Is there anything harder to do than to leave home?

Oh, I don’t mean those life-passages that are monumental transitions—going to camp for the summer, leaving for college, moving one’s address to the first rented apartment, following a job across the country, etc.

I mean those more simple departures—getting ready to take off for a family vacation or relocating to the summer home, traveling overseas, or even going to church Sunday after Sunday. Something weird happens in many people’s psyches—nerves get jangled; we think of all the things we haven’t done, and try to get them ALL completed in the week before we travel, or the hours before we are due at worship.

It has taken me many years to learn the art of leaving home. If I’m traveling, either for several days or several months, I really don’t want to come home to a filthy, disorganized house, so I will try to leave it the way I want to find it. Moving four kids, as I often did, through a packing process for a trip will turn any saint into a harridan—and I was never very saintly to begin with. What’s more, most of my travel involved Christian trips. I was traveling on the Christian speaker’s circuit, taking airplane flights because of assignments for religious journals, teaching in small spiritual retreats, or attending board meetings of national not-for-profit religious organizations.

It seems as though my leave-taking should have been a little more filled with equanimity, repose and serenity. In addition, I always forgot something—a crucial hairbrush, toothpaste, a half-slip—which I rarely wear these days, but then, I rarely stand on a platform any more, in a circle of revealing lights in front of hundreds if not thousands of people.

Well—pre-preparation is the key. Instead of rising at 3 a.m. and stuffing clothes into the washer and dryer, and packing my clothes, frantic about not being ready in time, I have one small suitcase with my toiletries always ready to go. I use it as I’m getting dressed the day I travel, and I make sure everything is in it that I need because I’ve checked it out that morning. Now, when I return home, I make a list of what I’ve used up, put the sticky note on the bathroom mirror, and don’t store that suitcase until I’ve purchased the missing items. A Nigerian saying reminds us, “The day on which one starts out is not the time to start one’s preparation.”

For long complicated trips where I will be crossing time and climate zones, dressing formally and informally, I put out a suitcase at least a week before I go, try on clothes I may want to take, make as many of the same color combinations as possible, put out the jewelry and accessories that go with each outfit, try to eliminate two or three outfits that I think I might need but probably won’t. I have one friend, a consummate world-traveler, who only takes two pair of shoes—the shoes she wears to travel and another pair for a change. Her clothes are all one color, and she never packs more than one purse.

I have yet to reach her exemplary model, but I am adhering to my rule about suitcases: If you can’t carry (drag, hoist or haul) it yourself, it’s too big. Get something smaller. One medium-sized suitcase, one smaller bag, one purse and a satchel is the absolute limit (oh well, I might carry a coat on my arm—depending on the temperatures where I am journeying). The airlines with their carry-on fees, of course, are screwing up this hard-won plan, so I am working on discovering alternate suitcase systems.

“The venerable tradition of traveling with one satchel or bag symbolizes the fundamental philosophy of pilgrimage: Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Phil Cousineau writes in The Art of the Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred. I am not here yet; I would like to be.

Cousineau recommends (as do many other writers) that we consider every journey, every home-leaving, no matter how short (trip to the grocery store, doctor’s appointment, or a daily run) as a potential pilgrimage. One family tells how they take a half-hour to “sit on their suitcases” before departure. This calms them; they remember what they have forgotten. More importantly, they remember what they are journeying for, the purpose of the trip ahead. How many times have I rushed out of my house only to have to return for something crucial I’ve neglected to bring.

Alexander Schmemann, the Russian Orthodox priest, reminds parishioners that Sunday worship begins before they leave their houses. So do the little and big pilgrimages of our lives. The biggest aid in an equitable home-leaving is an inner attitude. Mother Teresa once remarked, “Pray before you do anything.” Journeys, large and small, are made fruitful when we pray ourselves into the way. I pray (when I remember—haste, again, is the enemy) for safety, for caution, for attention, for receptivity. You do not know who you will meet, what you will find, where you will end your journey—even if it is just out the back door (or going to church). Louis Pasteur once commented on this quality of being ready, “In the field of science, chance favors the prepared mind.”

How many times I have whizzed past something intriguing discarded in someone’s else’s garbage, a street festival, or a beckoning road and thought, Oh, I wish I had stopped there.

Leaving home for those journeys where you will certainly return—doing this well is an acquired habit, a learned art. The author Martin Palmer writes, “True pilgrimage changes lives, whether we go halfway around the world, or out to our own backyard.” Let us learn to leave home well.


Karen Mains
KM1-17

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design Retreats of Silence, in both 24-hours and three-days formats, through the aegis of Hungry Souls. Developing hospitality initiatives that train Christian men and women how to use their own homes in caring outreaches through the Open Heart, Open Home ministries. Launching the Global Bag Project, a worldwide effort that markets sustainable cloth shopping bags to provide sustainable incomes for bag-makers in developing nations. Researching the impact of listening groups while overseeing some 240 small groups over the last three years. Experimenting with teleconference mentoring for Wannabe (Better) Writers. Designing the Tales of the Kingdom Web site.

This year has been filled with travel. In October of 2008, we took 16 friends to Paris for a Christian trip with the theme: God Through the Eyes of the Artist (and the Artist in the Eye of God). Because the Mainses’ extended family only gathers together every other year for Christmas, my husband David and I took a trip for the Christmas week to Hot Springs, Arkansas.

In March, we flew to Kenya with a stopover in London so my son-in-law, a video producer, could visit this city he had never seen. The rest of the time in Africa, we worked together filming a microcredit startup, the Global Bag Project, our ministry is launching in which sustainable income is provided for bag-makers from selling reusable shopping bags.

Throw in a trip to Phoenix where our eldest son and three of our grandchildren live, a cruise up the St. Lawrence Seaway with a couple of grandkids ending in a week’s stay on Cape Cod and an American history tour in Boston, and our annual tour to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, ON, and we’ve just sliced the tip off the iceberg as far as our travel plans are concerned.

Because I truly believe a person cannot be educated unless he/she travels; because in a globalizing world, we need to understand that there are different ideas, different ways of knowing and processing those ideas, and that travel that creates dialogue, that challenges our preconceptions is not just a pleasure but utterly necessary for world peace, I am amazed to discover that only 20% of Americans have passports (well, 22% now because of the recent Canadian and Mexican border document requirements).
 
Granted, the States are beautiful, our country is large and there is plenty to see here (I would have moved to Cape Cod in an instant had it been feasible), but it is the world pressing in on us that we need to work to understand.

Early on, when our adult offspring were kids growing up under our roof, their father and I decided that if there was a choice between purchasing things and buying experiences (with our meager ministry salaries), we would choose experiences.

So off they went to Peru with their aunt and uncle, who were taking a church youth group to South America. They camped through Spain, took summer college courses in Europe, taught English as a second language in China, and roamed the continents with their parents, whose curiosity for travel has never abated, even though we are aging and really don’t know how long we are going to be able to keep up with all this transiting around the world. Now we travel with the grandchildren: France with one, Scotland with another. I want them to see and not be afraid of the unusual, the unexpected, the exotic or the remarkable. I want their memories to be filled with places and journeys and bumps in the road and detours and all the stories travelers tell to one another—“When we were in Alaca, Spain…”

I have rarely been in a place I didn’t think was beautiful, or the people fascinating, the architecture amazing or the history absorbing. My life, my thinking, my wealth of being have all been enriched by journeys, friends who joined us on Christian trips, conversations with folk who were of other faiths, seeing Israel without importing my Christianity into it; meeting with refugees on five continents and writing about their courage and their despair; being hosted by ambassadors, one Queen and King, relief and development workers, and U.S. Embassy staff. Right now, my nations-visited total is 66. I am at the point of live where I think, So many countries, so little time.

I have discovered that every journey can be a sacred pilgrimage. Phil Cousineau writes in The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred, “Common to all pilgrims was the sense of awakened wonder. The long and wearing way carried them through strange lands filled with stranger people, which allowed them to experience
the wider world—probably for the first and only time in their lives. The pilgrim’s constant sense of surprise and astonishment at the ever-changing scenery, weather, and habits of others were as influential as the perils they had to overcome.”

So, I ask you the question I frequently ask of my own adult children: “Is your passport up to date?”


Karen Mains
KM1-16
keywords: Christian vacation

Other projects involving Karen right now are: Working with teams of Christian women to design Retreats of Silence, in both 24-hours and three-days formats, through the aegis of Hungry Souls. Developing hospitality initiatives that train Christian men and women how to use their own homes in caring outreaches through the Open Heart, Open Home ministries. Launching the Global Bag Project, a worldwide effort that markets sustainable cloth shopping bags to provide sustainable incomes for bag-makers in developing nations. Researching the impact of listening groups while overseeing some 240 small groups over the last three years. Experimenting with teleconference mentoring for Wannabe (Better) Writers. Designing the Tales of the Kingdom Web site.