Sacred Journeys.
These words conjure up images of thousand of devotees, walking on narrow, dirt trails through deserts and forests, to worship the stone shrine resting on a mountaintop.Generations of followers with wooden walking sticks follow in the path of their ancestors, their religious community, as they seek to connect with God, the Saints, or a higher life force. We think of monks with prayer flags, and the Christians in the Middle Ages, and Muslims' journey to Mecca. It's cross-cultural, this phenomenon.
It's also pop cultural.
These journeys are not limited to avid believers of their religions. And by religions, I mean Christianity, Buddhism, etc.
What many of us do as "social" or "cultural" things can be seen as "religious."
We take pilgrimages to Cooperstown, Martin Luther King's home, and Disney World.
We travel great distances and oftentimes make the journey as important as the destination itself. We swap stories with other travelers, asking how long they've loved baseball and when the first time they watched The Lion King. We plan vacations around these sacred journeys. We follow in the footsteps of the great leaders, pop icons, and mediate on their life and their legacy. We go to where they ate, like many go to see where Jesus had his Last Supper. We look at the places where they died, and for Elvis's followers, where he may have appeared after his death.
We as people are driven to make journeys and venerate. Go places we haven't gone before, hoping to find enlightenment and meaning. We yearn for this internal time for self-reflection, while sharing this common experience with thousands of people, from the past and the present.
We walk, we fly over oceans, we ride buses cross-country, and we go on these journeys to see the relics of Bob Marley and St. Francis. You can just go to Disney and not consider it sacred; just another spot that was on the way. But as thousands of people wait with bated breath for those gates to open, we can see the religiosity of their journey.
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