By EFFIE CALDAROLA

CatholicAnchor.org 

The journey knows what the traveler does not.

I can’t remember where I read those words, but I liked the sound of them. I was getting ready to take a trip to Philadelphia to see my daughter and son-in-law, and to New Orleans to a development conference. It appealed to me that only a perceptive and reflective traveler might discover the knowledge a journey might yield.

Travel can open our mind, and hopefully our heart, to new ideas and new ways of seeing God. But I think the key lies not in the destination, but in those words “perceptive” and “reflective.”

I have a friend who will travel to Central America during Lent on a humanitarian project. Some people might make this trip and come back complaining about creepy-crawly things, the heat, and the hard floors on which they’ll sleep.

But I can pretty much guarantee my friend will come back wiser, deeper, and with lots to share. Why? Because she’s a perceptive, reflective, prayerful person.

My journey was not so challenging, of course. Although it involved seven different airports and wildly different weather systems, I had comfortable beds and managed to slip in and out of Philadelphia between massive snowstorms. And the food – well, our shopping trip to the Italian market in Philly yielded a feast, and the shrimp creole and crab-stuffed catfish in New Orleans were fantastic.

Beyond the food and sightseeing, my visits brought out a gamut of emotion – the sadness of saying good-bye to a child who lives so far away, the excitement of witnessing Mardi Gras and the pre-Super Bowl sense of community in a still-recovering city, the depth of a family conversation with a cousin I see infrequently. Those things begged for reflection.

Travel can widen our perspective and deepen our spirituality. But again, whether we bring back merely a tan and a couple of extra pounds, or a new way of seeing the world, depends on how well we reflect on the journey.

When I was trying to find the quote with which I started this column, I ran across these similar words by the philosopher Martin Buber: “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” And will we reach that destination, or realize it if we do, without prayer?

The more I think about journeys, the more I realize that the greatest journeys are sometimes the most interior ones. And of course, we all started, last Wednesday, on the great interior journey of Lent.

A journey implies a willingness to open our eyes to new things, new people, new ideas. Many a traveler has found a travel journal indispensable for a trip. Perhaps it’s a great tool for the journey of Lent as well.

What if every evening, we wrote down what God had shown us that day? Soon, we might find ourselves listening with new ears, seeing a new world unfold in the mundane habitat of our daily routine.

“Our home is the journey,” said St. Ignatius, implying of course that in this life we never “arrive,” but travel on, seeking God and ourselves and waiting for what’s around the next bend.

Lent, reflected on day by day in a little journal, could be the best trip we take this year.

But to learn something, to really integrate a lesson from a journey requires some reflection. Not surprisingly, I reflect best when I write something down. I’ve heard many writers say that they only learn what they really feel when they write. Maybe in that case, the poem knows what the poet does not.

The writer is a stewardship and hospitality coordinator at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Anchorage.