Every Pilgrim's Jerusalem
1. Dublin
I find something very exhilarating in the act of stepping
out onto a street in an unfamiliar city with my only bag on my back, boots on
my feet, and the address of my place of lodging in my hand. On the morning of July 11th,
the Airport bus dropped Jana and me off at the corner of Cathal Brugha Street
and O’Connell Street Upper near the Dublin City Centre, a gentle drizzle
coaxing us off the wide sidewalk to the shelter of the closest eaves in order to
examine our unfolded itinerary and get our bearings. We had to make it to the Maldron Hotel at Parnell Square where
we had a room booked for that night, and where we would meet Fr. Gil and Cathy,
who had arrived the day before.
We gathered that we had to move north, asked directions from
some friendly passersby, and set off to find our bed that we hoped would be
available a couple hours before noon.
After a few wrong turns, a couple more friendly passersby, a free map at
the tourist office, and not before my shoulders were aching from the weight of my
pack, a fact that had me not a little worried about the next three days of
walking, we passed through the glass doors of our hotel a fair bit closer to
noon than we expected. And as if
they were waiting just for us, Gil and Cathy rose from their black leather
seats in the lobby, and, with smiles and exclamations of welcome to Ireland,
embraced us.
2. Jerusalem
Here at St. Augustine’s we’ve heard a lot about pilgrimage
over the years, and the topic is especially poignant to us now as Fr. Gil and
Cathy make their way from East to West across the Land of Saints and Scholars. Pilgrimage was central within the spirituality
of the Middle Ages throughout all of Europe, and the great medieval masters of
the mystical Christian path understood pilgrimage as a symbol of the soul’s
journey to its home in the heavenly Jerusalem. Jerusalem, in other words, is the destination towards which
every pilgrim sets her face, no matter upon which earthen trail her feet leave
their prints. And, as the fourteenth
century Middle English poem, “Piers Plowman,” says, “Pilgrims are we all.”
Few descriptions of life within this Jerusalem, the true
destination of every pilgrim, of every soul, are more detailed than what we
find in this morning’s reading from the letter of St. Paul to the
Ephesians. Listen to his words
again.
I bow my knees before the Father, from whom
every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to
the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your
inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your
hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that
you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth
and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses
knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who by the power at work within
us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to
him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and
ever. Amen.
The Jerusalem
to which I refer is what St. Paul here describes as a reality to be experienced
in our “inner being”. It is a
reality saturated with love, the love of Christ that is beyond our knowing, but
that dwells within us. And when we
awaken to this love, we are “filled with all the fullness of God”. If this sounds far-fetched, don’t
worry, as all pilgrims know, no one ever gets there by herself. It is God’s “power at work within us”
that delivers us to our destination.
3. False
Jerusalems
Most people have mistaken their soul’s true home, the heavenly
Jerusalem deep within, for some other reality that seems more tangible, more
readily attainable. In today’s
Gospel we witness Jesus retreat from the crowd when he realizes that they
intend to “take him by force and make him king.” This is their response to being fed from the loaves and
fishes. They’ve mistaken the
heavenly Jerusalem for a political kingdom wherein their interests have
priority. Now, there’s nothing
wrong with oppressed people banding together to affect political change for the
sake of their hungry children. But the path of a bloody revolution in
order to transfer power from one set of vested interests to another is not the
path of a pilgrim whose face is set towards Jerusalem, the city of peace.
Others mistake the inner Jerusalem for the place where their desires
are fulfilled. In today’s Hebrew
Scripture, King David, from his throne in the physical city of Jerusalem, takes
advantage of a vulnerable woman and murders her faithful husband for the sake
of nothing more than his pleasure and comfort. David believes that in Jerusalem, what the king wants, the
king gets. But the pilgrim knows
that in the true Jerusalem, the one throne in not for him.
4. How to
Walk
So we are all pilgrims, and though our feet walk different paths on
earth, and though we might lose sight of it, we share a common destination,
Jerusalem, Zion, where Christ dwells in multi-dimensional love and where the
fullness of God fills our inner being.
How, then, do we walk with our face set toward this goal instead of
toward some false Jerusalem? Well,
as one might expect to hear from a preacher in a Christian church, we learn to
walk by following Jesus on his own pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
During my time in Ireland, I brought a small journal along. It was a gift from The Rev. Julie
O’Brien, and it didn’t fare well in my pocket on the wettest of our days along
the Wicklow Way. In it I recorded
my reflections on the verses I was reading from the Gospel According to St.
Luke during my practice of lectio divina
of which I’ve spoken before. On
the morning of our first day of walking, I had arrived at verse 51 of Chapter
9, which reads, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his
face to go to Jerusalem.” This
oriented me to see my journey, my pilgrimage, through the lens of Jesus’ own
pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After our
first day of walking, on a rainy morning in a youth hostel at Knockree, I read
verses 57 and 58: “As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will
follow you wherever you go.’ And
Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the
Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’”
In silent prayer, as I sat with these words, I saw the fox in me saunter
along the way I walked— plotting, detailed, cautious, competent. Then I saw the bird in me flutter down
onto the path and back up into a tree—carefree, unfettered, irresponsible. These are two ways of being a pilgrim:
to plan every step, like a fox, or to “wing it,” like a bird. But the Son of Man is not a pilgrim in
either idiom. Unlike a bird, Jesus
has his clear destination, but unlike a fox, he does not control every detail
of the journey. If we are to walk
our pilgrimage in the idiom of the Son of Man, we must set our clear intention
“to go to Jerusalem” as we release our hold on the plans and expectations we
carry with us. If that sounds
scary, this is one reason G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Christianity has not been tried and found
wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
5. Kildare
Our three days of walking delivered us to the ancient monastic city of
Glendalough, and we spent Sunday among its many churches and scenic lakes. We celebrated Mass in the ruins of St.
Mary’s Church, just outside of the old monastery wall, and we walked to where
we could see St. Kevin’s bed from across the water of the Upper Lake. We felt peaceful, and a little sad
walking among so many ruins of what was once a living and vibrant spiritual
community. We also had trouble
orienting ourselves to the fact that we still had four days to spend in Ireland
even though our time of walking the Wicklow Way had ended. On Monday morning, we said goodbye to
Gil, and Cathy drove us to Kildare where we planned to spend two nights in the
city where St. Brigid founded her double monastery for women and men in the 5th
Century. After a lovely lunch at a
pub on the town square, we said goodbye to Cathy, and set off with our packs to
find our Bed and Breakfast, which we knew was located at 1 Dara Park in
Kildare. It was just two blocks
away, much easier to find than our hotel in Dublin, and we were shown to our
room upstairs.
Months before we left for the Emerald Isle, Gil had lent me a small
book that he had bought five years ago when he had last visited Kildare. It was written and published by the
Brigidine Sisters, two of whom lived in a house somewhere in Kildare Town. Jana asked me what I wanted to do with
the rest of our afternoon, and I pulled the book out of my pack to see if we
could figure out where the sisters’ house was located with the hope that maybe
we could take a walk over, see if anyone was home, and say hello. I turned the book over and saw that Solas Bhríde, which means, “the light of
Brigid,” and is the name of their house, was located at 14 Dara Park, just a
few houses down from the room in which we sat.
Five minutes later, as we walked, hand in hand, from the sidewalk
toward the front door of Solas Bhríde,
we exchanged smiles with a face in the front window and were met at the door by
Sr. Mary Minehan, who welcomed us inside as though she was waiting just for
us. She asked our names, took our
coats, and showed us into the small chapel where we sat in three chairs of a
dozen arranged in a circle. In the
corner of the room burned a candle, which is the literal Solas Bhríde, which the Brigidines re-kindled at the Kildare Town
Square in 1993. Sr. Mary smiled,
looked each of us in the eyes, and said, “I can tell that you pray.”
At that moment I knew that I had found what I had come to Ireland
seeking. I saw reflected in the
eyes of a living daughter of St. Brigid the work of a power that had
accomplished within me far more than I could ask or imagine. I felt that I was sitting before a
window through which I saw my first glimpse of Jerusalem. And as we sat together, drinking tea
and talking, I began to awaken to the love of Christ, which seemed to fill
every corner of the space we shared.
Amen.
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