When Drift Leads to Resurrection

ONE day in the late sixth century an Irish friar called Cormac clambered into his leather coracle and pushed off from the shore.

With no map and no fixed destination, he surrendered to the wind, tide and deepening ocean as it pitched and flexed his vessel’s flimsy wooden frame, with only greased animal hides keeping the water out.

Nowadays he’d probably be ticked off by the coastguards for being irresponsible. Back then he was following a long-established spiritual practice.

Peregrinatio, or spiritual voyaging, was a Celtic discipline which seafaring monks undertook as a kind of oceanic pilgrimage. There was something about offering themselves to the whims of the elements – particularly the untameable, seemingly limitless sea and sky – which connected their mortal bodies to eternity.

Some deliberately navigated vast distances, St Brendan even crossing the Atlantic. Others built thriving communities where they landed – like St Columba, the most famous of the peregrini, who founded Iona Abbey, and went on to Christianise wide tracts of Scotland.

Still others, like the lesser-known Cormac of the Sea, simply cast themselves off, kept their eyes and heart open, trusting the creator to guide them, believing they would know their destination when they found it. It was called?seeking the place of your resurrection.

AN OPEN HORIZON

I love that phrase, and the promise it carries that somewhere is a role or a calling or a community that will allow us to bring our fullest and most vibrant self to the world. You don’t have to be religious to feel the spiritual heft of that.

I first came across Cormac’s story when I was making my own?peregrinatio?around Scotland for?Adrift In Caledonia. Decades later I think of him when I meet coaching clients who are feeling lost or restless or adrift. Some carry shame about their lack of direction, others feel stuck in a place that’s not right for them, and need a change.

In either case, it’s rarely easy to strike out into the unknown – particularly if the answers you’re seeking remain elusive. Unlike the more famous saints with their polished biographies, Cormac encountered adversity, delays and mixed signs on his search for a new life and calling.

As he scoured the horizon, strong winds pushed him in unexpected directions, and strange sea-creatures plastered themselves against his oars. He sorely needed encouragement, but increasingly his fellow monks and mentors began to lose faith in his experiment.

St Columba himself eventually advised that in Cormac’s case, his “resurrection” would come from going back home – a 6th century version of “time to get a proper job”.

MID-CAREER SABBATICAL

A client of mine, who we’ll call Julie, was starting to get similar advice from well-meaning colleagues when she came to me for help. A successful but increasingly jaded project manager, she had boldly pushed off from the known shores of her career by resigning in search of a more meaningful calling.

She had given herself a year’s sabbatical, drawing on her savings, in which to explore a wider horizon and seek mid-career resurrection in an as-yet unknown sector.

To begin with, the experiment was exhilarating. Taking a break in a European capital, she noticed an inner conflict between her familiar habit of timetabling all the must-see attractions, and a less developed impulse to wander along side streets sampling pavement cafes and trinket shops. She followed the quieter impulse.

Intentionally drifting felt edgy and exciting, but harder to do in her home city, where the lure of the jobs sites was ever present. Nevertheless, she resolved to keep growing this underused muscle. Driving home from a coaching session, she resolved to decide in the moment whether to turn right or left, and see what unknown parts of her home city she might discover.

After pushing through her resistance and “sensible” self-talk, she found her world opening up: she stumbled on a live band at a previously undiscovered cafe, signed up as a volunteer to help clean up a stretch of local river, and discovered that her familiar values of ambition, hard work and sacrifice had currents of playfulness and passion running beneath – not least passion for the environment.

After six months, however, her well-meaning friends and colleagues were starting to caution that potential employers might question too large a gap on her CV – she didn’t want to get a reputation as a drifter, did she?

SEA vs TOWER

What did Cormac do at this point? My research suggested that after three voyages, one of them to Orkney, he eventually took Columba’s advice and went back to familiar Irish shores, became abbot of Darrow, and built a tower instead – the psychological opposite of the open ocean.

According to local legend, he latterly grew fearful of an unnerving prophesy about his own death from wolf-attack, and increasingly stayed indoors. The legend certainly doesn’t sugar-coat it: eventually some shape-shifting wolves broke into his tower and tore him apart – a grisly physical fate to match the psychological split he was already facing.

Whatever the truth of his ending, I can’t help wondering if he had received support and continued to keep searching in his coracle, he might finally have found his true resurrection on a very different horizon.

What about Julie? She held her nerve. Resisting the “sensible” option of resuming her old career, she instead continued to experiment with her instinctual sense of calling to something that would help her care for the planet.

Was she being woolly and unrealistic? Destined to drift forever? Time to head back to shore? Not at all. Nearly a year after she left her secure job, Julie landed a new role that felt perfect for her, managing a pioneering environmental project.

She was grateful she had given herself permission to drift intentionally for this year of openness and generative creativity – and last thing I heard was continuing to nurture her intuitive direction-finding skills for making everyday decisions in her new job.

CONVENTIONAL DRIFT

Of course, it’s possible to drift less consciously too, and many of us need help with different muscles – discipline and decision-making as much as letting go – particularly if you love the open ocean like I do.

The point is that we all drift in different ways. And following the socially-approved route that others think is right for us might leave us more existentially adrift than giving up our job.

I’m curious to hear others’ experiences of intentional drift – the moments in life when we’ve pushed off into the unknown in search of something different without being totally sure what it was.

How do we navigate the unknown waters while keeping faith with ourselves and others? Or how might we drift intentionally in small ways, even if happily anchored in a larger sense? What new perspectives might come from taking a different route home, changing up our routine, or saying yes to an offer or a role we might normally avoid?

In a volatile and changing world, we’re arguably all adrift rather more than we think. My hope and belief is that, like Julie, when given the right support and encouragement to trust our inner compass, we can find our place of resurrection in the end.

Names and some details have been changed to protect client confidentiality. For more detail on Cormac of the Sea, read chapter 9, The Patron Saint of Wanderlust, in?Adrift in Caledonia?by Nick Thorpe