Another season of lent is now behind us and we celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ! Lent was a little strange for me this year with Covid lockdowns and all the stuff that went with it. A positive was all the virtual things available as “Lenten Programs”. I attended an excellent Diaconal program about the history of the Diaconate, another program titled “Prayer and Fasting”, and as I write this in Lent a couple of other offerings which are coming up. I know there are a lot of people who are quite anti “Zoom” but I think it is a good tool, although it will never replace meeting face to face.
So how was your pilgrimage through Lent?
The venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica defines pilgrimage as “a journey undertaken for a religious motive. Although some pilgrims have wandered continuously with no fixed destination, pilgrims more commonly seek a specific place that has been sanctified by association with a divinity or other holy personage”.
The specific place the pilgrim was going through lent was the empty sepulchre of Jesus. What other pilgrimages have you made in your life? Perhaps you have hiked the Camino Nova Scotia, or like me, the Camino Santiago, both of which include a church as a destination.
Some pilgrimages include a destination that has been described as a “thin place”. Have you ever heard someone use this term to describe a place? They may have been recounting an inspirational site visited on a pilgrimage or talking about how journeying into creation draws them closer to God. Maybe they were not talking about a physical place at all, but rather a Sacred moment brought on by a spiritual practice or an incident that pierced their soul. St Augustine said “ A single tear shed at the remembrance of the Passion of Jesus is worth more than a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or a year of fasting on bread and water. “In any event a thin place is a location or moment in which our sense of the Sacred is more pronounced, where the space between the transcendent and the commonplace is very narrow. This phrase has apparently been in use for a very long time and apparently has its roots in the mystical world of Celtic Christians, and the Franciscan Richard Rohr has an interesting take on thin places. ( https://cac.org/finding-the-sacred-everywhere-2015-07-06/ )
I am very fortunate because I have experienced the thin places in both kinds, a physical place and through spiritual practice. One of the physical thin places I experienced was Mount LA Verna in Tuscany. This is the place where Saint Francis received the stigmata (wounds of Christ) while on a forty-day retreat and fast two years before his death. I freely admit that when I visited the Chapel of the Stigmata, built over the spot where the event occurred, the hair on my neck and arms was standing straight up! The closeness of the Divine was palpable!
There are many spiritual practices available to us, some of which work for us as individuals and some which do not. I think there is a lot of individual preference here. The trick is to try as many as possible and hopefully find one that takes you to a thin place. This is a pilgrimage in itself!
Some of the things readily available to us here in the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island are Christian Meditation (both virtually and in person in some areas), the Ignation First Spiritual Exercises, the “Pray as You Can” series on zoom which has offered everything from the Anglican Rosary to the Way of the Cross. These are just a few that come to mind, but I am sure there are many, many more in the Diocese. The point is, if you participate in some of these you may very well find one that takes you to the thin places, where the reward is great indeed!
So I guess the pilgrimage is not over, just the one through lent. And we did arrive at a thin place when we arrived at the empty tomb, because the fact that it is empty tells us The Lord Is Risen! How much closer to the Devine can we get than that? Our pilgrimage through life continues and we continue to seek God in all places and events so that we may experience that which is Holy.
In closing, I would like to share some words by the poet Sharlande Sledge who writes:
the door between the world
and the next is cracked open for a moment
and the light is not all on the other side.
God shaped space. Holy.
