It’s the middle of Holy Week. As we begin the Sacrum Triduum (Holy Three Days) of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil, I am struck that in a week, Jim and I will land in Tel Aviv and check into our hotel in Jerusalem, just a fifteen minute walk from the Old City where the crucifixion and resurrection happened. Next week will also be Orthodox Easter, the end of Passover, and the middle of Ramadan in a site sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. What a time to arrive!
A few days later, we will switch over to St. George’s College in Jerusalem for a study-pilgrimage called the “Palestine of Jesus.” St. George’s is an Anglican College that has been in Jerusalem since 1920 and has been a center for pilgrimage, study, hospitality and reconciliation for over a hundred years. Its programs are open to clergy and laity and are highly recommended.
I have a focus and plans for this sabbatical, but I do not know yet what it will be. In fact, I may not know until it is all over. We were encouraged to read the book Jerusalem Bound, written by the director of St. George’s programs. He draws the distinction among vacation, travel, and pilgrimage. A vacation is relaxation and escape. Travel is business or recreational but usually with a purpose for discovery or accomplishment. A pilgrimage is something different. It is transformative.
Any time we leave familiar places and go elsewhere, we learn and grow, which is a type of transformation, yet a pilgrimage has other factors woven in. It is taken in community with others, often very different from ourselves. It has a spiritual foundation. It requires stepping out of the familiar and a willingness to accept some discomfort. Accommodations are fine but not fancy; food is tasty and nourishing but not five star, and not from a menu of choices'; holy sites are crowded, inconvenient, and thousands of years old so are not aware of modern expectations; transportation in a region whose borders and pathways are defined by violence, fear, conflict, and anger challenges the holiness pilgrims comes to seek; and the individual has to be willing to surrender to a schedule, agendas, personalities, and common needs of the group.
My first thought was “Way to sell the idea of pilgrimage, sir!” But then, of course, he is right. Each of these things work on us to open us up, help us to see God in new ways, and take us to places of greater understanding, as well to places of greater and perhaps even more troubling questions. One cannot help but be transformed by that experience.
I can be a very organized and well-planned person, which can lead to frustrations when things do not go as planned. One of the attitudes I have started to embrace is the attitude that when things do not meet expectation or go according to plan, it does not have to be a problem. It can instead be an adventure. Or a story to tell. Or an opportunity to learn and discover. And in Scripture, one’s encounter with God is never planned out or scripted. Instead, as the say, “We plan, God laughs.” It is in the unexpected that we meet God.
I remember a mentor-priest telling me once when I raised a concern about something at my field placement congregation, “Mr. Reinken, there are no such things as problems. Instead, there are only opportunities.” He was right. Easter is the biggest reminder of that truth. There is no greater problem than Death, and Christ destroyed that once and for all. Everything else is easy. And what wise words to remember as I head off into the known and yet unknown!
This will be a fascinating journey and I look forward to sharing it as I can. Whatever happens in any given moment, to God be the glory!