Special Features An Experience Beyond Words: Reflections on a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land By a Pilgrim from the Diocese On the Feast of Holy Pentecost, 2017, over thirty pilgrims from across our Diocese and other parts of the U.S. embarked on an unforgettable pilgrimage in the Holy Land. We traveled under the spiritual leadership of His Eminence, Archbishop Michael, with Archpriest Ilya Gotlinsky as our tour guide. What a time of year to undertake a pilgrimage – our thoughts constantly occupied with the fact that we were to tread the very trails and roads where the Apostles, newly emboldened by the fire of the Holy Spirit, set out to “turn the world upside down!” Having landed in Tel Aviv, we boarded a tour bus bound for our hotel in Galilee. But, before we even got to the hotel, we encountered holiness – at the Tomb of St. George the Martyr, where all the pilgrims were anointed with the myrrh from his reliquary and with the Great Martyr’s blessing for the inauguration of our Pilgrimage. The heat, and the intensity of traveling in the arid conditions, caused us all to reflect upon what it must have been like for the Apostles as they traveled. We felt heat, thirst, and dust, like most of us had never experienced before. In Nazareth, we beheld the holy well where the Archangel Gabriel announced the Good News of the Incarnation of the Son of God to the young Virgin Mary – decorated with the loving written prayer requests of pilgrims – and the preserved “cave home” (since most construction in first-century Palestine was of stone, wood being very rare) of the Theotokos, St. Joseph the Betrothed, and the young Messiah. Visiting the place of Our Lord’s first miracle – Cana, the place of that divinely touched wedding – we were taken aback by the immensity of the “stone jars” – truly, massive casks – that were filled with the water turned wine! What a spectacular moment for the wedding guests to witness … truly a sign for His disciples, as the Gospel of John says, to believe in Him. Words can hardly convey the experience of walking and praying within the places where our Lord traveled and taught, and where His disciples were formed and fed with His Word. We had the great honor of visiting the newly unearthed site of a Jewish synagogue dated to the first century A.D., the first synagogue discovered
Fall 2018
in Galilee. This was a place where Jesus may well have read and taught from the Torah! Upon the shore of the Sea of Galilee, we heard the Gospel read in the beautiful Roman church built upon the place where the Sermon on the Mount was preached – and in the magnificent, newly iconographed Orthodox Church of the Twelve Apostles, at the site where the Twelve were first called. That experience was followed by boarding a wooden boat and pushing out into the Sea of Galilee – the very place where the Lord with his 12 “students” founded the “first seminary.” We listened to the Gospel and sang God’s praises, upon the same Sea from which the Disciples strained to pull in their heaving nets … where Peter obeyed His Lord’s command to walk toward Him on the waves … and from whose shore our Savior “pushed out a little” so that His life-giving teachings could be heard by thousands. Interspersed with the incredible visits to the holy places from the life of Our Lord and His Mother were other inspiring encounters at sacred sites from both the Old and New Testaments. During the last few days of the pilgrimage we entered the country of Jordan. There, in addition to visiting the place along the Jordan River where it is believed that our Lord was baptized, we ascended Mount Nebo, from which Moses had his last and closest view of the Promised Land, which he was never to enter. We saw what remains of the palace where Saint John the Baptist was beheaded at the hands of the ruthless Herod. And, at the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, we visited the place where the tree that was used to make the Precious Cross of our Lord was grown from a triple seedling of cypress, pine, and olive. One pilgrim remarked how much she had been looking forward to being in the place where Saints Martha and Mary had lived and met the Lord. “As a woman, I feel close to them both because sometimes I’m Martha and sometimes I’m Mary!” How awesome it was to stand in that very place where the grieving sisters met the Lord – where they challenged Him, even, for not coming while their brother was still alive – and yet He comforted them, explaining that this was taking place so that they, and you and I, might believe
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