Are We There Yet?

Are we there yet? No.

Be here now. You will know when.

Then begin again.

Once, on a train trip across the country, we made a station stop at a town at the foot of the Rockies, the next stop a mountain range away.  A harried mother with two young children in tow got on, and were barely settled before one of the children plaintively asked, “Are we there yet?”

Is this not a question we ask ourselves in one way or another in our journey through life?  When will I know I’ve made it?  Why is the journey so often hard and uncertain? When will I reach my life goals?  When will my journey with and toward God feel clear, settled, and sure?

When, in your life journey, have questions like these come to you? What were they? Inwardly, how did you respond at first?

For much of my life I organized my journey around concrete goals – getting good grades in high school, getting into college and graduate school, finding a meaningful and rewarding job.  And I mapped out for myself the steps to get there. And, by any reasonable standards, achieved them one by one. 

But often we experience a deconstruction of this destination-oriented approach to life, usually toward the middle of life’s journey when we begin to question the goals we have pursued and ask, “Isn’t there something more?”  In The Divine Comedy, Dante writes, "In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost to me."  We discover that though we have indeed arrived at destinations we have set for ourselves, there is something more calling to us and we do not quite know what it is.

Has such an awakening been part of your journey?  What was called into question? In what ways, if any, have you regained your footing?

If we remain engaged with the journey, we set out again but travel in a new way — not toward a goal or destination we have set for ourselves, but by a way of traveling that leads us to we-know-not-yet-where but trust we will recognize when we find it.  For Irish Celtic pilgrims of the Middle Ages, this was known as traveling until you find “your place of resurrection.”  It is a sense of traveling with accompaniment — by the mystery of the inner call that compels us onward.

Once I was hiking on the sacred island of Iona off the coast of Scotland and noticed a hillock nearby with a trail leading to the top, which was not far away.  Seeking the top, I set out up the trail.  But upon reaching the top as I saw it from below, I realized it was a false summit and the actual top was higher up.  So, I hiked on and upon reaching the next summit discovered once again that I was not yet at the top.  After this occurred a couple more times, I did reach the summit of this hill, from which the view was far more encompassing that from the foot or from each of the false summits along the way. 

I think this is what our spiritual journey is like; each new “summit” we reach, each new “destination” is at the same time the starting point for the next segment of the journey.  It is a place of wider vision, of expansion, of greater maturity, yet it is not “there yet,” wherever “there” may be. If we think we have arrived at the end of our journey, we have not really started at all.

The poet, Seamus Heaney, speaking of poetry, makes a similar observation: poetry (I would expand this to life) has been “a journey where each point of arrival … turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination. (Nobel lecture: “Crediting Poetry” 2014)

For me, this is not discouragement as exemplified in the young child who complained “Are we there yet?” but is a hopeful awareness that further growth, further unfolding of wisdom, beauty, goodness, and love are always before us.  Although we do “arrive” — over and over at ever new places — there is always the “more” that remains before us, the further adventure of the journey.

What is it like for you (or would it be like) to conceive of life as this ever-expanding journey: no final arrival yet ongoing movement toward “the more”?

Copyright Hearken Books.
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without written permission from Hearken Books is strictly prohibited.