It’s been almost a year since I published a post (entitled “Onward!”) about the turning of the year from 2020 to 2021. At that time, tired of treading water and waiting for a COVID vaccine that was still just a faraway speck on the horizon, I felt as though the simple acts of switching out my wall calendar on January 1st and making resolutions carried more weight than ever before.
I charged into that new year armed with some small, practical resolutions that would make my day-to-day life smoother and less stressful…and with a Word of the Year, which I promised to reveal and explain about in a future post but never did. Now, looking back on the year that just ended and ahead to 2022, it’s time to make good on that promise.
Choosing a “word of the year” is a New Year’s tradition for the hosts of my favorite podcast, Abiding Together. The idea is not to predict what the new year will bring but to give yourself a tool for handling it well and staying on course. The start of 2021 seemed as good a time as any for me to try it myself.
I imagined my word being like the Epiphany star to guide me when things got messy—Don’t look around at all that craziness. Look here. Walk in this direction. Or like a mantra I could return to again and again in my prayers, to bring things back into perspective.
My word of the year for 2021 was: PILGRIMAGE.
This word appealed to me for two reasons. Number one: a pilgrimage involves traveling, usually to a faraway destination (something I was longing to do but couldn’t.) It was easy, at that point in the pandemic, to feel like a boat tossed around on the waves, directionless and helpless. And worst of all, stuck.
Stuck is not a condition I typically handle well. Having to wait in a line that isn’t moving, or being expected to arrive at an event 15 minutes before it starts and just sit there, drives me crazy. One of the hardest things for me about life in the early months of the pandemic was the sheer boredom of it, and a lot of energy that I could have used for some better purpose had been wasted on fruitless anger.
But— in January of 2021 I was determined to stop believing the lies that kept dragging me down into self-pity and hopelessness. The lies that would tranquilize and neutralize and prevent me from pressing on to do the good works for which I was created.
The truth, and I knew it, was that not everything in my life was stuck in place. There were still plenty of places to move forward if I stopped complaining and started looking.
Holding on to the word "pilgrimage" in my mind was my way of claiming the power I still had: the power, as in the last line of the poem Invictus which I'd read that year, of being “the captain of my soul.” No virus, no travel bans, no cancellations could prevent me from going somewhere in my interior life. I could choose to set goals—whether practical, like my New Year’s resolution about better meal planning, or spiritual, like growing in the virtue of gentleness—and make progress toward them, no matter what was happening in the world around me. And if I was making progress, then today wasn’t the same as yesterday or the day before.
My second reason for choosing the word “pilgrimage” was as a reminder that whatever circumstances I might find myself in that year, they’d eventually be behind me. I was on the move, a pilgrim passing through on my way to someplace else. Someplace mysterious and beautiful and worth all the rainy days, sore feet, and rough mountain passes on the trail.
This perspective did actually help me through some difficult times last year. One thing I didn’t know when I chose my word for 2021 was that I’d be forced that year to walk once more through “the valley of the shadow of death," as Psalm 23 puts it, watching as someone very dear to me struggled in the treacherous quicksand of depression and suicidal thoughts.
It was a time of learning to accept my powerlessness and just walk, just be there, just love. A time of learning to hold fear in one hand and faith in the other. But I knew that someday I’d pass out of that dark valley and back in the sunlight, as long as I kept moving forward, heading toward my final destination of Heaven (or so I hope and believe).
Not that I would forget that valley of the shadow, and not that there wouldn’t be more of them in the future, but this particular one would someday be behind me, receding slowly into the distance. Thinking of myself as a pilgrim passing through, treading lightly on this earth, gave me strength on the worst days.
I have always loved how that verse from the psalm doesn’t say “when I stand in the valley of death.” It says “when I walk through.” There is movement, and therefore hope, in those words.
The closing line of Psalm 23 reads, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” Here again is the theme of movement: you can’t follow someone who isn’t going anywhere. When we suffer, this ancient song of comfort reminds us, we are not powerless or stuck. Nor are we alone.
I would encourage anyone who’s intrigued by the Word of the Year practice to give it a try for 2022. (For more background, you can listen to this week’s episode of Abiding Together where they share their words for this year.) If you do choose a word for yourself, I’d love to know—share your word, and a brief explanation if you want, in the comments.
This new year, the contours of my life look different. The needs of my heart are different. And my word is: RADIANT.
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