A Pilgrim's Tale
In the midst of suffering and despair, discovering hope.
By Johanna Kiefner
We are pilgrims whenever we travel on an intentional journey into the heart and soul. So it was in January of this year when 30 Boston area college students traveled to Israel with campus chaplains, Episcopal Bishop Thomas Shaw, and pilgrimage coordinators and guides. It was a pilgrimage in the traditional sense of going to many places significant to the Christian faith—Bethlehem, Capernaum, Jerusalem, and the Sea of Galilee. Places where an ancient spirituality seems to permeate the landscape in the centuries of old dust, dust that somehow found its way into my things. Even the rock seemed holy.
It was also a pilgrimage to places challenging the heart and soul on matters of peace and justice. These holy sites were places such as the Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, and the Aida Refugee Camp. We met many people dedicated to non-violence, such as those working at the Rapprochement Center in Bethlehem and the Christian Peace Maker teams in Hebron.
We met the people, Israeli and Palestinian, who live in this land, who love this land, and who suffer in this land. I marveled at the 2000-year-old olive trees, and how the little trees we planted survived the heat by soaking up dew on the surrounding stones. We floated in the Dead Sea, built a flower garden in a refugee camp, danced at an Orthodox Christmas party, swam in the sea of Galilee, laughed, wept, and vigorously pondered the history and pain of this ancient place.
In the grotto of the Nativity—a low cave where tradition says Jesus was born—a young Russian Orthodox priest dipped a candle into the candle wax of the many pilgrims before us. As he traced a cross upon my forehead, the warmth and scent of the wax reminded me of the earthiness, universal and sacred, of birth and life and promise.
For many of the students, this was the first they’d witnessed real suffering on such an intimate and powerful level. For young people accustomed to solving problems, it was a place of no easy solutions, a place where good and bad were not black and white but often shades of gray. Mostly, it was a pilgrimage where the spirit of hope moved in deep and profound ways. Here, hope held those in despair. Here, hope gave lightness to the dancing. Here, hope made for peace in the center of injustice. Hope made us brothers and sisters regardless of whether we were Christian, Jew, or Muslim. Perhaps this is the most a pilgrimage can be—a coming to a place where in the center is the wellspring of hope and connectedness, and out of this wellspring flows the promise of a future for all of us.
The Reverend Johanna Kiefner is the Lutheran Campus Pastor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Send your inspirational story to regina@collinsonpublishing.com.
