From My Window…
I went to the modern day fount of all wisdom, Wikipedia, to see what a pilgrimage was at its simplest level. It says: a pilgrimage is a journey or search of great moral or spiritual significance. We usually think pilgrimage, if we think about it at all, as some once in a lifetime trip to a sacred location. The Holy Land is where Christians for 2000 years have gone on pilgrimage to see the land Jesus saw and walk the streets he walked. It is a prayer of the faithful that, by doing so, Christ will become somehow more real. Yet it is also true that our entire life is a journey. It’s so true that it’s rather trite. Yet in that triteness we may miss the deeper truth that our life is a search of great moral and spiritual significance. Our lives lived out up and US 42 are as apt a place for Christ’s intervention as the Damascus Road was for Paul. Too ordinary, you may be thinking. Nothing more ordinary 2000 years ago than a major trade route filled with dust, camels and thirsty travelers. The Damascus Road, like the Emmaus Road, became shorthand for pilgrimages because of Paul and because of the two travelers. But remember that when we share and know the stories that have happened up and down our ‘roads’ we will also find stories of God’s dramatic intervention in lives that were apparently hopeless. We will hear of God’s saints in schoolrooms. We will be encouraged by God’s response to prayers without ceasing that the faithful have offered up for years. We begin Lent this year on February 22nd: a time of preparation for Easter. It can be a pilgrimage that you make searching for significance, for meaning where you may feel it lacking. You don’t have to have a passport for a pilgrimage, but you do have to have an open heart and an open schedule to allow God the space and time to make the pilgrimage with you.
Pastor Susan