Journey.

In Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’ seventeenth century allegory of the Sacred Romance, there is a man who comes to see his own story as he has never seen it before, and he is appalled by what he sees. He longs for life, real life, which is to say eternal life, and he knows that the stay where he is means death. He has no more sense of direction than that he must go and find the path that leads to the Celestial City, his heart’s true home. Against the protestations of his family and friends, in rejection of all the comforts of his smaller story, he launches on a remarkable adventure: “So I saw in my dream,” Bunyan wrote, “that the man began to run.” A good place to start. But as Bunyan tells it, “he had not run far from his own door” before the characters in his own small story ran to fetch him back, crying out all the threats and excuses they could think of. “But the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, ‘Life! Life! Eternal life!’”

This man becomes Pilgrim and the story of his journey is the story of our own. Entering into the Sacred Romance begins with a decision to become a pilgrim of the heart. As Gabriel Marcel reminds us, the soul is a traveler: “It is the soul and the soul alone that we can say with supreme truth that ‘being’ necessarily means ‘being on the way’ (en route).” We are, he says, “homo viator,” which means “itinerant man,” man or woman on a pilgrimage. The choice before us now is to journey or to homestead, to live like Abraham the friend of God, or like Robinson Crusoe, the lost soul cobbling together some sort of existence with whatever he can salvage from the wreckage of the world. Crusoe was no pilgrim; he was a survivor, hunkered down for the duration. He lived in a very, very small world where the lead character and all else found its focus in him. Of course, to be fair, Crusoe was stranded on an island with little hope of rescue. We have been rescued, but still the choice is ours to stay in our small stories, clutching our household gods and false lovers, or run in search of life.
- John Eldredge

Please remind me, many times per day, not to be the creator of my deserted island.

I have found Eldredge's book, The Sacred Romance, to be one of the most important books I have ever read.