Eta-Pi

Pi–Eta

In the twenty-first century, the average forty-five year-old human being is especially weighed with mental wear and tear and the physical aches and pains that toll the one bell most human beings dread – The Beginning of the End. Incredibly enough, the eventful life of Norma Mildred Ryder at that age was merely at The End of the Beginning – namely her long metamorphosis into becoming one of the most famous walkers since mankind decided to relinquish this form of traveling in favor of the fossil-fueled automobile.

She was a human butterfly that had a particular penchant for walking. It took her fifteen years to purify herself, undergoing the difficult cocooning process of letting go of her attachments to money, property, her friends and her family before she could accomplish what most human caterpillars might consider impossible, if not downright loony.

The first day of the year 1953 was The Beginning of The New Beginning. At forty-five years, she took the initial steps of an incredible walking pilgrimage for peace that took her across the U.S. continent seven times constituting twenty-five thousand miles for TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS, during which she did not carry or accept money.

She had so much faith in what she was doing that she vowed to not once ask for food, money, clothes or shelter until some Good Samaritan offered her something out of his own free will. She wore navy blue slacks and shirt, tennis shoes and a navy blue tunic which emblazoned her new legal name: The Peace Pilgrim. The self-designed tunic had pockets all around the bottom in which she carried her only possessions: a comb, a folding toothbrush, a pen and her small blue leaflets to pass out on the way.

Her simple message was this: overcome evil with good, and falsehood with truth, and hatred with love. These are the surefire paths to inner and outer peace.

Filipinos might find deviations from the human population like the Peace Pilgrim difficult to comprehend. Despite the heroine status this gentle American grandmother eventually gained, many of her own people then and now question her motives (moreso her sanity) for seemingly suffering an unnecessarily fanatical life.

Yet, suffer, she didn’t. Her proof was to have access to a boundless source of energy that she was able to accomplish what she did. Her words and actions were filled only with positive vigor, and at her seventies, she displayed a rare fearlessness that inspired all who were in her blissful presence.

I know how she must have felt due to the following reasons. I myself walked a great part of Mindanao during the course of a year before I learned of the Peace Pilgrim’s existence. Years before this, I began my spiritual journey in Pasadena, California, the same month and city she took her first steps in 1953. I was born the same day she died – July 7.

Indulge me, as I have to digress a little. At a major turning point on my journey, a random Mexican prophet I have never before met took me up the San Gabriel Mountain a few miles from Pasadena who forecasted not only my past, but my near future also, which according to him, would involve quite a bit of walking.

Interestingly enough, he kept insisting on a few lines from Isaiah, the exact same prophecy that the Peace Pilgrim often mentioned in radio interviews and in her many university talks around America:

“From Zion, instructions shall come
and people shall be instructed in His Way.
He shall rebuke nations
and decide disputes between peoples
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their swords into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against each other
Neither shall they learn war anymore.

Come, let us walk into the Light of the Lord.”

For any Filipino who shares the national exasperation in having to witness the slow but sure decay of Philippine pride, hearing the Peace Pilgrim’s story brings so much perspective to Who We Are and Who We Might Become. On the one hand, here are loads of religious and political leaders who live behind those high walls that keep out the destitute and the hungry, while they are busy talking the talk at the expense of those they have sworn to serve. On the other, here is an elderly grandmother who walked the walk, in the humblest, most sure-footed manner.

It was these two examples, that provided me with a compelling mixing bowl of frustration and inspiration that propelled me to the point in my life when I took that long hard look at the mirror and declared, “there’s nothing left to do but to live the truth.”

I started writing about the Peace Pilgrim a few days ago, in remembrance of the day of her death which is but a few days from now. I wanted to give you an idea of just how much purgation one must undergo throughout the pilgrimage and how one must battle to maintain the purity of life’s basic goodness. The Peace Pilgrim, in her grandiose way, died in a fatal crash when she accepted an ironic ride in a fossil-fueled automobile to where she was supposed to give a talk. Find out more about her at www.peacepilgrim.net/ 7-03-07. Pi Villaraza