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Jan and Jeanette take a few minutes to talk about the upcoming "Interfaith/Interspiritual Wisdom Training" which begins January, 2020. This one-of-a-kind training program is for people in the caring professions: spiritual directors, clergy and lay servants, educators, social workers, therapists, life coaches, chaplains, spiritual and secular community leaders, and more. Completion of the 5-month, online program results in a certificate in Interfaith/Interspiritual Competence. This will prepare you to companion and serve seekers of various religious, spiritual and ethical traditions. Learning Format: Online and via Zoom Dates: January 13-May 26, 2020 Optional Interfaith Urban Pilgrimage in June, 2020 in Chicago Applications now being accepted We hope you will consider joining us!
 Little boy. Knees so busy under your school khakis. Your dried millet stalk prods an old bicycle tire, bare of tread, along a rocky footpath. You wear a cereal box on your head. You are fearless! The magic of your cardboard helmet makes you bold, protects you. Your tongue trills out machine noises, your body synced. You are an engine of movement, propulsion. You are a green dart of energy running towards me, flitting to the side when we intersect. You come into focus, and I fold into laughter. Magic Sugar Flakes, imported from Ghana, now transformed. I know this box. Knock-off Frosted Flakes from the Muslim grocer. His store is Fridaos. Muslim Heaven. Did the wind carry the box out of the trash heap and lay it at your feet, like manna? With the donning of colored paper with shiny letters, you metamorphose. You take a scrap and animate it, let it animate you. You are unstoppable, courageous. Will anyone tell you this? Will you remember it if you reach adulthood? Will you find other ways to protect yourself, to dodge harm when malaria and parasites and infection comes? Later this afternoon, I drive the truck to another footpath. A new village. The rumble of the diesel an intrusion. The rhythms of this place are pestles pounding manioc, machetes chopping wood, women sifting chaff from rice. I come to say hello, to visit. I approach a group of four women crouched on wooden stools where the path opens. There you are beneath them, the second little boy of this day. And the second mask of this day. You lie on the ground, atop a red and yellow pagne. You are all knees and twigged arms. Your face. What is this? Are you, too, wearing a cereal box? I double take, uncomprehending. Then I see the older woman sitting closest to you. She tends an ochre paste in the scooped out earth. She is applying the mud to you. Not a mask. It is your misshapen face. Your jaw is longer than my hand. Your eyes bend and bulge through stretched, contorted skin. You see me, too, and then you turn away. Is it a tumor? A birth defect? There is no box to contain what I’m seeing, not even Magic Sugar Flakes. My tears start. Too many and too fast to swallow. Yes, this is happening. I go from watching to being watched. You and the women have no container for this, a white stranger who openly sobs. We have scarcely exchanged the most threadbare of greetings. Nyanewisi: you and the sun. The afternoon greeting, followed by a litany of questions about the state of your health, your work, your children. But no further questions will continue under this sun. And only God knows how the years will unfold under suns back home, in North America. I will sit with people seeking spiritual guidance. I will encounter them--sometimes in the midst of great suffering--and it will unmask us both. But for now, uneasy air stirs like a dirty swill of river water around us. None of us knows how to ease back into the everyday. I have seen you. And you have seen me seeing you. And we cannot unsee. This is a place of suffering. This is a place of bravado. This is a place of brazen love. Love in your unmasked faces, your downward gazes, bearing witness as you attend. And while this day has been extraordinary, you are all preparing me to see others and myself more clearly as spiritual guide. Little boy from this morning, you are preparing me to find bold, bald courage. To re-use the tools I have to leap into new worlds. Little boy in this afternoon sun, you are preparing me, too. Preparing me to sit unflinchingly in waves of suffering and waves of love, in equal measure. Women, you are preparing me. You teach me to turn my face toward what is before me, my attention more potent than any medicine I offer. You show me what it means to love until the end. Author Jane Neal is a student with Cohort 2 The Spiritual Guidance Training Institute, graduating in January 2020. She lives with her family in Tyler, Texas.
 Last year, my partner and I became “dual pilgrims” after walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain and the Kumano Kodo in Japan. Right as we took our first steps on the Camino, we said to each other, “We have been preparing for months for these first steps in the Pyrenees.” We felt hopeful, anxious, excited: Did we prepare enough? Are we ready for the challenges? Are we really pilgrims? A dear friend shared some sage advice that we turned to daily – “You will encounter a physical, emotional, or spiritual issue everyday.” And indeed we did. Lacy Clark Ellman teaches that people walk the Camino, or take any pilgrimage, for a variety of reasons, including for healing (emotional, physical, spiritual, mental or any other type of healing), the pursuit of self-knowledge and self-discovery, creating community, and renewal. We learned that a person’s reasons for walking (or cycling, bussing, training) were varied, yet similar, and always personal. Some days I had no answer for why I was walking the ancient pilgrimages, while other days, I knew I was doing it because it was what I needed to do. On day 23, we passed words painted on a large rock that read Santiago is not there. Is in you. That phrase has been my meditation for months now and has been a meaningful perspective as I navigate my emotions, thoughts, ideas, identity, and habits. The journey is both an outer exploration of the world with all its surprises, as well as an inner exploration of my values, attitudes, and perspectives. The destination is already inside of me, and I access it when I trust my inner teacher to guide my actions. Isn’t this what we do as spiritual companions? We provide a safe and loving space for our companions to find their way to their inner Santiago. At the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto last year, I went to a workshop on Pilgrimage by Robert Nash, Soumaya Khalifa, and Noam Marans. In the workshop Soumaya outlined three levels or types of pilgrimage: out of the country; in the city; 1 on 1. At the heart of what we do as spiritual companions is journey as pilgrims together, either 1 on 1 or in a group. In addition to 1 on 1 pilgrimaging, we are thrilled to be offering our first Urban Pilgrimage in June of 2020! During our journey, we will explore both the outer world of Chicago, with its variety of sacred sites, as well as our inner world, with its variety of sacred rooms. Please consider joining us in this interspiritual experience as we, like Robert Nash expressed, “make the familiar unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar familiar.” ~Jeanette Banashak, PhD, EdD SGTI's Urban Pilgrimage is open to the public. Send us an e-mail if you'd like to be added to the "I'm Interested!" List.  |
About this blogDeepening the understanding, practice and importance of spiritual guidance-companionship across traditions. 
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