Here I go again

The backpack is packed. The passport is ready. The Ipod is charged.

Tomorrow, I get a little piece of grace. Frederick Buechner said "loving someone is grace," but I think lots of things are grace. For me, journeys are grace. And this one in particular is a beautiful little gift, a little sacramental sip. I get to come full circle.

Since I'm on a never-ending mission to narrativize my life, it's hard not to see this trip to Budapest as a really fitting experience to have during my last semester at LCC. I've been here for 2 and a half years, but until now, I haven't had a chance to get back to the city where Eastern Europe first crawled under my skin and up into my psyche. I first went to Budapest when I was 16, between my sophomore and junior years of high school; it was our first destination on our way to camps in Romania. But Budapest imprinted itself on my brain cells the way it only can for 16-year-olds who read too much and long for a life amongst grandiose architecture.

I went back 6 years later to teach high school English. And then 2 years after that for a summer of work in a refugee camp during the first year of the Afghan/Iraqi wars. But I haven't been there since, despite having been "in the neighborhood," for several years. Budapest is why I'm in Lithuania. Budapest is why I've lived fully half of the past decade outside of the United States. This shocks me sometimes.

Friday in class, I just happened to mention (and it surprised me again when I said it) that I spend most of my time in a part of the world that I would not have been allowed into when I was growing up. I told them how I used to have nightmares about nuclear war when I was seven, waking up stark-eyed and unable to calm down my heart rate, climbing into my parents bed for comfort. I reminded these 18 and 19 year-olds, who were infants or eye-twinkles when the Berlin wall fell and when students in Vilnius were shot by Russian army officers for protesting at the TV tower, that, once upon a time, I could not have been their teacher, we could not have been friends. (and we would NOT have been speaking English). I looked into the classroom - at Ona, and Tomas, and Konstantin, and Nikita, and Aigul, and Laurynas, and Aiva, and Sergei, and Nastija, and... and I could not imagine how this could have EVER been true.

Budapest is why I'm here, now, doing what I do. So as I face only three more months of life in Europe (for the time being anyway), it's a good time to go back and visit her. I'm struggling against trying to make too much of events. To see it as an ending, when it's probably just a touchpoint. Nevertheless, to be able to go back is grace. And I'm grateful.

"The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of the inner journey. The inner journey is the interpretation of the meaning and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both." - Thomas Merton