What's the "Travel Year" and why does it matter?
This is probably the most compelling question to the project. It has all sorts of implications...which need to be addressed in order to truly understand what the Sacred Parks Project really is and aims to become. Essentially, the Sacred Parks Project "Travel Year" was/is a year set aside for the project founder (Paul) to visit faith communities all over the United States (and one in Canada), to see what the parks in our country have to offer, and to begin the effort to process what journey, destination, and place mean to the theology and mission of the project, and to the communities that engage with parks. This travel year was funded out of Paul's savings (see F.A.Q.) and was very much a working travel (i.e. not vacation). Moreover, to understand the travel year concept, it is helpful to know the following:
First, the travel year is where the project's narrative originates, and it is a key component of the project's experiential theology: of place, of neighbor, and of God's presence. Without the formative lessons Paul learned in the wilderness (and probably will continue to learn, albeit in less dramatic and frequent fashion), the Sacred Parks Project would simply be an exercise of theory, and not of practice. Somehow (unconsciously, most likely) this need for an intense experience in raw and sacred place was known from the beginning.
Second, the travel year has provided a "big-picture view" for the general landscape of parks - of what our local, state and national parks have to offer. This type of view - of which areas of the country are most threatened, which are most preserved, and which may be most in need of help - was invaluable (and still a work in-progress). While Paul has likened the first 9 months of the project's travel year as the "honeymoon" phase (of seeing things perhaps not as they are, but as they should be), the remaining 3+ months of the travel year are more like the first few months of a marriage: back to the ordinary, building on the extraordinary, and finding amazing grace in things familiar. Or, coincidentally, the 9-month time of travel might also serve as a "gestation period" of what happens next: (re)birth, whereby the rest of the project and ministry is pure growth.
Third, the travel year has been less about privilege, and more about responsibility. The point about people who have the freedom to visit parks far from home should not be that we go to these places because we can, but rather that we go there to connect to something (Creation), and someone (God and neighbor) and that the project's two central questions are always there for the asking. It is not the frequency of our travels to parks that matters, but the result. The Sacred Parks mission is built upon a theology that states that if we as a human race set aside places (i.e. parks) to be protected, these places are not to be held up as trophies, or simply places to check off our travel to-do, or bragging rights, list. Parks are places where stewardship is often best modeled, and (in our view) places to be emulated beyond their borders. Integrating park "ethics" into our lives is the mission, and the starting point. Experiencing parks and learning from them is not a privilege, or a right, but a calling.
Fourth, the travel year was a crash course on how to enter wilderness backcountry. This February, for the first time in Paul's life, he packed everything he would need for 48 hours in the wilderness and headed up into the mountains of Zion National Park. Though he prepared well with the proper gear, read books and talked to experienced backpackers, nothing could have prepared him for the lessons he learned in the wild. Successive journeys into some of this country's harshest (and most beautiful) areas have impressed upon Paul (like countless before and after) how there really is no substitute for entering Creation on its terms, and experiencing God's presence via survival in the wilderness.
Finally, the travel year illustrates a point that is at least as old as the Bible: sacred space is critical to religious identity. Even in the days when the Isrealites wandered in the desert with no temple to call their own, they had sacred space. Though they did not yet have the three sacred components of their future religion (King, Torah, and Temple), they most certainly had these three things in abbreviated form: a prophetic leader (Moses), a sacred text (the commandments), and the tent/tabernacle (the traveling "ark of the covenant") that journey with them everywhere. In the centuries that followed, we know that none of these institutions are without misuse. Thus, the connection to parks is perhaps a symbolic return to a different type of tent theology: that some of the holiest and most sacred places are not structures, personalities and institutions, but rather (or also) places built by the hand of God, and (for those who believe in an "open canon") connections made to a scripture that God is still writing.
First, the travel year is where the project's narrative originates, and it is a key component of the project's experiential theology: of place, of neighbor, and of God's presence. Without the formative lessons Paul learned in the wilderness (and probably will continue to learn, albeit in less dramatic and frequent fashion), the Sacred Parks Project would simply be an exercise of theory, and not of practice. Somehow (unconsciously, most likely) this need for an intense experience in raw and sacred place was known from the beginning.
Second, the travel year has provided a "big-picture view" for the general landscape of parks - of what our local, state and national parks have to offer. This type of view - of which areas of the country are most threatened, which are most preserved, and which may be most in need of help - was invaluable (and still a work in-progress). While Paul has likened the first 9 months of the project's travel year as the "honeymoon" phase (of seeing things perhaps not as they are, but as they should be), the remaining 3+ months of the travel year are more like the first few months of a marriage: back to the ordinary, building on the extraordinary, and finding amazing grace in things familiar. Or, coincidentally, the 9-month time of travel might also serve as a "gestation period" of what happens next: (re)birth, whereby the rest of the project and ministry is pure growth.
Third, the travel year has been less about privilege, and more about responsibility. The point about people who have the freedom to visit parks far from home should not be that we go to these places because we can, but rather that we go there to connect to something (Creation), and someone (God and neighbor) and that the project's two central questions are always there for the asking. It is not the frequency of our travels to parks that matters, but the result. The Sacred Parks mission is built upon a theology that states that if we as a human race set aside places (i.e. parks) to be protected, these places are not to be held up as trophies, or simply places to check off our travel to-do, or bragging rights, list. Parks are places where stewardship is often best modeled, and (in our view) places to be emulated beyond their borders. Integrating park "ethics" into our lives is the mission, and the starting point. Experiencing parks and learning from them is not a privilege, or a right, but a calling.
Fourth, the travel year was a crash course on how to enter wilderness backcountry. This February, for the first time in Paul's life, he packed everything he would need for 48 hours in the wilderness and headed up into the mountains of Zion National Park. Though he prepared well with the proper gear, read books and talked to experienced backpackers, nothing could have prepared him for the lessons he learned in the wild. Successive journeys into some of this country's harshest (and most beautiful) areas have impressed upon Paul (like countless before and after) how there really is no substitute for entering Creation on its terms, and experiencing God's presence via survival in the wilderness.
Finally, the travel year illustrates a point that is at least as old as the Bible: sacred space is critical to religious identity. Even in the days when the Isrealites wandered in the desert with no temple to call their own, they had sacred space. Though they did not yet have the three sacred components of their future religion (King, Torah, and Temple), they most certainly had these three things in abbreviated form: a prophetic leader (Moses), a sacred text (the commandments), and the tent/tabernacle (the traveling "ark of the covenant") that journey with them everywhere. In the centuries that followed, we know that none of these institutions are without misuse. Thus, the connection to parks is perhaps a symbolic return to a different type of tent theology: that some of the holiest and most sacred places are not structures, personalities and institutions, but rather (or also) places built by the hand of God, and (for those who believe in an "open canon") connections made to a scripture that God is still writing.