In my leadership class we recently read the novel The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse. In this book I have found many examples relating to my studies in Sacred Communications and Sacred Journeys. This novel is about a man who is on a journey (pilgrimage) to the east with a League whom he cannot identify or give up because he gave a vow not to do so. He writes this book as he is on his search to find Leo (a member who "disappeared" from the League). In the book he writes, "I also walked alone at times, whenever some sign or call tempted me to go my own way" (Hesse, 23). This relates to the first axiom, "sacred place is not chosen, it chooses; God chooses to reveal himself only where he wills" (Lane, 19). The man walks off to where the sacred place and God are calling him to. Sacred place chooses "the individual long before he or she is able to respond with a conscious choice of her own" (Lane, 22). On his pilgrimage he becomes decentralized (kenosis) with himself and if focusing on his surroundings and a servant that he looks up to on the journey, Leo.
Another axiom I saw in the novel was the fourth axiom: "for our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times" (Hesse, 27). The fourth axiom says "sacred place always possesses a double impulse-- a movement which is at once centripetal and centrifugal....a tendency toward localization and universalization" (Lane, 32). There is an awareness that God is never confined to a single locale.
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