Taking the Time to Make a Difference

It is as if past, present and future are all jumbled up. I am looking forward to a trip to the Holy Land. My wife and I and some friends from the Christian Family Movement will be traveling together. We are coming from several places in the United States, but we will meet in New York at an airport to begin our pilgrimage. As the time of departure draws closer, the words of Scripture in Lent and Holy Week become more alive to me. The names of places float in my mind. Did the Gospel just say something about Jesus going to Bethany? I wasn’t paying close attention. I’m going to Bethany. I think that’s on the itinerary. How far is Bethany from Jerusalem? I wonder what it looks like. Why did Jesus go there? He had friends there. I’ll be with friends there. And so it goes, my wandering mind, mixing the words brought alive again, and forward, then backward again to the present. I am not surprised by this jumble of thoughts about the places and the names and the events recounted in our Scriptures. As I write these words, the words from the Gospel readings of Holy Week are still active in my mind. I am a little surprised at the way the events central to my faith somehow become intertwined even with the totally mundane events and activities – such as plugging in my laptop computer to re-charge the battery. This is a new battery, one I just purchased because the old one was losing its charge in just a few minutes. The new one came with instructions, that it should be completely discharged before plugging it back into a power source. My eyes were drawn to the top of the screen every minute or so, as the power indicator showed five percent, then four, and finally zero. The screen went dark, and I couldn’t help but think: this is death. I soared briefly into the heights of resurrection, new life, power, the light returning to the computer screen – and then just as rapidly I returned to the world of ordinary cares: How will I re-charge my computer battery in Jerusalem? I will need an adaptor. Just as events in my life of faith have poked into an ordinary day, so do commonplace cares pull me back from the transcendent.

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Some years ago, while attending a conference in California, I went to the epicenter of an earthquake. I don’t know what I expected to see, but the experience was not quite satisfying. Perhaps I expected to see concentric signs of force in the earth, the way earthquakes are often depicted in illustrations, like the ring of ripples from a rock tossed into water. (A foolish idea, that was, like expecting to look down from an airplane window and see the states in different colors the way they are depicted on a map.) All I saw at the epicenter was a sign proclaiming the spot to be so. As I recall this experience, my thoughts again run ahead of me: What do I expect to see at Bethlehem? At Nazareth? At the Holy Sepulchre? Will there be more than a printed sign at each of these locations?

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As I look forward to a pilgrimage, I invite you to consider making a journey too, to a place of significance in your life. Go to Jerusalem – or to the place where you were baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Go to the Upper Room – or to the place where you first received the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, or to the church where you were confirmed. Take your children to such a place — or to the place of their birth, the home of your ancestors, or even to the epicenter of some extraordinary family tumult. Or help a friend make such a journey. Help the ordinary mingle with the eternal. And when you see a new family from a foreign country, treat them the way you hope the people of long-ago Egypt treated a family seeking safety from death and danger in their own homeland. Help the eternal mingle with the ordinary.

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