On Pilgrimage with our Lord

First Sunday of Lent

Mount of Temptations

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  One of my hopes during this Jubilee Year was to lead a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  There is nothing quite like traveling to the land which our Lord made holy through the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery.  I have been there three times before, but the sites help one go even more deeply into the Gospels by seeing the places where our salvation happened.  As we hear this Gospel for the first Sunday of Lent, I can see in my mind’s eye the Mount of Temptation, which stands near Jericho, the traditional place in the desert where Satan tempted our Lord.  Or, as we get closer to Holy Week, to walk the Way of the Cross through the streets of Jerusalem, or stand at Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and especially to see the empty tomb in that same church.  
    But most people, whether in the past or in the present, could or cannot physically travel to the Holy Land.  In the past it was expensive and dangerous.  Today the expense is more the issue than anything (the holy sites are generally very safe, even right now with the animosity and fighting between Israel and Hamas).  But St. Francis of Assisi developed the Stations of the Cross, originally just for Franciscan churches, to help people draw closer to the saving events of our Lord’s life from a local church.  And even beyond the Stations of the Cross, we are invited to, even if only spiritually, travel with our Lord in these forty days of Lent.
    During Lent we are meant to be on our own pilgrimage with the Lord for forty days.  We spend forty days in the desert, evoking the forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert between their exodus from slavery in Egypt to their entrance into the Promised Land, as well as the forty days our Lord spent in the desert after His baptism, leading up to His temptation by Satan.
    The desert of Lent is meant to test us, to see of what we are made, and to discover the areas in which we still need to grow.  If we think back to the Chosen People wandering in the desert, at first they were ecstatic about their freedom.  The Egyptians had given their riches to the Israelites, so the liberated slaves had precious materials for their new home to which they traveled.  But fairly early on, they started to regret leaving Egypt, even though they were slaves there, and wanted to go back because, even with as bad as it was, they were familiar and comfortable with the bad, which seemed better than the unfamiliarity with a future, unknown, good.  They cried to God for water and food, and even created a false god after Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai.  The Promised Land was their home, a land God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but a land they had left some four hundred years earlier, a land they had forgotten.  While the journey to Canaan was not an exceptionally long distance, because of their lack of faith, just as they were at the door of the Promised Land, they had to wander in the desert even longer than originally intended.
    Instead of lacking faith, our Lord’s forty days in the desert demonstrates what Lent is supposed to be: still difficult, still a test, but a test that we can pass because He did.  Our Lord hungered; our Lord thirsted.  But He did not doubt God’s care for Him, and He did not give in to the temptations of the devil.
    If we are honest, we are more like the Israelites than like our Lord.  Our baptism sets us free from Satan and sin, and God gives us the treasure of His grace, His life, to help us on our way home to heaven, our true Promised Land.  But along the way we doubt God.  We do not trust Him to provide all that we need.  We create false gods whom we feel will lead us better.  We forget that we are made for heaven and union with God, and in our selective amnesia, we make our path to God even longer and more difficult than it needs to be.
    So this Lent, our goal as we travel on pilgrimage with Christ is to be more like Him, and less like the Israelites.  As we fast and abstain, as our stomachs growl, we should remember that we do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.  As we pray, we do so not to put God to the test, but to bring the desires of our heart to God so that they can be purified and answered according to His will, not to our own insecurities and drive to be in charge.  As we give alms, we recognize that true power does not come from money and possessions, the false gods that we create, but from worshipping God alone and allowing Him to exult us.  
    While the desert is difficult, and tests us to trust more in God and less in ourselves, the desert is not forever.  God does not abandon us to wander around for eternity.  Christ has opened heaven by His Death and Resurrection, and wants us to end up there if we will follow His path through the desert.  The pilgrimage to heaven may be difficult at times, and we may want to turn back to what comforts we think that slavery to sin gives us, or look to other gods of our own making that we think we can control.  But if we follow Christ this Lent, and truly seek to allow Him to put to death in us anything which is not of Him, we will find the Promised Land where angels will minister to us as we worship in perfect happiness our true God: [Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen]

On Pilgrimage

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord/Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  On this past Christmas Eve, Pope Francis opened the 2025 Jubilee Year, choosing as its theme “Pilgrims of Hope.”  There are numerous opportunities to gain plenary indulgences during this Jubilee, including pilgrimages to our Cathedral in Lansing, to two of the three churches on the pilgrimage to Kentucky that we hope to do in June, or to certain churches in Rome and Jerusalem.
    We hear in our Gospel of the first pilgrimage of our Lord to Jerusalem for the two-fold purpose of celebrating the purification rites for a woman who had given birth, in accord with Leviticus, chapter 12, and the redemption of the first born son, from Exodus, chapter 13.  Our Blessed Mother offers the sacrifice for her purification, and our Lord is given back to God as the firstborn son, remembering how the angel of death passed over the Israelites who marked their lintels with the blood of the lamb.
    This idea of pilgrimage to the Temple, for various reasons, finds its root in the Old Testament, which our Lord fulfilled.  Generally, a good Jew would travel to the Temple each year at least for the Feasts of Passover, Pentecost, and Booths.  The temple signified the dwelling place of God, and so all the people would travel to God’s home to be near Him and to thank Him for freedom from slavery and the life of the firstborn (Passover), for the blessing of produce and giving of the law (Pentecost), and the blessing of the harvest and exodus from Egypt (Booths).  But in each case, one traveled to be near God.

Simeon and the Christ Child

    In Christ’s first pilgrimage, the Holy Family did not, technically speaking, need to go to the Temple to find themselves close to God.  They had God with them at all times!  And yet, they still humbled themselves to obey the Law.  Yet, in that Law, God came into His temple in a new way, unlike even when He dwelt in the Temple of Solomon in His presence with the Ark of the Covenant.  By their humility, the Holy Family participated in the fulfillment of the prophecy of Malachi that we heard in the first reading/epistle: “there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek.”  And in the fulfillment of this prophecy, another promise is fulfilled, that to Simeon, whom God promised would not taste death until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah, His Anointed One.  And from that fulfilled promise, Simeon also prophesies that Christ will be the rise and fall of many in Israel, and that a sword of sorrow would pierce Mary’s Immaculate Heart.  
    So how are we on pilgrimage to God?  Our life is meant to be a pilgrimage, not to Lansing, or Kentucky, or Rome, or Jerusalem, but to the heavenly Jerusalem, the Temple not made with hands.  Bethlehem to Jerusalem is a 5.5 mile walk.  You could easily get there and back in a day.  But Jerusalem was built on a hill, and so there were ups and downs.  This time of year in Jerusalem it is around 60 degrees, but there is also rain at this time of year.  So the Holy Family maybe dealt with sun or rain.  Likewise, in our life, which passes before God like a day, there will be ups and downs.  Some days trying to live as a disciple and love God and neighbor as He commanded will be easy; other days it will be difficult.  There will be sunny days where we are full of smiles while following the Lord and there will also be rain when we feel like God has absented Himself from our life, or like the cross He has allowed us to carry seems too heavy.  But you can’t get to the destination of a pilgrimage by stopping.  Sometimes little breaks may be necessary for rest, but the point of the pilgrimage is to keep moving.  
    And as we go towards the heavenly Jerusalem, we, too, should seek the purification of God.  Sin darkens our soul.  It makes us unworthy of temple worship, unworthy of being in God’s house because our actions have communicated that we don’t want to be with Him, and prefer our own ways to His.  It clouds our intellect so that we cannot understand what God wants us to do and how He wants us to love Him and others.  But God offers us purification through the Sacrament of Penance.  He washes us clean by His Precious Blood so that we can enter the Temple and bask in the warmth of His presence.  
    Pilgrimages are also based on hope.  We hope that we will arrive.  Nowadays, as we travel by car or bus or plane, or sometimes all three, our travel is less unsure.  But pilgrimages were historically a matter of walking, and you didn’t know where you might stop, or how safe the way was, or even if you would arrive.  So on our pilgrimage to heaven, we have to have hope.  We hope that God will protect us from anything that seeks to do us harm.  We hope that God will help us arrive at our final destination.  We go from what is seen, our starting point, to what is unseen, our destination.  In the end, until Christ returns in glory, only God knows who arrives safely, unless God grants the Church a knowledge that some have already arrived (our canonized saints).  But we hope that our loved ones are there, cheering us on, encouraging us not to give up, not to turn aside to other false gods or paths that lead away from God, and to persevere through the hills and valleys, the sun and the rain.  
    May this Jubilee Year inspire in us the hope that we will arrive in heaven someday, where Christ will welcome us all as parts of the Mystical Body of the Son redeemed in the Temple forty days after His Birth, the Light of Salvation for all peoples, Jesus Christ[, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God for ever and ever.  Amen].

A Pilgrimage to Bethlehem

 

Manger Square

First Sunday of Advent
    One of the great blessings in my life is that I have been to the Holy Land three times: once as a seminarian, and twice as a priest.  And while the climax of the trip is the visit to the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus died, was buried, and rose from the dead, also one of the major stops is the Church of the Nativity of the Lord.  Like a lot of other holy sites, a church was built in Bethlehem at the site of the Lord’s birth during the reign of Emperor Constantine, after his mother, St. Helena, had traveled to the holy sites.  Like other churches built during that time, it was destroyed.  But, a new church was built, around 529.  Unlike other churches, that same church structure from 529, though built up with additions, still remains.  As we were told, one reason why this church survived where others didn’t was because when the Persians attacked in 614, they spared this church alone, because above the church entrance were three Persian-dressed men.  It’s important to recall that, at the Epiphany, we celebrate Magi, wise men from the east.  And what is east of Judea?  Persia.  
    The Church of the Nativity has always been busy each time I went.  You enter through a door that makes you bend over to enter, called the “Door of Humility,” since you have to lower yourself to enter.  Then, as the antechamber opens up to the main nave of the basilica, you see how long the line is, and how long it will take you to wait in line to see the place where Jesus was born.  As a seminarian, I think I waited two hours or so.  This last time I went, I think I only had to wait 45 minutes.  

Door of Humility

    The line leads to a descending stair case, again, where one has to bow down to go through the archway above the opening, towards the Grotto of the Nativity, where Jesus was born.  At the location, in a small chapel, there is a silver star surrounded with a Latin inscription: Hic De Maria Virgine Maria Jesus Christus Natus Est, which means, Here, of the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ was Born.  Across from there is the Grotto of the Manger, where Mary laid Jesus down to sleep after giving birth.  
    Why do I mention this church and my experiences?  Not only to highlight that it’s my intent to lead another pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2022, but because I remember that wait.  At first you start praying, maybe a rosary, especially the third joyful mystery of the Nativity of the Lord.  And you’re trying to stay quiet (because otherwise the Orthodox monks will shush you), but eventually you want to talk a little bit.  There’s lots to see as you wait, as some of the columns still have saints painted on them.  There are mosaics from earlier times beneath the current floor, which you can see through plexiglass-covered openings in the floor.  Everyone wants to get in as soon as possible, so the idea of the line is basically morphed into a clump of people as you get closer (which does get precarious on uneven and semi-circularly shaped descending stairs).  There are icons everywhere, as most of the Church is controlled by the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.  And the smells oscillate between the beautiful aroma of incense which is used in the Orthodox prayers, and the less than beautiful scent of BO of pilgrims who have been in the heat, or from other cultures who may have other approaches to deodorant.  But, through it all, you’re waiting to get to the cave, the niche where Jesus was born (we Latins tend to think of the creche, due to St. Francis of Assisi).  

Place where Jesus was born

    

So this Advent, we’re on our way to the cave.  We’re waiting, not only for our celebration of Christmas, but for Jesus to return, not as a babe but as a victorious King.  Jesus tells us to watch, because we don’t know when it will happen.  As we go on our way to Bethlehem, our celebration of Christmas, the first step in is always humility.  We cannot make our way to the cave, to Jesus’ birth, unless we humble ourselves before God.  If we try to get there with our pride, we won’t be able to enter in to encounter God.
    There will be times, on our way to the cave, when we know we want to pray, and there will be times when we are tempted to stop watching and waiting, and put our minds on something else.  As we go our minds will sometimes be lifted with the smoke of the incense into the heavens.  And sometimes we’ll be brought quickly back to earth by smells that are all to earthly, and not divine.  
    On our way to the cave, it’s important to recognize, as we heard the Prophet Isaiah say in our first reason, that part of the reason we don’t watch so well is because of our sins.  We miss seeing God because our sins have grabbed our attention.  So let’s confess our sins to the Lord, and ask for His mercy, confident in His love for us.  And having received the mercy of God, may we, with St. Paul, give thanks to God, who has given us His grace to become more and more like Him, who became like us in all things but sin.  
    Today we start our pilgrimage to Bethlehem.  Our path is humility, prayer, contrition, and patience.  It may take us a while, sometimes it may seem like a very long time, but we’ll get there.  And if we are ready, watchful in prayer, then as we celebrate God-with-us at Christmas, and as we watch and wait for Jesus to return, we will find such joy at seeing the star, Jesus, the Morning Star, who will return to inaugurate the day that never ends.  Venite, adoremus–Come, let us adore!

Nave of the Church of the Nativity

The Pilgrimage of Holy Week

Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion

Cathedral of
Santiago de Compostela

When I was a junior in college, I had the great opportunity to study in Rome for 5 months starting in October.  It was a beautiful experience in and of itself.  But before we settled into Rome, most of the seminarians who were also studying in Rome for those five months and I began a pilgrimage in Spain called the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  It’s one of the oldest pilgrimages in Christianity, and the goal is the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where the mortal remains of St. James the Greater are kept (for non-Spanish speakers, Santiago is James or St. James in Spanish).  We walked 111 km., the minimum to receive the plenary indulgence, but you can take a pilgrim route beginning in most major cities in Europe, and even as far away as the Holy Land.  But even in just those 111 km., I was able to experience a beautiful country, hills, valleys, injuries, friendship, distrust of other travelers, and the final joy of reaching the Cathedral and attending Mass there.  

Pilgrimages are meant to give Christians a microcosm of the life of a disciple: a long distance, beauty, hard times, easy times, injuries, friendship, distrust, and the final joy of reaching the heavenly destination with the eternal worship of God.  While we’re not going anywhere physically today, we do get to go on a spiritual pilgrimage this week, this Holy Week.  We walk with Jesus on His pilgrimage to his suffering and death, and then we will be able to rejoice in the destination of that pilgrimage: the Resurrection.  

We start that pilgrimage today in joy and triumph as the Messiah enters His city, fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah that the Messiah would enter upon an ass’s colt.  The beginning of the pilgrimage is filled with the excitement of the crowd that all of God’s promises were about to be fulfilled, though they knew not the horrible way in which that would happen.  We just had a taste of the hills, the tough part of the pilgrimage, as we heard St. Mark’s account of the Passion.  We get a foretaste of what lies ahead of us in the days that will follow.

There is no substitution for walking a pilgrimage.  Of course, to arrive at the starting point, pilgrims these days often have to fly and/or drive.  But then there is walking–walking with Jesus.  We are not a walking people as much anymore.  We have planes, trains, and automobiles to take us wherever we want to go, and trams and subways to take us the shorter distances.  But on this pilgrimage there is no shortcut, no easy way to get there.  To truly experience Jesus’ pilgrimage, we need to walk with Him, day by day, and take in His experience.  To skip immediately past the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, past the crucifixion on Good Friday, to Easter means losing some of the power of the Resurrection, because the sweetness of new life is only accessible to those who have also known suffering and death.  

So I want to invite you this week to as many Masses and liturgies as you can attend.  We will have our usual Mass and adoration on Tuesday beginning at 5:15 p.m.; Mass Wednesday morning at 8 a.m.; the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday at 7 p.m.; the celebration of the Passion on Good Friday at 3 p.m.; the sorrowful prayer of Tenebrae Good Friday at 9 p.m.; and the joy of the Resurrection at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday at 8:30 p.m., or the Easter Sunday Masses at 8 or 10 a.m.  Very few things are more important than the Masses this week.  Very few other things will help you prepare for Easter quite like the Masses will.  Of course, some of you can’t make it to Mass because of work, health, or other issues.  If you can’t attend Mass, at least read the daily readings either from our parish app or at usccb.org/readings.  I especially want to encourage you to attend the Easter Vigil Holy Saturday night.  The symbols of Easter speak quite loudly, and we will be there to support those becoming Catholic–the newest members of our parish.  

Walk with Jesus on His pilgrimage.  Walk the road that He walked for you.  Walk the pilgrimage from suffering, to death, to new life.