Mapping Your Spiritual Journey: A companion and guide

By Sally Welch

Mapping your spiritual journey is a technique used in spiritual direction, on retreats and pastoral work, as a way of recognising and interpreting God’s presence in the highs and lows of your life experiences. This book offers creative ways to explore your own spiritual journey, helping you to trace your relationship with God from the beginning, whether looking at your entire life or exploring significant moments. It can be done in multiple creative ways – drawing, collages, timelines, maps, collections of objects or photographs, modelling, journaling, making a garden and more. It offers suggestions for ways to reflect on your journey by looking at parallels in the narratives of the Bible and in everyday life and to learn from these how to deepen your understanding of God’s presence and actions in your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press Norwich
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781786225443

Book preview

Mapping Your Spiritual Journey

Mapping Your Spiritual Journey

Mapping Your Spiritual Journey

A creative reflection method

Sally Welch

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© Sally Welch 2024

First published in 2024 by the Canterbury Press Norwich

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Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Canterbury Press.

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work

Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978-1-78622-543-6

Typeset by Regent Typesetting

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Preparing

The physical map

Part 2: Remembering

1. Before You Begin: Points to Consider When Choosing Your Mapping Method

What are you going to map?

A single memory

A single theme, place or encounter

A period of time

2. Stimulating Memory

Taking the time

3. Caring for Yourself as You Remember

Wrapping in prayer

Detaching

Detaching exercise

If it goes wrong

Part 3: Creating

4. Initial Considerations

Type of landscape – real

Or imaginary

Further considerations

5. Gathering Materials and Resources

6. Timeline

7. Three-Dimensional Landscape

Paper collage

Textile collage

Sand

Papier mâché

Three-dimensional landscape

The natural world

Labyrinth

8. A Two-Dimensional Map

What will you map onto?

What will you map with?

What sort of map will you use?

Traditional landscape outline

Spiral map

Ribbon map

Mind map

‘Tree’ map

Word maps

Part 4: Reflecting

Cleaning our windows

Living without appropriating

Take the time you need

Noticing

The good …

The bad …

And the ugly …

Listen

Part 5: Praying

Introduction

Choosing your incident

Recreating your incident

Find a Bible passage

Using a Bible passage

Starting from a different place

Part 6: Imagining

Laying demons to rest

Learning from experience

Noticing the gaps

Realizing the presence of God

Part 7: Bible Passages

Cairns

Cairns i – A personal commitment

Cairns ii – A mutual agreement

Cairns iii – The road back

Cairns iv – A reminder

Gardens

Gardens i – A place of solace

Gardens ii – A place of regret

Gardens iii – A place of commitment

Gardens iv – A place of betrayal

Mountains

Mountains i – Stepping aside

Mountains ii – The temptation of power

Mountains iii – A long way up

Mountains iv – A promise

People

People i – Against the crowd

People ii – Sacrifice

People iii – A hostile crowd

People iv – Finding balance

Pastures

Pastures i – Soul refreshment

Pastures ii – The flowers of the field

Pastures iii – Renewal

Pastures iv – Leaving the pastures

Rivers

Rivers i – A reminder

Rivers ii – A place for grief

Rivers iii – Living water

Rivers iv – Baptism

Roads

Roads i – Walking past

Roads ii – A missionary message

Roads iii – Ready to turn back

Roads iv – Companions on the road

Wilderness

Wilderness i – A place of wandering

Wilderness ii – A place of vulnerability

Wilderness iii – A place of strengthening

Wilderness iv – A place of promise

Family

Family i – Sibling rivalry

Family ii – Wherever you go

Family iii – Rejoice with me

Family iv – A new way of being

For Helen, my friend

Introduction

We all keep multiple ‘maps’ in our heads. They help to position ourselves within the world, to provide stable points of reference, to understand and categorize events and activities in a way that enables us to incorporate them into our experience. Some of these mental maps are practical and useful. We keep maps of geographical settings, familiar towns and other sites, for example. When we imagine ourselves travelling to a certain destination we can picture the journey, the landmarks we will pass and estimate how long it will take to get there. The shock when we arrive at a place to discover the traffic layout has changed or a particular shop or attraction has moved or disappeared is made worse because we must make the effort to alter our mental map and establish the new plan in our memories. These mental maps of physical places can be referred to when we wish to bring to mind a particular event – by placing such events in a physical context, small details can be remembered and the story brought back to life. They can be used to journey in our imaginations, bringing together a collage of remembered places to combine with those unvisited personally but seen on media or described by others. These can help us to imagine what it might be like to travel to a certain place or even live there. Such maps can be helpful when we try to put ourselves in the place of others, perhaps leading to a better understanding of their spiritual and emotional reactions to incidents and events and enabling us to communicate better with them.

As well as maps relating to space, there are those relating to time – we keep a number of historical timelines in our heads. There are the factual ones that enable us to keep in order events of external history – the First World War coming before the Second World War, to give an easy example. They help us when we are exploring our external environment – monasteries in ruins because of the Reformation – setting them in context and helping us to understand events as a consequence of each other. In addition to this there are our personal historical timelines, those that map out the events in our lives in chronological order. These can help us understand some of our actions in the light of previous ones, and possibly to predict future consequences.

But there are other types too, less tangible and less clearly attached to external factors. There is, for example, the one that plots out our position within our network of relationships, which helps us to remember and determine what has happened and with whom, what our last interaction with each person was and how we felt about it. This in turn enables us to speculate on future meetings and rehearse perhaps how we might behave. These people might be placed within their particular physical settings – I imagine my friend Helen, who lives in Cornwall, a long way distant, sitting by the sea. This incorporates both the fact that she is not easily physically accessible right now, and also that this doesn’t make me too unhappy as I know she is having a good time.

Even more individual are those imaginary maps where we picture our ideal place or situation, or our maps of ambition where we place ourselves somewhere in the future in order to help direct ourselves there more accurately, tailoring our present actions to meet future needs. Less productive might be the maps of ‘might have been’, where we picture the course of our lives had we taken a different decision at a certain point, such as choice of life partner or career. All such maps help us understand better the spaces in which we live, both physically and mentally, adding to our store cupboard of resources to enable us to navigate better the challenges and obstacles of everyday life. They can be layered on top of each other, interacting and informing as we carry out the perpetual work of making sense of our lives and our place within the world, constantly redrawing and reshaping the maps of our understanding.

The physical geography of a place and how we relate to it mentally have a symbiotic relationship, each depending on and influencing the other. Being able to depict both aspects in one physical object can help us understand better both the physical spaces in which our bodies operate and also the emotional and spiritual ways in which we react to these spaces. This activity can be used to explore our spiritual journeys, ‘mapping’ them in concrete ways so that we can ‘see’ where we have been – reflecting on the events of our lives and how these affected our spiritual journey in a way that will enable us to appreciate and understand them. A more rounded understanding of how our spirituality has been formed and shaped can help us in many ways, some of which will be explored in this book. It will also enable us to discern how to move forward in ways that are helpful and productive, as we seek always to journey more closely with Christ.

This is not a new concept. The fifteenth-century Dominican friar Felix Fabri went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, undertaking the difficult and challenging journey twice, once in 1480 and again in 1483. Returning to his hometown in Germany he would preach on his experiences to local convents and priories, to groups of people who would never leave their buildings, never mind the country. In order to help a particular group of nuns in Ulm, Fabri wrote the ‘Sionpilger’, a text describing the journey to Jerusalem, illustrated with a map of his travels.

In this way, the nuns could journey in their imagination, undertaking spiritual exercises and using the descriptions provided to gain the effect of a real pilgrimage. The term ‘Sion pilgrims’ was coined, to differentiate this type of spiritual pilgrim from those who made the physical journey. This type of virtual pilgrimage received a new lease of life during the Covid lockdown, when, forced to remain within the four walls of our dwelling places, media resources were employed to enable armchair travellers to journey beyond the confines of their rooms and encounter new and different landscapes and reflect on them. This has proved very successful in enabling those people to experience pilgrimage and its accompanying spirituality who would not otherwise be able to do so.

01map.jpg

Jerusalem from E, 1486, from Konrad Grünenberg’s Beschreibung der Reise von Konstanz nach Jerusalem. This was written at the same time as Felix Fabri wrote his book Evagatorium.

Another variation of the spiritual journey map is that of depicting physically the spiritual events of a person’s life.