So, it's been five weeks now since I returned from the Holy Land, weeks in which cathedral life has been particularly demanding, so that it has been hard not to lose track of the pilgrim experience and it's lasting impact.
Perhaps I'll never really be able to measure impact, actually, because I'll never know how the "me" who didn't go on pilgrimage might have developed.
But I do want to think about how it has left me, to try and notice changes of emphasis, perhaps, or new understandings.
One route in to this might be the Godly Play "wondering" questions.
So....I wonder which part of the pilgrimage I liked best?
Hmmmn. I think that might have been the moment soon after our arrival, when our tour guide said, quite simply, "Welcome Home" and I realised that the whole point of my coming was to find myself in the continuing story of God and God's people. I felt, and feel, so deeply happy that there's a place for me in this story. Of course I didn't need to travel to Israel Palestine to make this true, but those words, setting the tone of the whole journey for me, cast a fresh light on an ongoing story. While Jerusalem is no more, nor less, "God's house" than any humble parish church, while, to borrow from Godly Play again "all of God is in every place", still and all being in the places where the stories happened and are still happening, for good or ill, changed my sense of their tangible reality. Incarnation is all about the material, after all, and for me to see, touch, hold made a difference.
I wonder which part of the pilgrimage was the most important?
I'm clear about that. It was the moment on Sunday morning in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when I realised that, though the air was full of the sounds of such different kinds of worship, they were not ultimately competing but weaving their own distinct patterns each to the glory of God...that the sincere longings of so many generations to reach out to the Love at the heart of all things was an act of worship that was deeply pleasing.
I wonder which part of the pilgrimage I could miss out and still have all the pilgrimage I need.
Hmmmn. Tricky, that....but in comparison with the intensity of experience at the Holy Sepulchre, it was hard to feel that I really needed to visit any other holy sites. Oddly, the heavy cloud on the Mount of the Transfiguration was really helpful...that sense of peering through a fog to try and glimpse Jesus is disquietingly familiar - so that day, which was by some measures a bit of a wash out, was actually personally too handy to discard. Though just maybe the enthusiastic guide at Nazareth Village, like her counterpart at the Garden Tomb, could have stayed silent. It takes a lot to talk a bunch of clergy out of their lives' work, but those two almost achieved it.
So, yes, that's what we could have missed out. All those individuals and groups so certain of their own infallibility that they resort to verbal bludgeoning or its extreme corollary, of course, faith based violence to shut down the conversation. After all, you can't have much of a discussion from behind a wall.
I wonder where I am in the story, where I might choose to linger in the pilgrimage
Ahhh.....that's so easy.
Back in my first Holy Week after uni, the priest who heard my Holy Week confession gave me John 21 and the commissioning of Peter to reflect on as my penance. It turned up again at my selection conference 2 decades later, and has been an insistent motif through all my life and ministry.
Kathryn, do you love me?
To read those words aloud on the shore beside the church of Christ's Table, Mensa Christi, was to commit myself wholly once again to the response of a lifetime.
Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.
Never enough, never steadily (more rocky than rock-like, me) ...but that is my choice, distracted pastor that I am
"Feed my sheep".
His story.
My story.
A journey there and back again, that changed how I view the everyday landscape of my faith.
On my better days "Something understood".
Perhaps I'll never really be able to measure impact, actually, because I'll never know how the "me" who didn't go on pilgrimage might have developed.
But I do want to think about how it has left me, to try and notice changes of emphasis, perhaps, or new understandings.
One route in to this might be the Godly Play "wondering" questions.
So....I wonder which part of the pilgrimage I liked best?
Hmmmn. I think that might have been the moment soon after our arrival, when our tour guide said, quite simply, "Welcome Home" and I realised that the whole point of my coming was to find myself in the continuing story of God and God's people. I felt, and feel, so deeply happy that there's a place for me in this story. Of course I didn't need to travel to Israel Palestine to make this true, but those words, setting the tone of the whole journey for me, cast a fresh light on an ongoing story. While Jerusalem is no more, nor less, "God's house" than any humble parish church, while, to borrow from Godly Play again "all of God is in every place", still and all being in the places where the stories happened and are still happening, for good or ill, changed my sense of their tangible reality. Incarnation is all about the material, after all, and for me to see, touch, hold made a difference.
I wonder which part of the pilgrimage was the most important?
I'm clear about that. It was the moment on Sunday morning in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when I realised that, though the air was full of the sounds of such different kinds of worship, they were not ultimately competing but weaving their own distinct patterns each to the glory of God...that the sincere longings of so many generations to reach out to the Love at the heart of all things was an act of worship that was deeply pleasing.
I wonder which part of the pilgrimage I could miss out and still have all the pilgrimage I need.
Hmmmn. Tricky, that....but in comparison with the intensity of experience at the Holy Sepulchre, it was hard to feel that I really needed to visit any other holy sites. Oddly, the heavy cloud on the Mount of the Transfiguration was really helpful...that sense of peering through a fog to try and glimpse Jesus is disquietingly familiar - so that day, which was by some measures a bit of a wash out, was actually personally too handy to discard. Though just maybe the enthusiastic guide at Nazareth Village, like her counterpart at the Garden Tomb, could have stayed silent. It takes a lot to talk a bunch of clergy out of their lives' work, but those two almost achieved it.
So, yes, that's what we could have missed out. All those individuals and groups so certain of their own infallibility that they resort to verbal bludgeoning or its extreme corollary, of course, faith based violence to shut down the conversation. After all, you can't have much of a discussion from behind a wall.
I wonder where I am in the story, where I might choose to linger in the pilgrimage
Ahhh.....that's so easy.
Back in my first Holy Week after uni, the priest who heard my Holy Week confession gave me John 21 and the commissioning of Peter to reflect on as my penance. It turned up again at my selection conference 2 decades later, and has been an insistent motif through all my life and ministry.
Kathryn, do you love me?
To read those words aloud on the shore beside the church of Christ's Table, Mensa Christi, was to commit myself wholly once again to the response of a lifetime.
Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.
Never enough, never steadily (more rocky than rock-like, me) ...but that is my choice, distracted pastor that I am
"Feed my sheep".
His story.
My story.
A journey there and back again, that changed how I view the everyday landscape of my faith.
On my better days "Something understood".
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