Departure: The First Leg of Your Running Journey
Belden C. Lane offers a five-part structure to this book based on each “leg” of a backpacking trip. The legs include:
The call to adventure and risk (departure)
Assumption of a necessary discipline
Descent into darkness and loss
The return to a freer and more responsible life
Reprise
He describes this first leg through stories of venturing out, disillusionment, and desire. He explores the dynamics of just getting started through sensing some kind of call that draws you out to the margins. He tells the story of desert fathers and mothers living in the desert, which was actually just on the edge of town, and their desire to connect with God in the wilderness. Then he reminds us that the initial push to get out there can often be met with disillusionment. He quotes the Sufi mystic Rumi’s poem,
“Seeing the moon in the window, they are running to the roof with ladders.”
In the wilderness, we encounter the edge of what our ego can control. It is not a place where we’re in charge, and there’s a place deep inside people that yearns for something bigger than what we can control on our own. There, we meet desires that God has planted deep, and at the same time, we all have plenty of desires that aren’t so deep. In discussing Evagrius, Lane writes,
“Lesser longings have to be transformed into a larger yearning for infinite satisfaction—for something never fulfilled, but continually enhanced by every partial realization of its joy.” p. 62
This first leg of the journey is marked by getting started, disillusionment, and desire. From our context at Pilgrim Endurance, our journey often begins similarly. We often begin the running or spiritual journey in earnest because we have experienced a taste of its fruits, be it a deep sense of meaning or the joy of moving quickly over terrain. Something draws us. The idea of it may strike a chord within us, and so we set off with that momentum.
Disillusionment
It may go well for some time, but eventually we realize it's not all we thought it would be. I began running hoping it would remain easy and nothing would go wrong. In the midst of working out our discipline, disillusionment arises. As the poet Rumi writes, "Seeing the moon in the window, they are running to the roof with ladders."
In our excitement, we go all in. Then we begin and realize the fantasies we had in our minds of what it would be like (the spiritual journey or the running journey) are not exactly how it will go. If we can handle that disillusionment, we see that what prompted us to start the journey was enough and what keeps us on the journey doesn't have to be the same thing. It's a refinement of ourselves. Lane points to St. Therese of Lisieux, who teaches us about the tension between our sense of grandiosity and the virtue in littleness.
Desire
Next, Lane discusses desire that help us get started on the first leg of departure with several relevant examples, but the gist is this. Our wounds show up, and desire is everything. He discusses the archetypal mother and father wounds and points out the pattern that, "What isn't transformed will be transmitted." Some of our primary work is cooperating with God to transform the wounds we received. This is a vulnerable space to inhabit, and some never go there. It can be so easy to follow the ego desires, which is a necessary and first path. At the end of that path comes the work of transforming those deep wounds. This is some of the work we do with folks engaged with Pilgrim Endurance.
What isn't transformed will be transmitted.
Desire gets us started and helps us work through initial disillusionments. Lane shares a quote from Bernard of Clairvaux, "The one who seeks for God, has already found [God]." He discusses how desire is in the essence of God's being in the Trinity as the prompt for creation. Numerous wise men and women over the centuries have pointed out that it is the desire and the yearning that is so important. Lane brings up a term that illustrates this point: felicity. He quotes Traherne defining felicity as "our deepest humanity--the breaking open of the soul to beauty, our being stunned by a yawning capacity for boundless enjoyment." So, despite the disillusionment and everything else, you leap! Because God leaps first.
At Pilgrim Endurance, much of our initial work with people is in this first leg. People are excited to get their first training plan, and they find the discipline of daily run and check-in isn’t as glamorous as they thought. They find ways to persist, with encouragement from their coach or a run where they notice their progress. This is where our spiritual direction sessions can be so beneficial. Commitment to consistency in running over years can be a real transformation in their story, and it can be a tangible way to work out what they have been dealing with.
And remember, this is just the first leg of the journey!
