On our life’s journeys it is always God’s initiative that we are blessed to receive.
Not long before sitting down to write this column I had a clear opening for it. I was going to reflect on walking through the heat last year, making my way with hundreds of thousands of others through Lisbon, on our way to sleep out together and then celebrate Mass with the Pope on World Youth Day.
I was going to juxtapose that experience of pilgrimage with being knee-deep in snow on a different pilgrimage, in Nepal trekking with a group of young people and a team of guides. We were walking to a village in the Himalayas where the Jesuits have a small community.
Then this afternoon a Jesuit I live with received news his father had died at home in Cameroon. After dinner our community and some others gathered in our chapel for evening prayer, Vespers. We prayed the Vespers for the Dead. The last prayer of intercession reads, ‘When at last our earthly home is dissolved, give us a home, not of earthly making but built of eternity in heaven’.
I am in the US, so the wording is slightly different to the intercession used in Australia, but the gist is the same. For me it casts the notion of pilgrimage in its proper, ultimate context.
A HOME WITH GOD
The responsory from these same Vespers reads, ‘In you, Lord, I take refuge. Let me not be lost for ever.’ That is the end of our pilgrimage, a home with and in our God. Our life might be understood as an opportunity to move towards this experience. We can prepare ourselves more and less as we move along the way.
Our conscious preparation might be described as our pilgrimage. But it is by grace that we reach its end. It is by God coming to meet us that our pilgrimage is completed. In this way, our sense of ending, our expectations about the destination, is subordinate to the ways in which God graces us.
Going out on pilgrimage, taking on a long journey, one can lapse into a Pelagian sense that it is I who will reach the destination. I will complete the pilgrimage. I am something of the subject and the object of the experience. The one who will get it done and the one who will be enriched along the way. Our journeying may well be meritorious, and we do well to put ourselves in places where we might be best able to receive God’s invitation. But it is always God’s initiative that we are blessed to receive.
GOD’S GRACE
Our lives are pilgrimages to the extent that we live seeking to be receptive to God’s grace. On that hot Lisbon day last year, if I had thought the whole point was a sense of accomplishment on reaching the destination I would have arrived disappointed. At the destination was a blazing hot afternoon. It was uncomfortable, crowded. The next day we were on the road out, back whence we had come.
In the Himalayas our resilient guides could not propel us through to the peak after a snowstorm. At risk of becoming stuck, night falling, we had to turn around. The night was spent crammed into two small huts built for shepherds in summer. Several days later, having come back down the mountain and bussed to a safer starting point, we reached the village from another route. We still had to walk, there being no road into the village. It was not, though, the grand satisfying entrance we had imagined.
The experience of being in that village was no less graced because our pilgrimage did not go as we had planned. Indeed, God was there to meet us in the dislocation, the frustration and reorientation. God met our group, and over a million more, in Lisbon in the Mass, but he was also there to meet us in the shared experience of being hot and bothered.
GOD MEETS US
The late Australian Jesuit theologian Fr Gerald O’Collins SJ noted somewhere that: ‘Any human experience can convey a self-communication of God’.
Our lives, then, are a pilgrimage towards God but with God meeting us along the way. These encounters give rise to the hope of all full communion at journey’s end. That end which we understand as beginning, a new unfolding of the journey.
In this is our hope as Christians, not that we will get ‘there’ by ourselves but that God invites us and draws us into something more, into God’s self. Our destination is a relationship with the God we catch glimpses of and hope to have fullness of life in.
This article first appeared in the summer 2024-25 edition of Madonna magazine.
