Making Our Connections

Travel has always borne a cost and yet humanity has been persistently nomadic and movement and journeying have been reliable signifiers of spiritual obedience. As a race, we have been perpetually on the move, driven by need or by divine instruction or both. In the last two hundred years, more of us have had the option to travel, and travel as an unnecessary but somehow worthwhile pursuit became an exotic and romanticised luxury in the twentieth century. This is a book about how that romance of travel has become replaced by its commodification, a symbol of consumerism and a parade-society, a mode of societal dis-ease. It is a book about what has been lost in this process, particularly in terms of social and theological relations, and what could be gained by travelling less or travelling differently. Where does the tradition of spiritual journeying sit in relation to budget airlines and package holidays? Is it all part of holy travel, what Satish Kumar has called love miles, or is the journey now part of a purchase rather than providence? The author argues that there is a higher moral value to living locally and travelling little. Faith is best nurtured and community is best built in a less-travelled world and that our responsibility to the earth and to each other is to stay at home more and work in our neighbourhood. Enchantment (and obedience) is on our doorsteps if only we reclaim what it was we were originally seeking to find by leaving home: elsewhere can be literally around the corner, the divine in the everyday if only we stop to listen