By Paul Engler
Whenever I write my newsletter, I am afraid a subtle or not-so-subtle repetition will be noticed—I fear I write the same thing over and over again! Generally the theme has something to do with change, uncertainty, and transformation. In Christianity, this is called the Paschal mystery, the cycle of life, passion, death and resurrection, but the pattern is widespread, appearing in culture after culture in different forms throughout time. Richard Rohr calls it the wisdom pattern: order, disorder, reorder. The task assigned to us by life, he says, is to let go, to learn to let go of the first order, to allow and rest in the disorder, and to finally open ourselves to a new order—over and over again. My friend Carlos and the Ayni Institute talk about this as the “seasons” in our personal lives, in our organizations, and in our movements.
The same terrain can be explored through the concept of liminality. And in my Center Update, I write about the theory and practice of liminality through pilgrimages throughout many cultures, but specifically through my experience being a pilgrim on the Camino de Santigo on my recent trip to Spain. In 2022, the season of our house was one of greater stability, emerging from the winter of Coronavirus, which you can read about in our House Journal.
When it comes to where we are at within the social movements that flourished under Trump’s shocking rise to power—our season is still winter. After Trump’s fall and the election of Biden, we’re in a place where there has been a retraction in the once-flourishing social movements that I’ve followed closely and written about in many past articles. This has been a season of demobilization. Some of the largest moments of protest in US history happened in the last five years—around George Floyd’s murder, and the Women’s March. The anti-Trump resistance created all this spectacular activity, which has now, inevitably, contracted. There is also a popular understanding of midterm election backlash based on the fact that, almost without exception in the last 80 years, after the presidential election, there is an oppositional wave, and the President’s party loses seats in Congress in the midterms. This year was noteworthy just because the backlash was not as extreme as people have come to expect, even though the Democrats lost seats in the House and no longer have a majority in Congress.
This year, I also felt that many individuals like myself have been going through a personal winter, and especially many people embedded in social justice movements. So I thought I would write about one of the great lessons of liminality: rites of passage—what it means to embrace change, and become a pilgrim. It seems like where the whole world is at right now. We will all become pilgrims in the coming years.
Thanks for being our supporters for our journey as pilgrims. As I mention in my update, what makes pilgrims’ journeys possible is the support they receive from the broader culture. Other people open up their houses, feed them, and give them the space to be pilgrims. We all need that space at certain times in our lives. We all need liminality. For we all will become pilgrims. Buen Camino.