I write this on a flight between Chicago and Seattle, returning from 3 days in the hill country of central Texas. The flight is the final leg of my summer pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine as each of us agreed to attend a 3-day retreat 3 months after we returned home. (Going on an expense paid trip to the Texas Hill Country in November is an easy thing to agree to, by the way, and I’m grateful to the staff, vestry and members of the parish who make it possible for me to be away to my family for putting me on yet another airplane without them.) So, although I returned home from my Pilgrimage to the Holy Lands in mid-August, it officially ended this week in Texas.
The generous and deeply spiritual people who planned our journey set the experience up around a simple and effective model: orient, disorient, reorient. The “orient”ation occurred the three days prior to our overseas flight. We gathered at a conference center in northern Virginia, received the details of our itinerary, shared reflections on the book we read in advance, learned about travel in the Middle East and began to hear each other’s stories, thereby beginning to orient to each other.
The “disorient”ation, at least for me, began the minute we were corralled in the uber-secure gate area of the Tel Aviv flight in the Frankfurt airport. I have flown through Frankfurt several times, yet I have never been through a preflight security screen like that. Another bag scan, questions from the guards about the reasons we were going. Once scanned and questioned, we were unable to leave the glassed-in area. All around us, there were male Orthodox Jews saying their prayers, covered in prayer shawls, tellefin strapped to their forehead and arm. There were also a few Muslims with prayer beads in their hands and in the midst of that, I sat and read Morning Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer I had in my backpack. Looking back on it, it was a chance for orientation in the midst of all that was happening around me. My Episcopalian and Christian way of praying was my attempt to attach my prayers to the prayers of the Muslims and Jews all around.
For the next two weeks disorientation happened at almost every turn: 18 year olds with automatic rifles walking down the boardwalk along the Sea of Galilee, Bedouin families living in desert shanties, mine fields in the Golan Heights, bus loads of Christian pilgrims from around the world, irrigated orange groves and farms in the midst of a water crisis, three of the world’s religions constantly bumping up against each other, check points and places of great religious significance everywhere we turned.
Now, as I finally begin the process of reorientation I am intrigued by the possibilities for my own spiritual journey and for the community I serve as priest and pastor. I’ll keep you posted.
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