2023-02-28 through 2023-03-11
Reflections on the Holy Land Pilgrimage
The daily posts from the Center for Action and Contemplation for this last week have been about pilgrimage, a grace-filled synchronicity.
Sunday
Pilgrimage helps us see that as long as we think happiness is around the corner, we have not grasped happiness yet. Because happiness is given in this moment and this place, and this moment and place are as perfect as they can be. —Richard Rohr
Monday
Above all else, pilgrimage is praying with your body and it’s praying with your feet. It’s an exterior prayer, and the exterior prayer keeps calling you into the interior prayer. —Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Your soul no longer stays still. It’s moving with God in the world, and moving toward God, revealed in signs or shrines or saints or surroundings. The pilgrim’s walking body holds incarnate this inner journey of the soul.
—Wesley Granberg-Michaelson
Wednesday
A pilgrim must be like a child who can approach everything with an attitude of wonder and awe and faith. Let’s pray for wonder. Let’s pray for awe. Let’s pray for desire, and ask God to take away our cynicism. —Richard Rohr
Thursday
What most distinguishes the sacred art of pilgrimage from a tourist trip or hiking expedition, as beneficial as these are, is the characteristic inward journey, a turning of one’s heart to the Divine, with the expectation of transformation on every level of being along the way.
—Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook
Friday
Whether we are on an actual pilgrimage or perceive that the road of life we are on is our pilgrimage, each step, each move one makes is blessed by the Spirit. For both an actual pilgrimage and the pilgrimage of everyday life is a journey of faith.
—Brett Webb-Mitchell
Now back “home” it is the pilgrimage of everyday life, but informed by my discoveries during the days of this physical pilgrimage to walk the footsteps of Jesus and Francis. Again I walked in the footprints that span thousands of years, the same roads, the same paths, the same geographic locations that contain all the history that came before me, this particular individual in the continuum of human existence.
Our species tries to distinguish itself as separate egos within our species, separate races, tribes, clans and families, continually dividing down into smaller and smaller units of existence. I, too, am so acclimated to this attempt to self-identify an ego as my claim to existence. I need the concept of pilgrimage, not to “find myself,” but to see myself in the larger scheme of life, and to look beyond the human species to the Gospel of Creation.
The land we walked on during this pilgrimage was silently shouting to us about how much our human striving was beside the point, how much our clashing ideas, desires, claims of rights and demands for ownership and power and control blind us from seeing our relationship with all the other living beings: from the microbes in our guts, to the cats prowling the streets, to the birds singing their songs we do not hear, to the roots of trees that hold them to the stones, to the hills and valleys strew with those stones, the smaller ones of which that are placed on graves, to the power of water flowing downwards. We did not feel that shaking of the earth that made those ancient carved columns fall all in the same direction bowing down to the force greater than any emperor’s monument.
This Lent I am overwhelmed – again – by the Ash Wednesday invitation to penitence, to examination of sin, not just listing my sins, but looking at the spiritual blindness that sin causes, the stumbling block, that which makes the labyrinth of the life journey into a hideous maze. And I am also and again overwhelmed by the mercy and grace that I continually experience, the divine hand that gently turns my face toward the pilgrim road where the light is shining, where the path of the labyrinth is distinguished from the hell of the maze. And again, year after year, I see – hopefully more clearly – those same old sins that I have persisted in and repented of and despaired over, that seem tattooed on my soul, newly again taken away in that grace and mercy by the One who has always drawn me into the heart of his love.
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