With the celebration of Christmas winding down, I now stand on the precipice of anticipation for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. From January 7–21, I will be in Israel and Egypt for a two-week spiritual pilgrimage with Bishop Bruce Ough and 40+ other lay and clergy persons from both the Minnesota and Dakotas United Methodist Conferences. In other words, I am taking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where I will become a sojourner in the birthplace of Christianity.
To call this a pilgrimage is to be intentional about its purpose. A pilgrimage is meant to be a journey that leads to new spiritual awareness and a context for inner contemplation. Every religious tradition has a ritual of pilgrimage as part of its journey of faith. Muslims travel to Mecca, Hindus to the River Ganges, Sikhs to The Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, Tibetan Buddhists to the Boudhanath in Kathmandu, Jews to Jerusalem, and Christians to Jerusalem and/or Rome. These pilgrimages of spiritual transformation are all grounded in the experience of a physical place. And my trip, too, is intentional in its purpose.
In the book Spiritual Capital, the authors talk about pilgrimage as being an embodied experience that helps reveal the fragile veil existing between the natural and the supernatural. In other words, a pilgrimage is an embodied experience that shifts the spiritual lens of the pilgrim, allowing him/her to experience the sacred centre at the heart of all life. This connecting of the real with the spiritual is something Christians and faith traditions have been doing since the dawn of their births. As Christians, the central ritual of Communion functions in a similar way. The realness of the bread and wine helps us experience in a deeper way the spiritual grace of God in our lives.
My pilgrimage to the Holy Land is meant to elicit this same spiritual awareness of that thin, fragile veil existing “between heaven and earth.” As I experience the real places where Jesus lived out his life ministry and where Christianity found its voice on the world stage, my inner spiritual life is set to experience it’s own transformational shift.
Some of these real places I will be visiting include: Bethlehem, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, the city ruins of Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee, the Mount of Beatitudes, Cana, Nazareth, the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Sinai Desert, Mount Sinai, Elim, the Red Sea, the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx, and the Nile River. Additionally, this pilgrimage extends itself to the modern-day reality of Israel, where I will also be experiencing refugee camps, Princess Basma Center for Disabled Children, Palestinian schools, and Yad Vashem (the world center museum of the Holocaust). As your pastor, I am elated and deeply grateful to have been granted this spiritual growth opportunity. It is my hope to return from this pilgrimage with not only a new perspective on the Gospel/New Testament writings and the modern day situation of Israel, but with an enriched inner spiritual life. I will be excited to share with you all I learned and experienced. But as a preview to all that, I will be keeping a blog and video diary of my daily experiences while there and I invite you all to be pseudo-pilgrims with me by reading and following that blog at amandaraeslife.com. And my prayer for you for the month of January will be that you, too, will experience moments where “the veil between heaven and earth thins and becomes fragile.”
Your Pilgrim of Gratitude, Pastor Amanda