This interview took place between Susan Dunn-Hensley, Sharenda Barlar, Nadine Rorem, and Margaret Diddams while they walked trails in and around Wheaton, Illinois. This is the fourth part of a series of interviews that will take place with faculty from Wheaton College as part of Dunn-Hensley and Barlar's 2020 virtual pilgrimage program.
Hereafter, each individual will be referred to with their initials: SD, SB, ND, and MD, respectively. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Many take pilgrimages to cope with momentous events in their life, such as the death of a loved one. What are the psychological components of pilgrimage that aid such processing?
SB: There are losses of job, there's retiring, there are a number of different life changes now that put people on pilgrim routes, even people who aren't identifying as Christian sometimes go on the pilgrim routes-- they're seeking something.
MD: Here's an idea that I've been playing with. I think that people yearn for disequilibrium. And as a psychologist, I don't know that I'm supposed to say that. I'm playing with the idea of a writing project on leadership and lament. And I came up with a subtitle, called Coming Home by a Different Route, and it has to do with the idea of a hero's journey. In a hero’s journey, you’re coming home by a different route, you're always returning, but you're returning differently.
I think what happens in our lives is that we become good at something, and that becomes unsustainable, because when we become good at something, we're always adding stuff. I think about being a professor, and then, ok, let me take on more responsibility, I'll be chair of faculty senate, because I'm insane, and then oh, I have leadership ability, so I get called up to be administrative. All of that, it's still centered on whatever that original identity was. It's just adding more and more and more.
I think being good is actually unsustainable, in that there has to be these times in our lives where we have to stop being good and shift, because it's no longer sustainable. And in order to do that, there has to be this time of disequilibrium. When you're in this state of such high performance, it becomes your identity. So you have to have disequilibrium to shake loose that identity. I think that what pilgrims are yearning for is disequilibrium, they're yearning to stop being this good and become something else.
That so fits with the leadership literature of, in a sense, going from good to great. There's some kind of transformation, and when you come out of that, and you're moving out of this disequilibrium, you're also realizing that you're full. It's ego filled. The fact that you all are saying hello to everyone `on this path today, that's other-oriented. A pilgrimage is always going to be other oriented.
SB: I liked what you said in your devotion, too, that there is a difference between tourism and pilgrimage, because of the nature of tourism, is very ego-driven. What do I want? What do I get out of it? Pilgrimage is very much based on asking the question, What about others? How can I serve others? How can I speak to others?
SD: I think it’s interesting that you made that distinction because in pilgrimage studies there's often a conflation of religious tourism and pilgrimage, as if they’re just different ways of speaking to the same thing, and they actually aren't.
MD: When I think of tourism, actually, you're using other people.
SD: There’s some really interesting literature from anthropology about the tourist gaze and how problematic that is. I think that, especially for those of us who are Westerners, we see ourselves as independent, we don’t need anyone, we can do this ourselves. When you go on something like a pilgrimage and you're incredibly vulnerable, you don’t know what the route is like, you don’t know what you’re going to encounter, who you’re going to encounter, it could be very painful. To let your guard down is hard for a lot of people, but it's kind of what you're saying, what you're studying--the ability to let go control is necessary in life.
MD: Do you remember the movie Ordinary People? Judge Hearst has a great line as a therapist to the young men, he says, “Control is overrated.”
During a pilgrimage, and coming out of a pilgrimage, you have to be in the present. Actually, especially for a long pilgrimage, why bother thinking about tomorrow and the next day--who cares because you know what you’re going to be doing but you don’t. Or you know that you don’t know what you’re going to be doing.
SB: At least you know that there’s a repetitive cycle.
MD: --So why worry about Wednesday. And that’s kind of been like COVID, right, in a sense of what's today--I don't know--it's a day. Whatever, I got up this morning.
So I think, I know that mental health issues are up during this time of COVID, but I also think that there's been a winnowing to the essential. In pilgrimage, you have winnowing to be essential, you can’t take more than you need, because you’re going to find out really quick what you need and what you don't need, and you can't really be thinking about the future.
In typical anxiety and depression, there's rumination: what am I going to do? This is not working. Pilgrimage takes that away. And so when you come out of the pilgrimage, you have kind of retrained your brain to calm down, and you've also gained coping skills of relying on others, of developing a rhythm, of structuring your day, and honestly slowing down your mind enough so you can reflect. I’m guessing, you would see joy go up by the end, and it would sustain for some time afterwards. You're not only going on a pilgrimage, but you're gaining skills.
SB: Oftentimes, pilgrims, when they return, are still so attached to the pilgrimage, and they want to share that with others, and there's a let down when there's a reaction that is not the same as how they feel. So a lot of times you hear these pilgrims saying, I feel really disappointed, I'm home, I thought I'd have all of these changes, nobody reacted, they looked at my pictures, and much like many people do, they're like, “Great trip!” Whereas [the experience] is so nuanced for the pilgrim.
MD: That’s the exact same thing that happens with expats who come back and no one cares. No one really cares, and they've had this transformative trip, and people don't see it. The same people you left behind, as it were, see you as the person you were at the beginning of that trip.
So what has to happen, I think, and this is the [relational] aspect of it, you need to have someone who is going to see you. Part of that pilgrimage is the relational aspect of it, and then to come back out of with no relationship---that's why I think you all have to go with someone.
SB: That's why our Camino groups still have a Whatsapp chat, and we still chat to each other! Another group that’s very active when you think of the Camino is a group called the APOC, and they have a Chicago chapter, and they get together and walk. We got together with them here, and it’s a bunch of people of different ages, different parts of the Chicago area, but they get together once a month for a walk and talk about the Camino.
MD: That's really interesting, because I think it just can't be about that experience, but who you are now out of that, how you are living the Camino now.
SB: And now, you've joined us on our virtual Camino, which, if you had told me this time last year that I would be advocating for a virtual Camino, I would have been horrified. One leading scholar, Nancy Frey, is one of the best known anthropologists that talks about pilgrimage. She is very anti-technology, she wants you to be stripped away from anything that would tie you to something other than the present. What a shift happened with COVID— all of a sudden, Susan and I started getting emails: Can you write an article about pandemics and pilgrimage? We need to publish this right away! Everything is virtual now. Susan can tell you Walsingham had a huge rededication of England to the Virgin this year.
SD: They ended up not being able to do it in public, they had to do it virtually, and so many people logged in it crashed their server. It ended up thousands of people watched that, people who could never have traveled to England to see it. Whereas it would have been easy to lament that all of their plans had gone awry, Msgr. John Armitage, shrine rector at The Catholic National Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, explained that the virtual ceremony allowed for the possibility of carrying the message of Walsingham and the hope of the Annunciation to a much larger audience.
NR: One of the criticisms of technology is that you are not present. You're on your phone...but now, what does being present look like virtually if you’re not present when you don’t have your technology?
MD: The difference between presence and present. I'm not straight up anti-technology, I think it’s just a tool. I'll be the first one to say, presence doesn’t equal present. We want our students to be present and just because they’re in the same room or in the same zoom box, it doesn’t make them present. I want face to face interaction because I'm going to force them to be present. When I did this zoom class with incoming freshman over the five Mondays in June, I told them turn on your cameras. Even though there are 160 of them...you have to be present. I would call names--George, turn on your camera.
I think as faculty we confuse that present and presence. But when we have the presence, it’s easier, with social support and accountability to get the present. Both mediated and unmediated, with technology, the goal always has to be present, not presence.
The theology of technology is not that technology is wrong. At the end of my time at SPU, we did a conference on the theology of technology. Most people, when they think about theology of technology, think that the goal is to get rid of technology as it interferes with theology. But we did a panel session with people with disabilities who cannot easily leave their home, and the only way that they can experience church is through technology. So, then we have to question assumptions that say that we have to end the use of technology in our Christian faith as it is always bad. Anyways, I actually hope that with these five months people will have a more nuanced view of tech, but I have to tell you, I'm done with sitting still in front of my camera for zoom. I need to move around. I'm trying to do phone calls as much as possible
SB: I had never walked half of the trails we’ve walked until COVID hit, and Susan and I had to change our research plans--ok, we can do a virtual pilgrimage, and we can invite people, and both of us were like "this is amazing, this is beautiful." It’s been 57 days, and we have not missed a day. And we walked separately, and Nadine and I biked together, and she introduced me to bike routes I've never taken, and that's because I’m never here in the summer. So just to be able to enjoy something that I didn’t even realize was at my finger tips. [I would not have been here at all this summer]--
SD: You were going to Spain and Japan, and we were going to London.
SB: It's been a gift, really.
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MD: So going back to this idea of people going [on pilgrimage] to find themselves, to change. I'd be interested to know what you all think about pilgrimage as lament.
SB: I can tell you that when you think about lament and sorrow, I'm thinking about the pilgrim songs that you share. I have seen so many pilgrims on the Camino that are walking out of sorrow.
SD: Historically, that would have been true. People walked to Walsingham because they were infertile. A huge source of pilgrim traffic was women going to ask the Virgin to help them have a baby. Apparently, Henry VIII even went to see the virgin at Walsingham to help him have a son, but I suppose when it didn't work, he decided to destroy the shine. I'm being facetious a little bit, but not entirely...
If you think about going for penance, even. You're lamenting your sin and you're hoping that you will get forgiveness from the trial you're going through.
SB: In 2015 I met a woman when I was on the Camino who had lost her husband by suicide, and she was carrying his urn, and she scattered his ashes. She was Dominican. So that was really powerful when I saw her at Cruz de Ferro, that really tall cross, just crying. I walked with her, she made it to the pilgrim's station at the same time I did, and then I met a man from Argentina who had just lost his wife. So, I think absolutely, pilgrimage is for lament. I don't really think you have to set off on your journey lamenting, but I think that everybody laments at some point on the Camino, because every single person I've met comes to a wall, an emotional wall.
MD: How many days into pilgrimage do you normally see that? SB: It's usually about 5, to 7 days out, and I usually time [the schedule on Camino around that wall], because I've seen it in the students. The honeymoon has worn off, and it's hard, we're at a hard section, and on that first Sunday, I make it a solo day. Those often become a really hard day for the students, but a breakthrough day, really.
NR: It's like a retreat, it creates a space and I think oftentimes the Lord gives us invitations, if we allow ourselves to get to these points. It's that solitude, the community and the accountability that occurs in that space. I find, when I go on silent retreats to get away, it takes me a couple days to disconnect, and I think that's interesting that there's a certain point of self-reflection. I think there's an invitation, always, and that's part of what pilgrimage is, an invitation.
SB: Margaret, I want to ask you this question, because I know you're studying this idea. It seems like, on the Camino, when you do have that moment of lament, when students are able to reflect on their lives, it seems like that moment opens up space. Once they share, it opens up that space so we can become a better community. Thinking about the college, what kind of things should we lament, even during this time, to make us real brothers and sisters?
MD: Two things...I don't think we can will ourselves to vulnerability. I don’t think we can say, I’m going to lay down all my burdens, I'm going to rethink my operating system. You can’t will that, but you can wear it out. That's the beauty of pilgrimage, is you get to the point where you have to lay things down. You're not going to make it if you don’t. And that's why it has to be long term and it has to be hard.
The first chapel talk I did, it was a grad chapel, and I introduced myself to the community. I talked about how I had narrowly avoided a head on collision that probably would have killed me and everyone around me. Guess what, it didn’t change my life. Because it was just a split second think. I think I titled the talk, “The Unbearable Lightness of Near Death.”
There was unbearableness, because we think that when we dodge these bullets, it should matter, but nothing changed for me except that I was iffy about driving for about a week. There has to be this wearing down, as it were. We're always living in some sort of tension, and we have to recognize that as Christians, we live in the “already, not yet”, but do we acknowledge that?
I think as evangelical Christians, we're scared as can be to acknowledge our own theology, because we have to admit that we're not [at perfection]. We’re scared because we have to witness to people about the goodness of Jesus Christ, with “my together” life, Don’t you want to be like me? Isn't that part of the evangelical message?
So there is this uncomfortableness with that tension between being excellent and being vulnerable. We think that you can only be one or the other, and I'll let someone else judge my legacy, but I hope that Margaret Diddams was able to be vulnerable and excellent at the same time, and she was able to pull it off and she was no less demanding even as she was vulnerable.
...
I just spent every Monday night with incoming freshmen [in an online summer class I taught]. We don’t have that many rituals for adulthood. Spring of your senior year—that is our rite of passage, and these kids had it stripped from them. These freshmen were feeling a sense of isolation, missing what were going to be these rituals for them, and they were so honest about how they were processing this spring.
I timed the class almost as a pilgrimage on purpose. First, I did “learning in wartime,” and I started the first week with why bother? The second week we talked about the nature of COVID and how the church has responded-- we're part of the great cloud of witnesses.
The third week, we discussed the questions, Where is God? What is evil? and What is lament? Because I had to get them to that place where they could get to that honesty, and that’s what basically allowed them to be vulnerable. The last two weeks were asking How do Christians respond? and How am I going to take care of myself at Wheaton?
Students said in their essays, that the third week was the pinnacle of the class. It changed something for them.
SB: You had to build up that trust for them to get to that point.
SD: We’ve had such a lack of seriousness as a culture over the last few years, and COVID has really caused us to think about it. It’s good to have freshman thinking about things like lament, as opposed to the normal things of "I’m excited to meet all the people!”
It’s more like What is my mission? How am I being discipled? MD: It’s the grit of life.
I think with a pilgrimage, to truly be a pilgrimage, you have to find yourself entering that liminal space. That letting go, that not quite knowing what I’m going to grab onto, and letting it unfurl. I'm like, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know who I'm going to be, I can't program this!
SB: I think it’s important too that you walked beside them during this process, and you let them know you were feeling a lot of the same feelings...
MD: Because you have to model that, you have to basically say I’m older, wiser, and I’m here with you.
SB: I even think when I walk with students, you know here I am, mid 40s, but I can go forever. So the students are [exhausted] because I’m used to this and they’re not there, but I know what they’re capable of. At the same time, I'll tell them---I tell my children all the time, too--You can do hard things, but I will never ask you to do something that I won’t do with you. So when they see when we’re walking alongside of them, that we're in it with them...
MD: What I was hearing a lot about from the freshmen was shame. Why am I feeling this way? I feel self-centered, I'm not being the person God wants me to be... They have this view of God being distant and judging.
In the third week [of my class], David Lauber talks about the impassibility of God, basically telling them, God is with you in your suffering. God is not suffering with you, that’s God's impassibility, but he's there, as that older wiser person coming along. And you could just see on the zoom screen, it changed for them.
And then Beth Jones started talking about lament as God is sitting with you on the couch. In lament, God is with us, instead of this judge that's angry because we can't get our act together because there's a pandemic, and I've lost my senior year and I should feel...so much shoulds. That third week of basically getting them to let go. Let go of the shoulds. It seems to me, in pilgrimage, there's not a whole lot of shoulds because you’re trying to get through the day.
SB: That scripture comes to mind that says, “Jesus is a man of sorrow, he's acquainted with our grief.”
Dr. Margaret Diddams is the principal consultant with The Diddams Group, which is dedicated to building strong Christian leadership teams aligned with their institution’s strategic vision. With expertise in leadership development, team building, employee engagement surveys, effective and legal hiring processes, performance management, program evaluation, creating work-life balance, and mitigating workplace stress and burnout, Diddams has over 30 years of leadership and consulting experience to serve today’s Christian leaders. Diddams is the editor of The Christian Scholar’s Review; the premier journal for scholarship that advances the integration of Christian faith and learning. She recently served as the Provost and Chief Academic Officer of Wheaton College (2016-2020) a liberal arts college grounded in its Evangelical Christian faith tradition. With oversight of 500 employees and a $50 MM budget, she provided leadership for over 50 undergraduate and graduate academic programs. She began her academic career in the Social-Organizational Psychology Department at Columbia University in 1991, joining the faculty at Seattle Pacific University (SPU) in 1993 and began consulting with Microsoft’s IT group soon after, with a focus on jointly developing strong teams with sustainable work processes; a combination that, she believes is the key to organizational flourishing. The Microsoft IT group hired her in 1996 to continue this work full-time. Diddams returned to SPU in 2000, rising to the rank of Professor of Industrial / Organizational Psychology before becoming the Director of the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development, and then Assistant Provost. While at SPU, she continued her consulting work, focusing on developing individualized leadership development plans for C-suite and other executives in the Puget Sound area. Diddams earned a MA and Ph.D. in Industrial / Organizational Psychology from New York University and her BA in Psychology from Wheaton College. She and her husband Stan are the proud parents of four adult children and a growing number of grandchildren.
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