Pilgrimage and Transformation w/ Jon Huckins

In this episode of Breathe In Place, Montague Williams sits down with Jon Huckins, founder of Journey Home and co-founder of Global Immersion, to reflect on the transformative power of pilgrimage. Together, they explore how pilgrimage continues to shape us long after we return home: offering healing, clarity, and deeper self-understanding. Learn more about The Pilgrimage Innovation Hub by following us on Instagram: @pilgrimageinnovationhub.

Transcript

Montague Williams (00:19):

Welcome back to Breathe In Place, a podcast about how pilgrimage can help young people find purpose, resilience, hope and meaning in a complex and confusing world. I'm your host, Montague Williams.

(00:57):

Several times on this podcast you'll hear a conversation about what pilgrimage actually is. This may seem strange to revisit the definition of pilgrimage. So often you might wonder why we do this. Well, what I've found over the years is that as we engage the practice of pilgrimage, the nature of what pilgrimage is continues to reveal itself, and we begin to see the different ways pilgrimage can impact us and transform us even after we return from pilgrimage, sometimes years after the fact its effects remain with us revealing to us who we are and who we are called to be. In today's conversation, I talk with Jon Huckins. Jon Huckins is the founder of Journey Home, an organization that seeks to create healing spaces through the practice of pilgrimage. Previous to Journey Home, he co-founded Global Immersion, which focuses on training Christians for peacemaking. In my conversation with Jon, we look closely at the ways pilgrimage works on us as individuals and as communities.

(02:06):

How can pilgrimage be a way through which we experience healing after traumatic experiences? How can pilgrimage help us make sense of what is going on in society and in our own inner worlds? John Huckins talks about the way pilgrimage can bring healing and he doesn't just give advice devoid of experience. He also shares a bit about his own journey and how pilgrimage brought healing in his own life after a stressful and painful period. If you're someone who is in need of healing or seeking ways to make sense of the world or guiding young people in these ways, this episode may be useful and illustrating how pilgrimage can aid in that process, I hope it's a meaningful listen for you. Let's hear from John.

Jon Huckins (02:57):

Inherent in pilgrimage is a commitment to pursue transformation, and it's hard for me to understand how we are transformed without being willing to acknowledge where we need to be transformed or at least be willing to discover where we need to be transformed, which requires humility, a level of trust and community where we can be vulnerable.

Montague Williams (03:17):

Jon Huckins, thank you for being with us.

Jon Huckins (03:19):

You bet. It's an honor to be here and fun.

Montague Williams (03:22):

Yes. I'm looking forward to our conversation. You lead an organization that fosters three main pilgrimages. One is around the US Mexico border. Another is a Camino pilgrimage focused on men, and a third focus is a Camino pilgrimage for women. Can you tell us a bit about these?

Jon Huckins (03:45):

Yeah. I mean, organization didn't really birth out of a strategy or a five-year plan as much as a response to some personal healing and awakening in my own life. And the short version is for close to two decades I've been in professional ministry and from pastoral work to in the Christian Justice world. And in 2019 I had a physical break basically where I was moving at such a fast pace and I think performing in so many different areas, and there's all sorts of stories as to maybe why I was doing that. I had a significant panic attack, adrenal failure, like my body just shut down. It didn't let me keep going at the pace I was going. And I had heard about the significance of pilgrimage from some mentors and spiritual directors. I had heard about the Camino de Santiago in Spain as one of three Christian pilgrimages. You have Rome and Jerusalem and Santiago as a place where people have gone to seek awakening or healing or transformation, specifically Christian pilgrimages in the way of St. Francis.

(05:05):

And so I decided to go not really knowing why or what other than I was hurting and needed some healing. What I discovered on the path was an invitation into a deeper awareness of some of my own core wounds and an awakening to a life of liberated from a lot of the things that had held me captive to God's love for who I was, to how I understood myself as a husband and a father and a colleague, the need to kind of perform and produce and have ego drive us. The community de Santiago is like this counterculture to so many of our leadership paradigms that say bigger is better and more is the path rather than the path being kind of up and out. As Parker Palmer says, the path is in and down, it's towards ourselves. And it was so revelatory towards me. I just said, I think there's other leaders that need to go on a similar journey.

(06:03):

And so I began to invite specifically other dominant culture men who I think have been at the point of the spear of so many of our social ills to go on this to see if we could wake up to some of the brokenness in ourself that would animate how we lead, how we show up in the world, how we take up so much room and in our healing hopefully contribute to healing on a societal level. So that was the conception of journey home and then just began to do that. And in parallel, my family and I, we live in a neighborhood that's very connected to the immigrant plight and we live 13 minutes from the border and the border. We live a bordered life and have friends and colleagues in Tijuana. And so I've led pilgrimages here on the border for now 12 years, whereas the

Montague Williams (06:49):

So your work with border pilgrimages in many ways a local pilgrimage experience for you and your family?

Jon Huckins (06:58):

A hundred percent. We host a lot of it in our home. Across the street from our house is the headquarters of Border Angels and our community center where so many of those who need support immigrants who are feeling anxious about the current reality are finding solace. And so we invite folks from around the country to come experience the reality of the border in San Diego and in Tijuana. And for them, we're really trying to invite 'em into our life. This is how we practice our faith, what it looks like for us to follow Jesus in this space and to learn from those. We're often taught not to see that we can live, especially those of us in dominant culture like myself, we can live blind to the plight of our neighbors who have a very different reality than ourselves. So yeah, the Camino is really focused on the healing, personal healing, and it happens in a global context where the border pilgrimage is looking at societal healing. How are we contributing to the healing in society by coming face to face with so much of the brokenness here.

Montague Williams (07:58):

Now you just said something interesting, you just said that with the border pilgrimage, it helps people see communities that you said that we are taught not to see. So there's a sort of unlearning and a new learning. There's something around learning that's happening in this very embodied experience. How is that?

Jon Huckins (08:25):

That's right. The language we often use as guides, as pilgrimage guides, we are intentionally disorienting our pilgrim, especially those that come here to the border, that we can be so oriented around the status quo or what we know, kind of our typical framework for life and faith and politics. Pilgrimage disrupts all that. It disorients it by waking us up to realities that have always existed, but that maybe our social location or our politics or our theology or our race haven't allowed us to actually lean into. And the border pilgrimage experience just gives us a ground zero 3D look at the beautiful and the broken really on a systemic level, we talk about the border pilgrimage is introducing people to the personal and systemic implications of borders.

Montague Williams (09:14):

Mmm

Jon Huckins (09:14):

Are personal implications, how it can separate families in ways that we can. I think of a friend who is deported and separated from her five kids. That's a very personal reality. And then we walk up to the border wall and we see the systemic implications of borders and how does that impact everything from environment to human movement and relations and how we see each other. So yeah, it's an unseeing and a re-seeing, an unlearning and a relearning, I would say it disorients us so we can be reoriented around the way of Jesus in ways that open us up to life of formation and ongoing formation.

Montague Williams (09:52):

So you have one Camino pilgrimage experience that is dedicated to what you described as dominant culture men, and then there's the border pilgrimage that it sounds like that's open to a variety of people and groups, right?

Jon Huckins (10:08):

That's right. This year we're launching one called Via Fina, we of the Feminines for Women. My colleague Leroy Barber is starting one for leaders of color, so where that is expanding in demographics, the border pilgrimage is largely open to the way we work with folks here are church community specifically or denominational leaders, and some are nonprofit organizational leaders, but it's anyone. So they have 20 folks that come on these pilgrimage and our team works with these folks of a variety of demographics and invite them into the reality here. And I can share more about the process from when they say yes to actually what the pilgrimage looks like to the post.

Montague Williams (10:53):

Yeah, we'll definitely talk about that. Here's a question. Who leads the Via Fina pilgrimages?

Jon Huckins (10:59):

My wife is actually going to be for the first time in our 20 years of ministry, our vocations of intersected, which is really exciting. She's a trained spiritual director and she's the pastor of our House church co-pastor with Christiana who, and so formation is a big piece for her. The Camino has been significant for her as well, and so she and a team of other women and we describe our guides as elders who are those wisdom elders who have gone before us to model a healthy way towards healing and especially those of us that are maybe in middle life if we're moving towards Father Rohr talks about moving towards second half of life, people who become less concerned about success and more concerned about transformation.

Montague Williams (11:46):

And by Father Roy, you're referring to Richard Roy?

Jon Huckins (11:49):

Yeah, yeah. Who's his work and his organization are core partners and have been at the center of our development both in content and in infrastructure.

Montague Williams (12:01):

Okay. Now, in other places you've said that what makes a healing space on pilgrimage is the involvement of vulnerability, generosity, humility, and a willingness to acknowledge when we are wrong. How does that happen on pilgrimage? What makes pilgrimage significant for fostering that

Jon Huckins (12:23):

Inherent in pilgrimage is a commitment to pursue transformation, and it's hard for me to understand how we are transformed without being willing to acknowledge where we need to be transformed or at least be willing to discover where we need to be transformed, which requires humility, a level of trust in community where we can be vulnerable and expose those parts of ourselves maybe that we haven't otherwise been willing to expose. I love the definition of, you've probably heard of Rick Steves, he's a travel guy. He says, tourists go to be entertained, travelers go to learn, pilgrims go to be transformed. And I couldn't agree more. I think it's a beautiful articulation of the posture of pilgrimage requires that we are the ones to be transformed, which really short circuits a lot of the, especially the short-term missions paradigms that many of us have inherited within evangelicalism or Protestantism at large. We go to be the hero in the story. We go to fix someone else's problem without maybe having asked what the problem is. Whereas pilgrimage is saying, I am the one to be transformed whether within myself, I'm going to wake up to wounds within myself that need healing, or I'm going to come to a place like the border and wake up to realities I've contributed to on a societal or political level that I need to contribute to healing. And I've been part of the problem even if I wasn't intentionally doing something,

(13:48):

Because we have been taught not to see certain realities by all these different powers, powers at be, if you will. We have repentance to do in that sense as well.

Montague Williams (14:01):

Yeah, whenever I've been in rooms and I've talked about pilgrimage and juxtaposed it to things like short-term missions and we talk about the transformation piece. Some people ask, is it okay if we work in some sort of service project

(14:18):

Into

(14:18):

Our pilgrimage? And I often say yes, but it's about that demeanor with a lot of short-term missions. Participants come back and they say, I didn't expect this, but I experienced some sort of transformation and pilgrimage I found is naming that on the front end that you already are acknowledging that this is going to be about your transformation. And if you go with that in mind, it shapes what and how you do, how you engage, who you're willing to see, who you're willing to let speak into your life, the demeanor, the posture. What do you think

Jon Huckins (14:56):

A hundred percent? A lot of pilgrim guides that I've learned from would say that we are, if you're actually setting off on pilgrimage at some point we are being beckoned into that. We have to say yes to a, call it a divine call, call it a personal awareness, maybe it's a trusted guide and it's an invitation to say, I'm going to intentionally take the first step towards my own transformation. I'm not taking the step to go fix the problem for someone else or to build the thing for someone else, although that can be done well, like we're saying. But inherent, I think in pilgrimage is that saying yes to that beckoning. I think there's something more. There is a rock that needs to be uncovered in myself and I am going to choose a lifelong learning posture. And that informs even how we show up with our, if we're on pilgrimage with others, instead of meeting each other with our fists around our ideological or political differences, we have our hands open. How can I learn from this person? How can I show up with this person with an open heart and mind and allow them to learn from me as well, but not because I need them to be convinced of something, but I want to show up as my full self in that we'll learn together. It is a very different posture,

Montague Williams (16:18):

And it's not about just getting something done. The journey back is not about showing a bunch of pictures of what you did. In fact, it can't fit into pictures.

Jon Huckins (16:32):

No. Which makes the metrics of it a little tricky sometimes, especially when we're working with churches and denominations where it's like typically short-term missions, you can put in the newsletter we're going, and then you come back and this is the amount of things we did or whatever. Whereas pilgrimage is like, how do you measure transformation? You can only really measure transformation when the people at home experience you as a different person and how you lead and how you love and how you parent and how you show up in your neighborhood and the issues you're engaged in. That's the metric and that's a little harder to pick.

Montague Williams (17:06):

It's funny you frame that around metrics. One of the first pilgrimages I led was for a group of college students and one of the students wanted to raise money for the trip, and so he went to his home church to present on what he was doing and members in the church who gave him a platform during one of the breaks, like Christmas break, and they heard his presentation, members from the church approached him and said, well, I thought I was going to donate to a mission trip. I don't even understand what you're doing. I can't give you this. And he's like, yeah, but it's me trying to embrace what God's doing in my life. And they're like, yeah, but we're not sure we can give to this. I thought that was so interesting.

Jon Huckins (17:54):

No category.

Montague Williams (17:55):

Yes. They're like, what are you getting done? How can I feel so good about the pictures that come back? You're not going to give me great pictures. Totally. Yeah.

Jon Huckins (18:05):

It's not good in a newsletter. It's pretty hard to toss in a newsletter.

Montague Williams (18:10):

So with all of that in mind, how do you prepare people for pilgrimage? What do you do? What's on your mind at the beginning? Not of the pilgrimage itself, meaning not when you take off, but in the weeks, months, I don't know. How long do you prepare people? What does that work?

Jon Huckins (18:35):

I mean, I'll just quickly bifurcate. The Camino pilgrimages we do is actually part of a six month cohort, both for the men and women. So that is, there's an interview process. It is a very rigorous even to the start of the six months. And then we walk the Camino on month five. So we spend five months together building the kind of sharing our stories, building the kind of trust where we can enter a room with one another and be vulnerable because we know on the Camino our stuff's going to be exposed. There's something beautiful about Camino, it's like a vision quest. It pulls everything out of you. You can't hide anymore. And so we try to create a culture over these first five months where we're learning to trust one another and where we're being met and taught by guides. If we have a faculty of elders who meet with us monthly and we have movements that we go through around identity and vocation and leadership, and then we walk the Camino and then we do some follow-up work.

(19:32):

But the goal in those first five months is to build trust in our community, to have guides who are shaping our path, and then to prepare ourselves for the actual physical, we need to walk twice a week, 90 minutes, and you need to make sure you have the right shoes like the pragmatics. So it's opening our hearts to each other, to ourselves and getting our bodies ready. Whereas on the border pilgrimage, it is more a preparing hearts and mind. It's not as physically rigorous. It's a couple days. And we would say it's our responsibility as pilgrim guides here on the border to prepare our pilgrims to be as thoughtful as possible. So we have them read certain texts around immigration and border issues. We have 'em read certain texts around a theology for peace and peacemaking and how we are contributing to that so that by the time they land here in San Diego, Tijuana, they're asking the right kinds of questions.

(20:26):

They're postured to be open to their own transformation rather than just getting stuck. As you would imagine, people can get stuck in the politics of immigration. And then we're just bouncing off each other's triggers for our ideological differences rather than embracing a path of collective transformation. So those months, and with the border pilgrimage, we do that over the course of a couple months and we really trust the local leadership of those communities to facilitate it. We give them the content, I'll meet with them virtually, but they are as a community, working through the content before they land with us.

Montague Williams (20:59):

So what do you have them read?

Jon Huckins (21:01):

Yeah, I mean for the Camino pilgrimage, our cortex is Richard Rohrs Falling Upward, which talks about this movement from first half of life to second half of life. And then for the dominant culture men, we expose them to voices like Bell Hooks and Co. Arthur Riley and our faculty are almost all leaders of color and women specifically who can give us perspective on where we need to grow and how we show up. Whereas the border pilgrimage, we're reading basic, not basic, but overviews of immigration and policy like welcoming the stranger that Matthew Sorens and Jenny or Yang wrote, and then a series of podcasts and articles. We try to make it as accessible as possible. If you give too many books, it has depreciating returns. Not everyone has the capacity for it. Everyone that's saying yes to this has a full-time life. And so that's something we've learned as guides.

(21:56):

While for me, this is my full-time gig, I can think that people maybe can do more than they can. And so what's realistic to prepare them that's accessible, compelling and also stewards our relationships well here so that we ensure that our pilgrims are ready. Because the last thing I'll say there, for example, on the border pilgrimage, we're meeting with undocumented folks in our living room, and it's a very courageous move from our undocumented friends to share their story. They're trusting us. And so if I have a group come in that doesn't know how to engage that space well, it breaks trust, and that's the most important currency we've got. And none of those folks here at the border, my undocumented friends don't owe us their story. They're gifting us their story because it's transforming us. So the fact that pilgrims need to be prepared for that moment, otherwise we could really do more damage I think, than benefit.

Montague Williams (22:53):

Have you run into a situation where somebody really wasn't ready?

Jon Huckins (22:58):

Yeah. I mean, the border pilgrimage is a little harder to, what's the word I'm looking for? It's harder to know where each person is before they show up because we will work with the church and we're working with that leader and that leader is deciding that the 15 folks are so they're going to come. And so sometimes, and because it's such a heightened political moment, there's some kind of hidden ideology that doesn't expose itself until you're on the ground here and they have a visceral reaction to someone who pushes up against their theology. And I've had a couple instances where they've verbalized that in the context of a very tender conversation with one of our partners here at the border and had to intervene really to protect that person and that relationship and pull that pilgrim aside and say, that's not how we talk, and that's not inappropriate. And I'm happy to work with you on what's coming up for you. Actually. It's a huge learning moment for that person. It's probably profoundly transformative now they get to deal with whatever was sitting dormant inside of them. But when it comes to the cost of someone who's, especially in a vulnerable space, it's not going to work. So that's a tender moment of leadership is how do I walk with this person towards healing who's exposing something broken themselves and also protect this vulnerable person who's gifting us their story?

(24:23):

It doesn't happen every pilgrimage at all, but over the number of years, it's happened a few times and it's uncomfortable, but it's critical, critical moment.

Montague Williams (24:32):

So you prepare guides for leadership on pilgrimage. You've obviously led pilgrimages yourself, you've, I'm sure experienced being led on pilgrimage. Sounds like one of your first experiences would've included some of that. So with all that you've seen and all of that you've learned, what would you say is needed for leadership on pilgrimage?

Jon Huckins (24:59):

I actually don't have to think about that very much. I actually think the most important piece for a leader on pilgrimage is to model the posture of being a pilgrim. Every single one that I lead, I hesitate to even say the word lead in a lot of my spaces because I'm a pilgrim, especially when I'm guiding on the Camino. I have so much to learn about myself and the world every time I step foot into that community and on that path, and God meets me there in ways that I could never have anticipated unless I think I'm just there to lead. If I think I'm just there to lead, I don't really actually experience a ton of transformation. I'm too worried about the mechanisms of the thing. And there are moments I'm always thinking about when I'm leading the mechanisms of the thing. So there is a dual hat you have to wear, but more than anything, and I've gotten this feedback from our pilgrims, they experience me and our guides as fellow pilgrims, and it's in that space that we can have that trust is built.

(26:03):

Collective healing is found. When I'm guiding down here on the border, if anyone's not an expert in immigration reality, it's me. I have so much to learn. Every time I sit with Pedro Rios who is a humanitarian and immigration expert here on the border, I learned so much. And so to model that to the other pilgrims and how I posture myself and the questions I'm asking in the ways, at the end of the day when I'm debriefing, oh man, I really confronted this in myself today and I need to wrestle with that, rather than saying, what did you confront in yourself and how can I help you fix that? It's a different, leadership is different.

Montague Williams (26:41):

Yeah. You're saying something that I have sensed quite a bit on pilgrimage and it's that the kind of leadership that you are pushed into because you're leading a pilgrimage and not just an event, the kind of leadership you're pushed into feels like the kind of power dynamic we hope for in Christian communities

(27:10):

Where

(27:11):

Somebody is trusted to guide, but they're not afforded all of this power to control. They are afforded trust around certain areas around knowledge, but their real role is being a lead learner, not necessarily being the one who has learned it all. And yet with all of that blur that can be there, there's still the kind of trust and the kind of care that makes room for leading.

Jon Huckins (27:45):

But it's an intuitive level of leadership that I think a lot of us have never, I was raised in the evangelical mega church space. Leadership looked like control. It looked like creating a certain kind of environment and then maintaining that at all costs. It looked like doing the outcomes before a thing began and making sure you lead towards those outcomes. Pilgrimage, you don't know the outcomes. You're trusting the spirit to meet us there and the community and meet us there. And the outcomes come from that. It's so organic, so it's also very courageous because you can't control the moment as a pilgrimage leader. You are kind of sitting back and you're intuiting what the next faithful step forward is. The next question we're going to ask, the next prompt we're going to follow. So yeah, to teach how to be a guide really requires just, I think experiencing it. It has to be hands-on, like come walk with me and see, and then let's process what you're observing and how's that going to shape your leadership. There's not a manual for it as much,

Montague Williams (28:55):

Right? And if there was, you'd have to critique it a lot because it would try to put into a formula something that disrupts formulas,

Jon Huckins (29:04):

But it's quite disruptive. And I'd be curious, this is where I'm fascinated with the work you're doing inside institution. And I know inside still the church institution to lead in this way is still so countercultural and how it is not all academically buttoned up or ecclesiological buttoned up. So it's a countercurrent. And how do we lead in this way while still kind of existing in these institutions that lead in a very generally, in a different way,

Montague Williams (29:41):

In some ways within an institution, an educational institution, pilgrimage experiences, they are a disruption for the typical ways of learning, for the typical ways of relating. But then it also points participants to new possibilities.

(30:02):

So you return, but you return differently. You return with a new sense of what could be. And so now the way you read is differently is different, the way you engage each other now, you see more each other as more human. There's a mutual humanity there. There's less need to display oneself as more powerful than another because you've been on this journey where you rode on the same bus together, you rode together and you wondered together, and you were honest together. And if you go back to the way things were, you're also denying yourself of the truth that you've experienced. So now you, you're pushed to see each other and be together in a new way. I love pilgrimage for that. And I think you're naming something important. Institutions do have their limits, but pilgrimage functions to expose the limits in some ways, but also push against them in other ways. That's right. Let me ask you this. So pilgrimages, people return, we're talking about returning. What does the post pilgrimage life look like for you and for the people who participate in Journey Home pilgrimages?

Jon Huckins (31:33):

It's a great challenge, quite honestly, because of what you just said. Once you have experienced pilgrimage and you've done it in a community and then you go home, that isn't necessarily that community. You can feel very alone. You can feel disoriented in another way. You've tapped into a reality. You didn't go on vacation. You actually tapped into a deeper reality in yourself and in the world, and you go back home and home isn't reality. You're like, oh, actually, home was a pseudo reality. That was what was real. So how do I live in this kind of pseudo reality and be in reality myself? I dunno if I'm making sense, but totally 100% yes. Oh good. There is this dissonance and we've experienced folks feeling depressed, like, oh my gosh, I just am misunderstood everywhere now. And so we do a few things. One, we really, especially with our communal cohorts, we become a community and these, these are some of the most intimate communities that a lot of these leaders have ever experienced because they've never been free to be as vulnerable as they are in these. So we really try to sustain that community. We still gather monthly to check in, and then we do periodic reunions with one another. But right on the other side of the pilgrimages, especially for the border, we do some coaching on how do you enter back home? How do you answer? This sounds so simple. We do our last session, we wrestle with how do you answer the question, how was your trip?

(33:06):

Because as soon as you get home, as soon as you get in the elevator, you get on the plane, you walk in your door, people are going to ask how your trip was. And the reality is, it wasn't just a trip, it was this transformation we've been talking about. But these people don't have a framework for that. So you don't want to impose that on them. And you also don't want to share your heart and then just be disappointed over and over. So how do you answer that question? So we give really clear coaching on how to answer that question in three sentences and then have a couple stories ready. If people are curious, then share a story with them and then invite them deeper into the path. But don't feel like you need to unwind everything with everyone, and that actually might not even be the best bet.

(33:48):

It might not be safest for you, and some people aren't ready to hear it. But we talk about on the front end of the pilgrimage, identify people who are sending you on pilgrimage in your own community, whether it's your family or your friends or your faith community. And share some stories as you go. So when you go home, you have some level of people who are, they've been sharing the pilgrimage with you, even from afar. They've been holding you in thought and prayer and care. But that's been a really important piece to going home, is have a few folks that are excited to hear about it

(34:22):

And

(34:22):

Are going to walk through that space.

Montague Williams (34:23):

That's wise.

Jon Huckins (34:25):

Yeah. And then what are some practices for yourself? Create space once a week to do some ongoing journaling, have an opportunity to begin to discern what's yours to do. Are there those already in your context who maybe are tuned into that reality you experienced on pilgrimage you can link up with and begin to support and accompany? So yeah, there's something about having actually a setup before the pilgrimage that helps people return after the pilgrimage. That has been critical. And for us organizationally, knowing we can only, we don't control, we can guide an experience, but how people integrate it into their own life is beyond our, it's not our responsibility, nor is it we're not the experts of their context. It requires the individual in community to discern what is theirs to do. But it's looked like so many different things. Dominic culture, man, going through our Camino, realizing how he's been leading his organization is still assuming all of these constructs of patriarchy and whiteness and all these things. And now he's having to build a community of wisdom guides around him to help unravel that or maybe displace himself. There's been some very visceral ones to others, just like, I'm just showing up with my family in a more generous and tender and present way.

(35:48):

So yes. Sorry, that's a lot of info thrown at you there.

Montague Williams (35:53):

Yeah. But it's good info. And if pilgrimage is this invitation to this journey of discernment, it sounds like what you're saying is that return home is, the goal is to try to keep, you can't keep alive the experience. That's not going to be a reality. No. But what you can do is put some things in place to maintain the ongoing discernment

Jon Huckins (36:20):

And even some rituals. There's a book called Returning from Camino by Alexander Shaya, and he talks about rituals on the other side of pilgrimage. It doesn't just have to be on the Camino, it could be pilgrimage and anywhere. But they both reorient us back to that reality we experienced on pilgrimage and help us do some of that integrative work in the form of very tangible, tactile things. It's, it's a great tool and resource that we have. All our guides stay pretty fluent in.

Montague Williams (36:50):

Well, we're coming to the close, but before I ask my last question, I did just want to acknowledge, our listeners don't know this, but you just submitted your dissertation for your PhD in theology, submitted it last night.

Jon Huckins (37:06):

Sure did.

Montague Williams (37:07):

How you feeling?

Jon Huckins (37:08):

I get to join you in the ranks of post dissertation life, finally five and a half years later. Feeling

Montague Williams (37:15):

Good.

Jon Huckins (37:16):

I'm feeling grateful, and I feel good. I don't know if I'm feeling the joy. I'm still in a level of disbelief. Yes, we'll see kind of a probably unhealthy cynicism of like, is it really done? I'm not sure. It's shared

Montague Williams (37:30):

By anybody who has submitted a dissertation. They know that feeling.

Jon Huckins (37:35):

And as soon as I finished it, I came in the house and my wife is like, do you finally have time to change the toilet seat? That's where I'm at now. And I'm like, yes, I'm going to change the toilet seat, but

Montague Williams (37:46):

First I have to go do this podcast.

Jon Huckins (37:49):

Yeah,

Montague Williams (37:51):

That's hilarious. Alright, so could you tell me, tell our listeners about a spiritual practice that participants pilgrims on the pilgrimages you lead or that you have others lead. Can you tell us about a spiritual practice that people find meaningful?

Jon Huckins (38:10):

There's a spiritual practice that probably many of you're familiar with. You're listening called Centering Prayer. And there's actually a song called Centering Prayer. Maybe you've heard of it. I think it's Porter Scape that does it. And the primary refrain in the song is be where your feet are. I want to be where my feet are. And whether it's the Camino pilgrimage or the Border pilgrimage, we actually open the first morning of the physical pilgrimage, whether in Spain or Portugal, I should say. And here at the border, we listened to that song and we put our hand on our heart, which I know maybe for some could sound a little woo woo, but on a molecular level, it can slow our heart rate and allow us to enter into the space, enter into our hearts, enter into our bodies, enter into the room that we're in, enter into the community, and we pray as Tering Prayer does for that we can be right here where our feet are.

(39:08):

And there's something about that that opens us up, whether it's on the Camino, it's each step and to the deeper frequency of God that maybe is humming below the static of our crazy lives or here at the border, all the people are coming into the room and you have all these perspectives on the border and walls and immigration, and it's like we need to release that and just be here with each other and with ourselves, and move from people with fists to open hands. And I found that our pilgrims, long after the pilgrimage, still find ways to put their hand on their heart and offer that refrain. I want to be where my feet are and trust that I can meet myself there and that God can meet myself there. And I'll meet you as a peer, as an equal, as a fellow pilgrim in that

Montague Williams (39:53):

Posture. Jon Huckins, thank you again for coming onto this podcast for being with us here at Breathe In Place. Thanks my friends. You've been listening to Breathe In Place, a podcast brought to you by the Pilgrimage Innovation Hub. This podcast is made possible by generous support from the Lilly Endowment Narrative Production by Guimel Sibingo,Technical Production by Danny Martinez and Project Coordination and Guest booking by Wanda Galey, opening Music by Chaos. If you have any questions or comments about today's episode, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at pilgrimage@pointloma.edu or message us on Instagram at Pilgrimage Innovation Hub. I'm your host, Montague Williams. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next week.