When you go on pilgrimage you need good guides. Steve and Janet are remarkable! Other guides do their quick info jobs and leave the group on their own. Steve and Janet are TOGETHER with the pilgrims. We could always talk privately and suggest things about the journey; we always felt in their intimate presence where faith and information were perfectly blended. Steve teaches how to look at the sacred places and he spends all his energy (sometimes to the point of exhaustion) on making the pilgrimage full of meaning.
To see the places where Jesus lived is to realize something you never can realize elsewhere: the material reality of our Lord. So many people, even Christians, yes even Christian thinkers and clergy, tend to find it “vulgar” to talk about our Lord and Mary, Mother of God, in terms of clothes, dirt, sweat, toil and irksome burdens, crowds, headaches, being hungry, eating and drinking, walking all over the mountains, washing, doing nature’s calls, trying to talk loud so that all can hear, sounds and noises, being sleepy, being drowsy, feeling irritation, needing rest and silence and not getting it.
Liberal Catholics in my country even denounce Mel Gibson’s film because it is too human. There is a deep problem here: it is so easy to abstract Jesus to merely someone in my private heart, a private relation that has nothing to do with the territory of Israel, an interior reality essentially without history or troublesome bodily daily reality. Well – walking the footsteps of God in Israel makes you realize what Peter, Andrew, John and the others knew: divine and material reality cannot be separated.
Most religions do that, philosophy does it chronically. But when you connect the Gospel with the very ground in Israel with your own body, the text comes alive. This has far reaching implications for faith and understanding. Jesus transforms water into wine in Cana. It is not an abstract literary theme anymore, or a strong religious metaphor to enjoy and allow oneself to "believe". It is stark divine material action.
When I realized that in the wedding Church of Cana I simply went down on my knees. One comes into such a freedom when this happens: He is the Lord over us all, He is the Holy One. One comes into freedom from doubt, from interpretation, from abstracting into modernism or into relativistic religious privacy. One is taken back to the Apostles, to our real Church. This is what pilgrimage to the Holy Land is all about, from the 1st century and onwards to this very day."
One comes into freedom from doubt, from interpretation, from abstracting into modernism or into relativistic religious privacy. One is taken back to the Apostles, to our real Church. This is what pilgrimage to the Holy Land is all about, from the 1st century and onwards to this very day.
A note on safety: In Sweden, as elsewhere, the media portrays the Middle East and especially Israel as a scene of war. My daughter told me to never go near a person with a rucksack! But Israel was clearly safer than night-time Stockholm. Peace and quiet was obvious wherever we went, even in bustling Jerusalem. We felt safe all the time and Jews as well as Arabs were gentle and kind. Night-time Jerusalem was peaceful and I noticed how small single girls could walk around like you never do in Stockholm and Gothenburg. I feel sorry when I think of the hysteria in media at home."
Staffan +