The Journey Behind the Journey

There are some trips that do little more than stamp a passport and give you something pleasant to talk about over supper or over coffee with friends. Then there are the other kind, the ones that settle somewhere deeper down, in that inward country where memory, gratitude, and wonder all seem to live side by side. These journeys over the past five years turned out to be one of those.

Destinations

What first looked like a list of destinations on a map slowly became something else altogether. It became a gathering of moments stretched across oceans and years. It carried me over the Pacific and the Atlantic, across the Tasman Sea, the Caribbean, the North Sea, the Baltic, and even the old blue waters of the Mediterranean. It took me from island shores in Hawaii, Tahiti, and Samoa to the Caribbean islands, and onward to the Azores, Madeira, Mallorca, and Mo’orea, each place bringing its own weather, its own light, and its own way of lodging itself in the heart. It carried me through cities like London, Paris, Edinburgh, Belfast, Bergen, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Gibraltar, Barcelona, Sydney, Auckland, Papeete, Hamburg, and Lübeck, places where the streets themselves seemed to remember what generations before had built, prayed, endured, and hoped.

Along the way there were old cities worn smooth by time, and weathered harbors where the salt air seemed to drift in carrying stories of sailors, merchants, wars, departures, and homecomings. There were quiet afternoons inside ancient cathedrals where the sunlight came soft through stained glass and laid itself across stone floors that had known the footsteps of centuries. There were island mornings washed in turquoise and gold. There were streets where history did not seem trapped behind museum glass, but alive and nearby, as if it had decided to stroll alongside you for a while and keep you company.

Churches

And nearly everywhere I went, I saw churches.

Sometimes it was a grand cathedral rising over the city square, its bells marking the hour and its spire pointing heavenward as if to remind everybody below there is something higher than commerce, traffic, or politics. Sometimes it was a small stone church tucked along a side street, plain and weathered and faithful in its own quiet way. Sometimes it was a chapel by the sea, or an old parish church standing watch over a village, or a sanctuary open in the middle of the day where a traveler could step inside, sit in silence, and feel the hush settle over him.

In city after city, island after island, there was evidence of God’s presence.

Not always in loud ways. Not always in ways that would make a headline. But there it was all the same. In the old cathedrals built by hands long gone to glory. In candles flickering before prayer altars. In carved stone crosses worn smooth by time. In sacred music drifting faintly through old naves. In the faces of strangers showing kindness. In the beauty of morning light on water. In the deep human longing that built churches in the first place and still draws people through their doors.

That may be one of the things that stayed with me most. No matter the country, no matter the language, no matter the style of architecture or the shape of the harbor, I kept finding reminders that human beings everywhere have reached toward God. They have built sanctuaries. They have prayed under vaulted ceilings and plain wooden roofs. They have lifted hymns in cities and villages and on islands far out to sea. The settings changed. The languages changed. The weather certainly changed. But the witness remained.

Every place had a voice of its own.
Some whispered.
Some sang.
Some simply stood there, quiet and sure of themselves, and let beauty do the talking.

Twenty-five Countries and Counting

Since April of 2022, I have traveled to twenty-five countries. I have not made that journey alone. Along the way I have had company from my walking stick—my cane, actually—named Virgil, as in Virgil Cane. My fiancée, she who cannot be named on the internet and who has no online presence at all, has shared much of the road with me. Friends from my writer’s group have also traveled alongside me from time to time, helping carry the laughter, the weariness, the wonder, and the occasional confusion that always seems to come with trying to find your way in a place where even the street signs look like they belong to somebody else’s story.

Travel, at least the kind worth remembering, has a way of humbling a person. It reminds you that the world is both far larger and far more intimate than you imagined. You can stand in a cathedral half a world away and feel something familiar stir in your chest. You can sit by a harbor in another country and watch the water move against old stone, and know deep down that human beings have always been longing, leaving, loving, grieving, building, and hoping. The scenery changes. The heart does not all that much.

That may be one reason I have loved these journeys as much as I have. They have shown me beauty, yes, but they have also shown me continuity. The world is wide, but there are threads that run through it all. Hospitality. Reverence. Memory. Music. Bread on a table. Light on water. The hush inside a church. The laughter of strangers. The sense, now and then, that you have stepped into a place that was waiting to tell you something if only you would slow down enough to listen.

And slowing down has been part of the lesson.

A cane will teach you that. Age will too. Travel has a way of reminding you that not every journey is meant to be rushed through as if you were checking items off a list. Some places ask for lingering. Some call for sitting still. Some deserve more than a photograph and a hurried sentence in a notebook. Some deserve your full attention.

That is what this series is about.

What follows is the story of that journey, told through the destinations that have stayed with me the most. I have ranked them not by cost or popularity, not by travel-brochure promises or online trends, but by memory, feeling, and by that harder-to-define quality of whether a place settled into my soul and decided to stay there.

These are the places that have lingered.

These are the old stones, the quiet harbors, the island mornings, the church bells, the cathedrals, and the city streets I still carry with me.

This is the journey behind the journey. I’ll be sharing the wonders of where I’ve visited in the weeks ahead.

Grace and Peace
Jimmie Aaron Kepler

Did you enjoy this article? You can find more of Jimmie Aaron Kepler’s non-fiction books at NONFICTION and his speculative fiction books written as Jim Kepler at FICTION.