Peregrine was the monastic name I chose as a Servite--in my second venture in Catholic religious life. The name means "pilgrim" or "wanderer." It seemed like the perfect religious name. The spiritual quest is frequently metaphorized as a pilgrimage. Joseph Campbell likened the effort of every person to live a full, rich, contributing, and worthwhile life to the "hero's journey." Being a hero is saying yes to life, achieving maturation and beauty of character, learning to cope with challenges and difficulties--through discovery of one's true spiritual being as invincible and eternal and beyond ego. For homosexually oriented souls, being gay is the great challenge. Being gay calls for being a wanderer, seeking an idealized life beyond the difficulties, for we are cast out from the conventional roles of householder and paterfamilias, called to discover our own special path. The journey is to wholeness and virtue, to fullness of experience, and to being a source of love and joy in a world so often bereft of love and joy these days.

Being a pilgrim or wanderer means accepting the insecurity of life, being open to change. It's the opposite of being a householder obsessed with stability and safety--and self-reliance. Being a wanderer puts you at the mercy of the seasons and vissicitudes of human history. It means sometimes relying on the kindness of strangers andbeing a stranger and a hero yourself, on a quest, doing good deeds and showing kindness along the way. Being a wanderer means placing your faith in something bigger than yourself and your own powers. Being a spiritual wanderer means responding to signs--"karmic resonances"--to reveal the path you should be following. Maybe it means believing in luck, synchronicity--and magic.

In fact, it was for a magical reason that I joined the Servite Order: for I discovered that Peregrine was a Servite name. St. Peregrine was a 14th Century Italian Servite friar who'd been canonized for his good works--and for his having been miraculously healed overnight of a melanoma lesion on his lower leg. Peregrine is the patron saint of cancer patients and, more recently, of people with AIDS. He's usually shown pulling his tunic up to expose the lesion. (Peregrine's malady was probably actually phlebitis; as an act of mortification and austerity Peregrine always stood, he never sat down. That's a sure way to get varicose veins and phlebitis. The instant cure is no less remarkable though!)

I'd become attached to the name when, as a fervent young man fresh out of high school and about to enter novitiate with my first Order, the Marianists, the word "peregrination" was the secret word on a local radio station for which you could win a prize by calling in when the D.J. used it. I was proud of myself for knowing the relatively obscure secret word, and proud of myself for recognizing that I was starting a true spiritual peregrination.

Several years later, I was told to leave that first religious order because I was too modern and too independent a thinker--I understand now that that was a euphemism for my burgeoning homosexuality. But still drawn to monasticism, I soon discovered in the Servites an Order that was seriously making an effort to modernize and that had a St. Peregrine. On Peregrine's feast day, May 2, 1967, a whole series of coincidences fell together including, interestingly, Joseph Campbell's notion of embarking on a "hero's journey" and the Buddhist bodhisattva spirituality that White Crane readers will recognize as ongoing themes in this magazine during my tenure as editor--and all coordinated by a young Servite seminarian I had a crush on. The synchronicity seemed to me a sign I should join the Servites.

And what a good decision that was! I loved living in community. I loved the brotherhood of idealistic and innocent young men. And Servite life proved a great way for me to finally figure out my sexual orientation--within the context of being a spiritual pilgrim. It also got me to San Francisco in 1968 where the Servites had a house on Stanyan St. on the edge of the Haight-Ashbury still heady and hippie from the Summer of Love.

Indeed, I'd been a hippie seminarian as a Servite. I got in trouble with them for wearing my hair too long and--again--for being too independent a thinker. While in seminary in Southern California, I inadvertently got to be editor of the Servite Provincial newsletter. I really was only supposed to be the printer (because the Provincial printing press was in the basement of the seminary). But since I had to do the typing and layout, I couldn't resist including my own column.

I wrote an article reminding the Servite Fathers that the Order was originally founded as mendicant at the time of the Franciscan reform of monasticism, meaning the Servites were supposed to practice an especially rigorous form of poverty. I wrote that I thought they ought to abandon their automobiles and hitchhike around Los Angeles--relying on the kindness of strangers. You can see the hippie in me in that advice! It wasn't long after that that I was out of my second religious Order and standing by the side of California Highway 101, hitchhiking to San Francisco: a true mendicant seeking liberation.

The funny thing was that here I'd taken the name Peregrine who's always shown with his staff and begging bowl and his skirt hiked up showing his leg--just like Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, teaching Clark Gable how to hitchhike!

The peregrinations have taken me on many a turn since then. The next step was going to be to discover gay activism, to meet Joseph Campbell, to find that I could write books that got published, and in quite a surprising way to "heal" a boyfriend of cancer (by insisting he go to a doctor urgently and, the next day, undergo emergency surgery--on May 2nd, St. Peregrine's Day). My pilgrim steps then led me to be a gay psychotherapist, then gay bookseller, novelist, and most recently WCJ editor and, with Kip (now through 19 years), quasi-eremitical gay B&B Guestmaster.

I share my fascination with the metaphor of the spiritual life as a journey and peregrination, in part to introduce this issue on PILGRIMAGE and in part to announce another stage of my own journey--one that affects White Crane Journal. I hope you'll be sure to read "About the Near Future of WCJ" on page 23.

This issue contains some wonderful and interesting material. There are several explications of the metaphor of the journey, there are several accounts of journeys--some in space, some in memory, some in spirit. There are suggestions and opportunities offered for new roads on your own peregrinations.

I think all of us experience our lives in stages that we hadn't exactly realized when they were happening. It's in retrospect that you discover the patterns of meaning. The following articles should provide occasion and inspiration for perceiving and cherishing your own spiritual journey.