The story of the departure ceremony (4): ‘Meeting’.
The Departure Ceremony/Pilgrim’s Lauds of the Walk of Wisdom on November 7 in the Stevenskerk in Nijmegen was unfortunately cancelled due to corona. As a result, the contribution of pilgrim Marlou Elsen, the text by Cees van der Pluijm, was not recited, but recorded.
The text for each Departure Ceremony comes from the book ‘Seasons of Life: a contemporary book of hours and pilgrims’.
Below you will find the text as recorded by Marlou.
Meeting
Not in convent or monastery, church or hermitage
Not in the big words freedom, hope
Not in the room where darkness reigns
Nor in the bright sunlight of the day
Not in the unbridled nature that used to be
Had to go from ideal to hard
Lagging, not in the intoxication of heart or head
Not in the pain of body or mind
But in the language, that inalienable home –
What color crept into a painting
Hidden to be found quietly –
Or in a song that reads love awake
Only in that brief moment, in from the start
That hundredth of a second, when you saw;
That one look that lasted just a little longer
The flash that sent you into another forest
Than what you had erred believed in so much –
A quest that would have been in vain
Only detached from lack and time
In the end, what you miss touches the most
Meet who crosses the borders
Cees van der Pluijm
Reviewer, Poet, Talk Show Host and Lecturer
(Radio Kootwijk 1954 – Arnhem 2014)