By Ken Homan, nSJ
I had looked forward to the Pilgrimage Experiment for some time. The pilgrimage for us novices is this: $35, a one-way bus ticket, and a month to get home. We should avoid staying with people we know or Jesuit communities. Most, if not all of us, set out with particular graces we sought. I wanted to visit different Native American ministries and to look for God’s work and hope in the world. My journal reveals that God made these graces extremely present.
My trip took me on a fairly big loop of the West — from the Twin Cities, to Albuquerque, to a Navajo Reservation, to Seattle, to Billings, to St. Louis, to Omaha and back to the Twin Cities. I spent endless hours on the bus and hitchhiked with rude, wonderfully kind and story-telling persons. I stayed with Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuit Volunteers, my dad, and friends (I bent the rules a bit because they were places prayer led me). And perhaps that was the biggest grace I had — simply letting prayer lead me. Prayer, more than anything, helped this pilgrimage be about God’s will rather than my own desire for travel and adventures.
God gave me many different ways of seeing His love and action in the world. The uncopyable gifts of heaven that landscape our planet enveloped me with a sense of God’s love and inspiration in the world. The people I met filled me with more hope than I could ever ask. I met teachers, writers, construction workers, nurses, doctors, students and more who all were searching and who all were serving. In Albuquerque, I stayed at a Catholic Worker House with beautiful people who dedicated themselves to offering a community to those in need of one. In Billings, I met a bishop, doctors, nurses and community members who created ideas to serve with and for the nearby Crow Reservation. In St. Louis, a high school teacher of mine asked me to talk to all five of his sophomore classes about faith and justice. The simple generosity of people inviting me into their homes and feeding me was amazing. One family wouldn’t even let me do my own laundry — they demanded I relax on the couch while they did it for me!
Overall, pilgrimage left me with a fantastic sense of being able to trust God. By no means am I alone. God is always with me and always inspiring us to love and serve each other. And we need this love in our world.
What does this mean for me? It means my pilgrimage not only gave me graces, it gave me responsibility. More than ever, I feel called to share hope and the Good News. I feel called to serve, to love, to hope and to pray. I need this prayer to remind me I need God and I need you.
I’d like to share this poem (below) I wrote while sitting on a mountain top watching the sunset at St. Mary’s Mission on the Navajo Reservation. I found out the next morning that several mountain lions live and hunt on that mountain.
God lives on a Navajo Reservation,
so I went there to find Him.
I followed from St. Paul,
to Kansas City,
to Oklahoma City,
to Albuquerque,
to Tohatchi.
God lives in Tohatchi, on a
Navajo Reservation.
I tried to follow God up the
mountainside,
and the Holy Wind gave me
strength to hike.
I felt urgency, so I ran.
I stopped and looked,
the only sound
the drumbeat
of my sea-level heart.
I dug my toes into the
sand set against me.
God lives just beyond that peak,
where the golden cloud,
juts just next to the rose one.
The trail stopped.
Or rather,
it circled the Peak where God lives.
I jumped at that peak.
God lives on a Navajo Reservation,
because that is where God found me.
– Ken Homan