Are You a Pilgrim Golfer?

The Pilgrims called themselves such long before they left for the New World and settled in Massachusetts. They envisioned life as a pilgrimage in which there is an eternal, internal journey of spiritual growth. Golf can be considered a pilgrimage too. It is more than just a trip from the parking lot and clubhouse around nine or eighteen holes and back. There are the many challenges, triumphs, and detours that one encounters along the way that can also make it a transformational process should you choose to perceive it that way. Moving back and forth from pride to shame, from anger to joy, and from depression to elation are just a few of the transitions we make during a round. Author Scott Peck calls the golf course the “ideal laboratory for spiritual growth.”

As a pilgrim golfer, score is not the focal point of the game. Rather it is soulful learning and growth. How truly rewarding is it for you to simply learn how to score better if you do not also learn something about yourself along the way? So what do many of us Westerners ask our fellow golfers at the end of a round? “What did you shoot?”

In golf, like life, we learn is not linear – there is no straight path in your journey. Rather there are detours mixed with triumphs of sort, progress and regression too. Real growth is not measured by how good a golfer you. When we begin to diminish our fixation on scoring to an appreciation of the experiential journey, we may truly begin to grasp what golf and life have to offer us, and indeed score even better. While you may want to have a goal or destination, it will be your detachment from that goal and rather your focus on the journey and the process that will produce greater and more gratifying results.