Reflections on Travelling

’Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

Take my camel, dear.

This much loved opening sentence from Rose Macaulay’s novel, the Towers of Trebizon, is so charming because of the image it evokes.

One imagines an intrepid traveller who is at the same time a dashingly elegant, very English woman wearing gloves and a flowing silk scarf, heading into the desert riding a camel and thinking nothing of travelling the long distance to attend Sunday Mass.

Other ways of travelling
The image comes to mind when, not infrequently, I find myself in the midst of airport chaos, long delays and lost luggage, on my way to various parts of Europe as part of my working life. Rose Macauly’s picture of travelling sustains the imagination and comforts the present-day traveller by reminding us of an earlier era of more audacious and gracious ways of travelling.

Travels for all 
We travel more than ever before and this surely must influence and inform our lives at various levels. Travelling is no longer reserved for the few as the cost of air travel has been greatly reduced but the cost of this to our environment is enormous.

Let us, however, for a moment consider the implications for the traveller of many journeys of so varied influences and impressions from far-away places and cultures.

Travel and Life
“To travel is to live,” Hans Christian Andersen told us and certainly that is true in different ways. Our lives are enhanced and sometimes transformed because the encounters we have with unfamiliar people and places have the potential to open our hearts and bring us into contact with dramatically different ways of living and being, and thus reach and teach and show us something about ourselves and ultimately God. As we let go of our familiar and everyday pattern and engage with the journey we can begin to focus not only on the end of where we are going but also on how we get there. The parallels between travel and life are obvious and so is our human frailty in being forever looking forward to arriving instead of experiencing the journey itself.

Sense of Displacement
And something else; travelling involves by definition a sense of displacement. Waking up in the middle of the night and wondering for a moment where you are - metaphorically and practically can be an unsettling experience.

The journey that we take to places and through life ultimately throws back on us the values that we hold and the assumptions that we make and how we want to live with or without these in the future.

How to get to Rome
A sobering comment on travelling is made by the British writer William Darymple, who explains that the word TRAVEL is the same word as TRAVAIL – physical or mental labour or toil. This was a source for reflection, if not comfort, when on a day last week on my way to a teaching engagement in Rome, I, together with thousands of others, found myself stranded in Copenhagen airport considering what to do in the face of 178 cancelled flights. “All roads lead to Rome,” we are told, but how to get there is another matter!

The Revd. Ulla Monberg, Director of Training for the Anglican Diocese in Europe