The emotional granularity of the experience of a pilgrimage formed a trio her a month ago, moving from trepidation into weariness, then reviving into a second wind. Of course, that couldn’t be the end of it. As everyone knows, a pilgrimage isn’t over until the pilgrim has arrived.
Arrival is, on one level, a tangible condition, a literal achievement that takes place when we bring our bodies to an intended destination. There is also, however, an emotion that we express metaphorically in the phrase, “I have arrived.”
Everyone knows what we really mean when we say this. The important thing is not that we have moved our bodies to a particular place, but that our identity has changed, that we have become something new.
It was in this sense that President Barack Obama spoke of the arrival of a new citizen four years ago.
I want us to remember people like Ann Dermody from Alexandria, Virginia. She’s originally from Ireland and has lived in America legally for years. She worked hard, played by the rules and dreamed of becoming a citizen. In March, her dream came true, and before taking the oath, she wrote me a letter. “The papers we receive… will not change our different accents or skin tones,” Ann said. “But for that day, at least, we’ll feel like we have arrived.” Well, to Ann and immigrants like her who have come to our shores seeking a better life, yes, you have arrived.
It’s telling that President Obama felt the need to affirm the status of Ann’s arrival. Ann arrived in America years before she felt that she had arrived.
The emotion of arrival is the feeling of having traveled the figurative distance between who we are and who we feel that we ought to be. When we declare that we have arrived, we declare that our struggle for transformation, which is the struggle of every pilgrimage, is complete.
Anyone with a sufficiently healthy body and the financial means can travel to the end point of a pilgrimage. To be there, however, isn’t the point. It’s everything that the pilgrim has been through to get there that matters. The travel itself makes the arrival worthwhile.
