Pilgrimages to the Edge

By Michael Coffey | July 24, 2021

“Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”

-Geoffrey Chaucer

Pilgrimages attract people who have something to work out.  The walk is a ritual that offers the soul a space in which it can let down some defenses and allow imprisoned thoughts, feelings, desires, revelations to manifest themselves.  Ideally, reaching the symbolic destination at the journey’s end coincides with the resolution of the inner drama that inspired the journey.

My spouse of thirty-four years, Maggie, has become a such a shrine.  She has ALS – perhaps the most prominent of a shrinking number of diseases for which there is neither prevention nor effective treatment.  Upon hearing of her diagnosis, shock, sadness, denial and, I suspect, some less-than-conscious anxiety about their own situation is evoked. 

But, after the initial shock, folks have experienced an impulse to visit.  Since news of my spouse’s ALS diagnosis broke about two years ago, a great many people have been drawn to her.  Now this is not entirely unsurprising since Maggie has a magnetic personality, a public face as optimistic as they come, and she has spent her life convening folks — but this is different.   I think it does not take much effort to see that mortality awareness is working here. 

The terrible simplicity of the diagnosis — you are going to die in the relatively near future and there is nothing you can do about it – is indeed breathtaking.  But considered from a slight distance, all that is said by the diagnosis is that one is human.  The gauze has been removed from the camera’s lens.  Maggie has been disencumbered of the pretense that tomorrow will look pretty much like today.  The terrible beauty lurking in an ALS diagnosis lies in the fact that there is no varnish that can prettify the rot underneath.

Our culture’s common evasions of death consideration upon encountering life-threatening disease suddenly reveal themselves to be both silly and futile. In this, such conditions become a gift – another of the Divine’s tenacious attempts to rouse us from our stupor of distraction from life’s inevitable end. 

These visits are, in part, pilgrimages — as sincere as any that have ever been made and, I hope, more effective at facilitating growth than those taken with vague goals and that follow a cultural tradition separated by hundreds of years from their original inspiration. 

Consciously or not, they journey to a place where the fabric between our lives and utter mystery has thinned.  I suspect that they might hope that Maggie, as a traveler several paces ahead of them, might have reached some higher ground where she can catch a glimpse of “the undiscovered country.” 

I hold out much hope for these visits.  At a time when many of our institutional sources of wisdom are foundering, shared moments in the presence of such immanency can be a place for growth.

I have seen a quality of joy, unfettered from the distraction of mortality evasion, grow in Maggie and sometimes be shared with her visitors.  The inexorable but slow progression of the disease and attendant losses has afforded Maggie the opportunity to shift her understanding of her own value from her many former capacities and energetic personality – to an intrinsic value recognized by the communities that surround us.  As unwelcome as her situation is, it is here that I think she has discovered the country she would not have without ALS. 

I think the optimal result of these pilgrimages is that folks pause long enough to be present, cherish some of the awesomeness of life itself, be present to the inescapable reality of death, and hopefully take a critical look at their own immortality projects and diversions.  I hope that they leave with a deeper awareness and a choice to live more generatively.  Perhaps, at some point in the future, I’ll have some evidence to assess whether my hopes have been realized or not.

Michael Coffey lives in Milwaukee, WI. Much of his life has involved faith-based responses to social issues, particularly from the tradition of Ignatian (Jesuit) spirituality. He is very interested in how Becker’s ideas can help inform a clarified vision of the religious impulse and a renewal of how it can be expressed to promote human thriving for all.