A MOST INCREDIBLE JOURNEY
Pilgrimage to the Holy Land
13 to 29 March 2008
by Franka Bernardine (Grenada)
The Beginning
And Jesus gathered his people one by one calling them from the islands and from America and from Canada and calling even those who had been before, but He needed them to be there again. He called the young, as young as 16, and even those who felt able but were advanced in years. All responded to the call, and here we were all 60 of us with our priest for the journey Fr. Jason Gordon and those who would guide us along God’s path and show us His way – Rosemary and Sandra.
Check In at Piarco was at 10:30 am on the morning of the 13th March. Those of us coming in from the islands had arrived the day before to allow ourselves time to prepare for the departure on this most glorious of journeys.
We had all been preparing for weeks, even months, and each in his own way had been getting ready through prayer, meditations, acts of mercy, discussion groups, bible readings and just thinking about it all. But no amount of thinking could have prepared us for this experience of a life time that was in no way like anything else we had ever known.
We journeyed back 2,008 years in history, looking at it all right before our eyes, experiencing the simplicity, and yet the complexity of it all; the joys and the sorrows, “the love story that went horribly wrong”, the passion of a Saviour with such a powerful yet such a simple message, “love one another”. It was about Mary and where she lived and looked after Jesus and Joseph, about that fisherman Peter and the call of ‘the others’, it was about the beauty and peacefulness of the Jordan River and where John did his thing, the Promised Land, and Jericho where Zacchaeus climbed the sycamore tree, that Sea of Galilee and the Mount of Beatitudes, and Gethsemane and the Caves and the House of Caiaphas and Calvary; the Upper Room, the Ascension. But perhaps the most profound of all was the old City of Jerusalem where it all happened. The Temple where He would have taught during the day, returning to the caves outside the city at night with the disciples; and Dominium Flavius where Jesus wept for Jerusalem. Bethlehem, now under heavy military guard was an experience all by itself.
The flight to Miami was uneventful except for pleasant reminders and reassurances coming from our ‘guides’. We whisked through Miami airport with just enough time to clear our luggage and board the flight for London.
London was good for us in that it gave us a chance to regroup mentally and physically after the long flights. We were also happy to attend Mass at the St Aloysius Church and to rest and relax in various ways for the rest of the evening.
I think the excitement was tangible when next morning at 4:00 am we assembled in the lobby of our various hotels to depart for Heathrow and please God, The Holy Land.
It was not that we hadn’t travelled before because for many it was yet another long flight; it was just the anticipation of accepting the invitation of Jesus as he said to us ‘come and see’ where it all happened; and as the flight circled over Tel Aviv, and the southern Mediterranean, we leaned forward and crowded the windows to get our first sight of Israel and the Promised land.
The next hour and a half was a lesson in cultural adjustments and modern technology. No immigration forms just your passport and long immigration lines. There were eyes everywhere, those you saw and those you didn’t see. Twice we had members of our group pulled over but both times they were released. Militancy on all sides, but still cordial greetings; lots of questions by young immigration officers and soldiers (mainly female) but not unpleasant.