Pilgrimage Report

The Dean, Gerald Stranraer-Mull, finds the Holy Land really is a special place

The Holy Land is the sort of place that - once tasted - draws you back time and time again. To me Galilee is a beautiful and poignant place. The Sea of Galilee is an inland lake - 13 miles long and up to eight miles wide. It is 700 ft below the level of the Mediterranean and surrounded by high hills. It was a much busier and more populated place 2,000 years ago and yet the landscape is the same.

The hills are the ones that Jesus saw, the mist of dawn across the lake is the same, the colours of evening unchanged. Jesus saw all of these and was at home in Galilee. And so it is perhaps unsurprising for a Christian to feel this too. I know that I love it - whether in the warmth of winter, amid the beauty of the springtime wayside flowers, in the humidity of high summer or among the parched hillsides of autumn.

This summer I visit it twice. Once in May on my own and in July I have the privilege of leading a group pilgrims to Jerusalem and then on to the Galilee, seeking to share with them some of the wonders of the Fifth Gospel, as the Holy Land has been called. To go on a pilgrimage is a highly personal thing. Nearly all the Church fathers denied that pilgrimage established any special spiritual link which could not be established elsewhere.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa, writing to one who sought guidance in the fourth century, said: "Change of place does not effect any drawing nearer to God but wherever you are God will come to you if your soul is such that he can live and walk in you." The Kingdom is within us and the true pilgrimage is in our heart. And so Saint Jerome could comfort a friend who could not make the journey, saying that nothing was lacking in her faith because she did not see Jerusalem and that those who had that privilege were in no way better than those who did not. In our busy world, however, pilgrimage does give time for peace, for silence and for reflection.

Often the journey can coincide with the interior journey of the soul. Just being there - where Jesus stood - has an emotional appeal and being there also has its rational value, a knowledge of the land helps in understanding and taking deep within us, the Gospel stories. On our journey this summer we travel to the holy places of Galilee and to some that were heroic in other ways - such as the castle of Belvoir high above the Jordan valley, where more than 800 years ago the bravery and chivalry of the Crusader knights was recognized by Saladin, conqueror of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and they were allowed to ride out of the Castle to the safety of the coastal city of Acre, unmolested and with their colour flying.

We also meet the "living stones", some of the Palestinian Christians who maintain the faith in the Holy Land in ever more difficult circumstances. Accommodation is on the Mount of Beatitudes - the beautiful hospice there was renovated for the visit of Pope John Paul 11 four years ago and during my May visit a nun in the sacristy there handed me the Eucharistic vestments and afterwards told me that they had belonged to Pope Paul V1. I realized that while some achieve greatness and others simply have it thrust upon them!

I always feel sad when I leave the gentle people and landscape of the Galilee, where children still play and smile as once that young boy of Nazareth did. But leave I did and traveled back to Jerusalem where the tensions both in our faith and in the world are felt so strongly. To enter or leave the city means passing through military checkpoints and the "separation" wall - designed to keep Israelis and Palestinians apart, grows ever bigger. No longer could Jesus walk across the Mount of Olives from Bethany to Jerusalem. The wall now blocks the way and a long detour has to be made through the nearest checkpoint. In Jerusalem I met Christians and Muslim Palestinians and Israeli Jews as well as visiting the holy places of faith.

I like both the people and the holy places and concur with Rose Macaulay, who wrote eloquently of them in The Towers of Trebizond. She said of Bethlehem -I liked the dark cavern glittering with silver lamps and gold and silver and tinsel ornaments and smoky incense fumes and tapestried walls. Bethlehem was charming and moving and strange and one does not mind either there or in Jerusalem whether the shrines are rightly identified or not, because the faith of millions of pilgrims down the centuries has given them a mystical kind of reality and one does not much mind their having been vulgarised, for this had to happen, people being vulgar and liking gaudy uneducated things around them when they pray; and one does not mind the original sites and buildings having been destroyed long ago and others built on their ruins and destroyed in their turn, again and again and again, for this shows the tenacious hold they have had on man's imagination.

To look behind the holy place to see what is truly holy is always a good rule to apply in Jerusalem. This was especially true for me one morning very early. I walked alone from the New Gate to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The narrow streets and alleyways were deserted but twice the sound of morning office and the singing of nuns, coming through the open windows of convent chapels, make me stop listen and give thanks.