A Way of Pilgrimage in the World

By: Julie Durbin

Julie Durbin is an associate professor of humanities and writing at Geneva College, where she directs first year English composition and the writing center. Prior to working as a professor, she spent ten years as a missionary in Ukraine.

I have been thinking about what every student needs to learn, and there is no way for me to answer this question without considering “Invitation to the Humanities” at Geneva College, a required course for all students. We believe it offers something that all students need.

What students need to learn is more than just information—a what. What they need, what we all need, is a how and with whom—a way of pilgrimage in the world.

Any college or university, regardless of its posture toward religion, is working to prepare students for life. Our actual lives—in college and beyond—are lives of motion. As German philosopher Josef Pieper put it, we are in status viatoris, on our way toward fulfillment or annihilation. Our students are struggling to survive their own persistent anxieties, their fractured families and communities, and the crumbling remains of civil society. In the classroom, they increasingly exhibit cognitive and emotional paralysis. But perhaps there is a way out. As John Andrew Bryant writes in A Quiet Mind to Suffer With, “The most important thing in the Wilderness is not to feel better or worse, but to know someone and be headed somewhere.”

The first sentences of our humanities syllabus chart out the territory of this journey.

We seek in this course to launch students on an ever-deepening quest of what it means to be human. Seeking to explore what Christians over the course of two millennia have considered to be life’s central questions, we will center our attention on three particular subjects: death, love, and modern times.

We’re inviting students on “an ever-deepening quest.” We use the language of adventure, asking students to see the stories they are in, the roles they are called to play, and the weight of their choices. Something real is at stake here, even in the classroom. Like Frodo, who said, “I will take the ring, though I do not know the way,” we may find that our journey demands the courage to take paths through the dark unknown.

The way goes through the valley of the shadow. “You want to convince your students that they are going to die,” one professor said during a planning meeting over twenty years ago. These days we find students require less convincing. Death meets them everywhere, but preparing to face death is another matter. Though we would prefer to be distracted or made to feel better, what we need is a way through the valley.

When our students’ loved ones die, when our loved ones die, or even when our very own students die, we need a way to bear it together, a way to apprehend a reality beyond our grasp. We are grateful that we have been rehearsing, reminding each other that we are dust, that the whole cosmos is groaning for redemption. There has not yet been a disaster so jarring that it made the way we are trying to walk together irrelevant. We are in the practice of making meaning daily, semester after semester, wearied by our need for it, but not wearying of the repetition because it is a liturgy for life in the midst of death.

“The most important thing in the Wilderness is not to feel better or worse, but to know someone and be headed somewhere.” Who is the someone to know in this way that we are trying to walk together? Surely, there are many someones in our humanities course. There are Christian authors, those mentioned in our syllabus who over the course of two millennia have considered life’s central questions. And there are writers who, regardless of their belief, have given us language for naming our many forms of cultural self-deception. We are asking ourselves in this course what it means to be human, and with these companions, we are not alone on the shadowy path.

In our context, we remind students that we are not alone because Christ, our companion and our shepherd, leads us. He has gone through the valley of the shadow in every way. He has wept at the tomb of his friend. He has died and has risen and is the victor over death who teaches us how to die and how to live. And he calls us to love one another. But we are not very good at it.

We need a way that places us in constant awareness of our need for God and our need for one another. We need a robust how and with whom for the what we claim to believe.

Among the voices of those who claim unbelief, who “see through to nothing,” we have Hulga, from Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People.” In a moment of stunning perception, she jumps up and exclaims to her mother—and to us, “Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!’ she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, ‘Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!’”

Indeed, we are not our own light. We need light from outside. People on the way, without a light in their eyes, without a source of love from beyond themselves, are just walking in circles.

Death plagues us, not only physically, but spiritually, not only individually, but culturally. In the words of T. S. Eliot,

     We are the hollow men
     We are the stuffed men
     Leaning together
     Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Escape from the spiritual sleep of the walking dead requires, as Dostoevsky called it, “perpetual spiritual resistance.” Or as George MacDonald put it, “he who would be born again indeed/Must wake his soul unnumbered times a day.” This waking requires that we “urge (ourselves) to life with holy greed.” What might holy greed look like?

T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” draws on imagery from Dante’s Inferno to describe people lacking a spiritual dimension to their existence. The poem was originally part of Eliot’s famed “The Waste Land” but finally appeared in his collection published in 1925.

We believe it looks like wonder; it looks like imagination; it looks like beauty. It is a pursuit that is not afraid of longing, or what Lewis called, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

With Flannery O’Connor, we are “stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a dangerous quest.”

What we have to fight as travelers on the way is not only death and disaster, but also the deadening “everydayness” of our own lives, as Walker Percy put it. “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” We need the search, and we need companions who remind us why we search at all. We need friends across the generations—living and dead—who show us how to be properly dissatisfied.

There is plenty of despair to contend with. Chesterton warns us that the antidote to despair is not a shallow optimism that “whitewashes the world” and calls evil good. Nor is it the cynical academic pessimism our circles sometimes reward us for expressing, particularly in the humanities disciplines. No, it is cosmic patriotism, a way of “loving the world without trusting it,” a commitment of love that sees the world as “an ogre’s castle to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.” For this way of life, we need the heart of the martyr, who “dies that something may live.” As all the best adventure stories show us, we must be willing to contend with death in order to have any kind of life beyond death.

Many college and university classes explore the human condition and invite students to question life’s meaning. Many depict life as a journey. What we propose is that the purposeful journey must be honored in the way we live academic life together. How we go about all of this matters a great deal. Love “needs space around it, and time,” as Kathleen Norris discovered.

Those who designed and have led our humanities course understand the importance of space and time. They chose to make a place for creative, robust friendship among professors, teaching assistants, and students enrolled in the course. We gather once a week in a large common meeting to hear our own members lecture. We engage in lively discussion twice a week over challenging texts in small classroom sections. We pray together, share life stories, and listen to songs that express the youthful angst of each generation that has been awake enough for a moment to say, “something is terribly wrong with us.”

We often have lunch together, and we sit together in the late afternoons every week in staff meetings that range from the ridiculous to the sublime, because we don’t want to just talk about community, we want to experience it. And wondrous things can happen when we do.

I say these things because I am living them in the fellowship that the Invitation to the Humanities course has created and continues to foster. A way has been made for me. I have found friends and fellow pilgrims who tell me the truth and demonstrate the courageous way of love.

It is the way of Jewel and King Tirian in The Last Battle, who went back to Stable Hill, proclaimed the truth, and took the adventure Aslan sent them. It says, with Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

It’s a way that faces death but refuses to succumb to the tomb, for as one of our students said, “A culture of death sets the bar pitifully low for the good life.”

In The Weight of Glory, Lewis argues that our desires are not too strong; they are too weak. “We are far too easily pleased.” We do students a disservice when we aim too low; when all we do is attempt to prepare them for careers which may not exist by the time they graduate. And we see the results when youthful angst has been given no pathway, no frame of reference beyond self-reference, no ancient guiding wisdom. Both apathy and radicalization stem from a similar source—a failure of hope. We must point to a lasting hope and walk together in that direction.

The Raised Hand is a project of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and serves its mission to catalyze and empower thoughtful Christian presence and practice at colleges and universities around the world, in service of the common good. To learn more visit cscmovement.org.