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On the Importance of Wanderlust
Posted in: General,Grace,News Items,Practices,Recommended by Tom Beaudoin on September 17, 2009
As if to acknowledge that rock can be a way of being trained for a spiritual orientation with immanent materials, a new festival called Wanderlust linked up yoga with rock this summer. See Melena Ryzik’s report here. For the kind of Christian spiritual and theological attitude I’ve found most persuasive, and have tried to set out regularly on this blog, I find “wanderlust” to be a splendid term. There will be those who blanch at endorsing the “lust” part, but to me the whole word suggests a restless and searching attention that nicely holds the ambiguity of the “lust” (German, “die Lust”: desire, wanting to, pleasure in) that necessitates nomadism, on the one hand, and the lust for nomadism itself, on the other.
Wanderlust is also the name of one my favorite ‘non-theological’ books that taught me about thinking carefully about what it means to move under one’s own power through places (which I take to be full of clues about how to conduct oneself theologically); in other words, to see theology as a way of walking through different kinds of places. The book is Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin, 2000) by Rebecca Solnit.
I began to read that book while attending a ministry conference outside Chicago in 2001, and I now interpret the decision to read Solnit then as a way of trying to deal with the ways that the wanderlusts of young adult Catholics (the putative occasion for the conference) were being gently but firmly laid to one side, so that the real project of Catholic identity could move forward.
Finally, wanderlust is, to my mind, the key lyrical theme in what I take to be the anthem for my generation, if I may still speak of generations as such and of mine in particular. That anthem, showing no signs of age, is “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The wisest of ministers and theologians today have space in their work for this song.
Tom Beaudoin
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
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