BY : JOHN PAUL MEENAN
I have always desired to pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and an
opportunity arose early this year, when a priest friend asked if I would join a
journey he was leading in the middle of February. Normally, as a teacher at a liberal arts
college, I could not take a week off, but the dates overlapped with our reading
week, just before Lent. Divine
providence seemed to be at work, so I said yes, and, after a very early icy
drive to Kingston to meet up with the group, mostly Queen’s University
students, off we went to the airport on a cold Canadian morning.
Much could be said about our pilgrimage: We saw the primary sites, Galilee and the
Mount of Beatitudes, where we spent a tranquil first few days, Caesarea
Philippi, the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, before journeying south to the Jordan
River, Jericho and, for the last few days of our ten-day pilgrimage, the holy
city of Jerusalem, a winding maze of narrow streets, leading to the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre.
I say difficult, but not impossible. Standing on the shores of Galilee, where Our Lord cooked breakfast for this disciples on a brisk Easter morning, or kneeling a few feet from Golgotha, one cannot help but be put into some spiritual frame of mind, to block out the noise, and imagining what is was like in the time of Christ.
Of course, one cannot take the spiritual depth of such an
experience in at once. I see a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land like planting seeds in the soul: The fruits of such a journey are only known
and seen in time. Like Our Lord’s own
life, one will only realize what such a pilgrimage means afterwards, perhaps
even years later, in hidden ways. That
to me is the key to the Holy Land: It is
a geographical reminder, nay, more, a relic, of the Incarnation. We walk on holy ground in that land, and it
is incumbent on us to keep and guard those sites hallowed by God Himself during
His time on earth.

I feel very blessed to have had the opportunity to have made
such a pilgrimage, and I hope I brought many graces back for those with whom I
live and work, and for my own spiritual journey. God be praised, now and forever.
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