Pilgrimage to the Holy Land 2008
A Reflection by Michele Jodhan (Ayoung-Chee)

Michele holding Baby Jesus after
Mass at Shepherds Cave

Recently, while chatting with someone who knew that we had just returned from pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she asked, “So…how was Jerusalem?”

I recognized the moment.  The moment of the short question for which I have either no answer, save some sort of a gesture, or the longest and most involved of answers.

Immediately, I recognized the implication of the moment.  This happens only when I am asked to describe powerful life experiences.

Ironically, on one of those rare occasions of recognizing a moment, I simultaneously realized the significance of going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and found the short answer.  “Jerusalem,” I said, “is not for the faint-hearted.”

It takes physical, emotional, mental and spiritual fortitude to directly encounter the Jesus story of two thousand-odd years ago; particularly within the context of the Jesus story of today, the Israel and Palestine of 2008; while holding the Jesus story which we carry within in the context of our own lives and our own cultural milieu.

I found the Holy Land in Holy Week, to be serious and complex business.

Ultimately, though, I found it to be extraordinary, exquisite and utterly hopeful business.

Life prepared me to enter Jerusalem.  It prepared me to discard former imaginings and pre-conceived notions, even beliefs.  It prepared me for the magnificently harsh landscape that, in different ways, is both the Holy City and the inescapable desert.

And Life prepared me to be beguiled.  I knew that going to the Holy Land would be a watershed for me.  But in spite of this, or maybe because of it, I remained beguiled.

What Life did not, as it simply could not prepare me for, was the inexhaustible treasure that lay within … within Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and in the Jordanian desert.

For this is personal journey.  This is encounter.

I knew that I was in the right place at the right time when, on our way from Mount Nebo in Jordan, driving through a landscape burnt in my psyche during Anthony Minghella’s masterful movie, “The English Patient”, Anton, our guide spike as if peering into my heart.

He pointed out the charcoal black crust on the mountainous desert terrain.  Flint – the scorched and cracked surface formed by the extremes of heat and cold which is the desert climate – a type of surface rock.  He revealed the desert had a smell.  Yes!  When military tanks traverse the desert crushing the excoriated flint, herbs like rosemary and chamomile, growing just beneath the sandy desert surface, release their sweet aromas.  And the voyeur’s line … this aroma is known as “the smell of the voice of God.”

Immediately, I was filled with new imaginings of the sweet smell of the voice of God, liberated by the violent destruction of His only beloved Son, the excoriated Jesus.

The historical Jesus lived in an occupied land, with Roman dominance and Jewish hierarchical complicity and He was crushed.  In the Holy Land today, while driving along an armoured graffiti wall, we experienced the sense of the occupied ghetto which is contemporary Bethlehem.  As we live in a region with a history of occupation, leaving us a people fractured and fragmented, like flint.

Yet we yearn and search for the sweet smell of the voice of God; in the Holy Land today; in our land; in our lives.

In this imagery, I understood what theologian, Louis-Marie Chauvet, meant when he described sacramentality as filling the vacant place of Christ, His “absence”, as at Emmaus with the goal of the sacraments being to establish between humanity and God a communication which theology calls grace.

Walking in Jesus’ footsteps, doing the Way of the Cross on Via Dolorosa, takes us back to first principles; to the clear call to engage the human complex of memory and imagination in order to resist the sin of forgetfulness; to yield to the grace which allows us to communicate back to God, as Jesus did, the sweet smell of God’s voice; and like Jesus, the call to absorb violence in order to allow the precious herbs of our inner being, given to us in His image and likeness to be released – His sweet aromas. It is a sacramental call; how we fill the vacant place.

This is historicity.  This is the poetry of the past.  This is Jerusalem.  The sound of holiness, from the early morning Muslim “call to prayer” to the early evening “vibrations” of the Wailing Wall.  This is solidarity.  This is hope.  This is the Holy Land.

However, this requires some pattern for opening the imagination beyond equality to equity, as the horizon of the cross, the vision of the Eucharist moves one from the “right to food” to the call to feed; to action in Jesus’ holy name.  Jerusalem is not for the faint-hearted.

"What Jesus does, then, he does in anticipation: not only of his ‘dying’ … but also in the giving of his presence in symbols. Through the commemoration which the disciples will make of him, this ‘real’ presence of Jesus will light up, from within, the night of the passion that lasts through the centuries in countless sufferings of human beings and their real ‘dying’."  (from Xavier Leon Dufour)

A pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  To smell the voice of God.  To be utterly beguiled.  To enter Trinitarian mystery.

Thank you, Rosemary, Sandra and Fr Jason.  And thanks to the Living Water Community for making the pilgrimage possible.

God bless our fellow pil-ee-grims!

By Michele Jodhan (Ayoung-Chee)