographies. Perhaps their god is more powerful than ours?
All of this is spontaneous as I write about geography in my life. I am a part of every place I've lived, and one of the strongest is New Mexico.
One of the most powerful places on earth spiritually, and symbols of New Mexico to me,  is Taos Pueblo...a civilization and "religion" that is older than America. That is because of the people and places that are an essential part of who they are. Most of us in Western religions cannot fathom the depth of their beliefs.
This was not supposed to be political, and perhaps it is not...but it is religious. Spontaneous thoughts,  spiritual emotions, erupted about what Christmas is supposed to be as I viewed and wrote about my annual watercolor cards featuring Taos Pueblo. 
Have we forgotten that all of us are immigrants, and even the Oklahoma nickname honors desperate illegal immigrants--"Sooners"?
How would Christ react to desperate immigrants? Aren't we all desperate immigrants, hungry for a sacred homeland?

Shutdown

"Captain, they're trying to shut down the reactor."
"I know that, Clark, and there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it, is there?"
"But we're out here light years from home, asteroids everywhere, and without power...."
He let the the thought go unsaid....sure they'd have enough oxygen for a week on the mile-long ship, but without power to keep the shields up and maneuver, it would be only a matter of time before a piece of rock hit and killed them all.
"I'd break out the spacesuits," the Captain said. "It'll give us a few more days, and by then, if they're dead, we might be able to get back there and restart the drive." He and Clark were the only survivors of the original crew of 24 on the interstellar Sojourner.  It left a year  year ago to take 249 remaining  members of a radical religious group to a new home where   they would no longer threaten the finally peaceful, unified Earth  trying to start Armageddon.
But they'd overpowered their keepers in the rear of the ship where they were quarantined. While they couldn't get to the control cabins, they'd managed to break into the reactor areas.
All the Captain and Clark could do was helplessly watch on the control monitors as they tried to sabotage the drive systems.
"Can't they set off an explosion?" Clark asked. He was a navigator, not a nukie.
"No, but they might make a mistake and release enough radiation to kill themselves," the Captain said. "That would be their own Armageddon."
"And ours," Clark thought, because then there would be no way to get back there and restart the drives, without dying of radiation.
"And for us, death by radiation or lack of oxygen, some choice," he mumbled.
"It's amazing to me that with all the planning that went into this relocation, nobody thought about the effects of a shutdown," the Captain said.
"Relocation" was such a nice word, Clark thought, thinking back to his ancient history lessons about the Earth's treatment of colonized people, like the Palestinians, the Jews, the American Indians, the slave ships. But they'd never had the chance to shut down a government. If they'd only known how easy it was to disrupt the majority.
Then he remembered, there was one instance where a radical minority back in the 21st Century caused the collapse of an entire civilization, just by forcing a shutdown of the government. At first it had just been some kind of revolt against a law, mixed in with religious fervor.
 It amazed him how the followers of religious leaders who preached love and goodwill, peace and compassion could be so hateful and violent throughout history. And of course they hadn't seen or thought about the consequences, once their government quit functioning ... uncontrolled sickness and plague, financial collapse mixed with invasions from enemies taking advantage of the paralysis. All of them ended up in labor camps and died of starvation or disease, prisoners in the land they helped destroy, with no government to protect them.
"Like us," Clark thought. "Prisoners in our own land, and about to die of starvation or sickness.
"All just because of a  shutdown."
The lights flickered and the monitors went blank. The two-hour emergency lights came on. He and the captain  reached for the spacesuits.
He heard something hit the hull of the ship, and the lights went out.