This tour is both a study tour and a pilgrimage tour. I encourage anyone considering a Holy Land tour to read Tom Wright's short book The Way of the Lord: Christian Pilgrimage Today (Eerdmans, 1999). Here are the last few paragraphs of that book. To read the entire final chapter, "The Holy Land Today," CLICK HERE.
When we go on pilgrimage today, then, we do not go in order to comment on or criticize other people for their inability to solve political problems. God knows we can’t solve our own, which are much smaller and less rooted in history. Of course, we will grieve over injustice, oppression and violence wherever it occurs and whoever instigates it; but in highly complex situations it behoves us to go with our eyes and ears open, ready to learn rather than to condemn. But as pilgrims we go, above all, to pray. In the same passage where Paul speaks of God’s intention to make the whole world his Holy Land, to renew and liberate the whole of creation, he also speaks of the whole creation at present groaning in travail; and then he declares that we who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we, too, wait for our final redemption (Romans 8.18-27). It is in that context that he says that all things work together for good to those who love God (8.28). What can he mean?
He means, I think, that our vocation as Christians includes the vocation to be in prayer at the place where the world is in pain. We are not to expect to pray only at places of great beauty, stillness and peace. We are not to look only for selfish refreshment, to top up our own spiritual batteries while forgetting everyone else. We are to stand or kneel at the place where the world, and particularly our brother and sister Christians, are in pain and need, and, understanding and feeling their sufferings, to pray with and for them, not knowing (as Paul again says) what precisely to ask for, but allowing the Spirit to pray within us with groanings that cannot come into articulate speech. We are called, in other words, to become in ourselves places where the living, loving and grieving God can be present at the places of pain in his world and among his children. We are called to discover the other side of pilgrimage: not only to go somewhere else to find God in a new way, but to go somewhere else in order to bring God in a new way to that place, not by tub-thumping evangelism or patronizing, well-meaning but shallow advice, but by our presence, our grief, our sympathy, our encouragement, our prayer.
As we do this, in going to the Holy Land today, we find the three things I said about pilgrimage in the introduction to this book reinforced and given particular direction. Pilgrimage is a teaching aid: at this level, it teaches us not only about the roots of our faith, but about the ways in which injustice still rampages through communities, some of them within our own family. It opens our eyes to see God’s world the way it is, rather than the way we would like to imagine it. Second, pilgrimage is a way of prayer: both a way of drinking in the presence and love of God in Christ, as we visit places particularly associated with him, and also now a way of standing at the place of pain, at the foot of the cross literally and metaphorically, holding on to that pain in the presence of God in Christ, not knowing what the solution will be but only that God is there, grieving with and in us, in a perpetual Holy Week at the heart of the Holy Land. Third, pilgrimage is a way of discipleship: both to be reinforced in our own daily life and work as Christians, and now also to be reinforced in thinking, working, speaking, writing and praying for justice and peace to be restored to the Middle East, to Northern Ireland, to the Sudan, to God’s entire creation.
We do not go on pilgrimage, then, because we have the answers and want to impose them. That would make us crusaders, not pilgrims; the world has had enough of that, and I dare say God has had enough of that. We go on the pilgrim way, we follow the way of the Lord, because he himself is the way – and, as he said himself, the truth and the life as well. We go to meet him afresh, to share his agony, and to pray and work for the victory he won on the cross to be implemented, and for his way to be followed, in Israel and Palestine, in our own countries, and in the whole world.
Most tour groups whisk people in and out of Bethlehem. Half a day at the most. They visit the traditional site of the Shepherd's Fields (either Latin or Orthodox), then the Church of the Nativity and they're gone. On the Ancient Stones, Living Stones tour, we spend four nights in Bethlehem. This gives us barely enough time to get a feel for the city and, most importantly, to meet some of the people who live there. It's important to me that tour participants get a good sense of what life in Bethlehem is like. You might want to read the National Geographic article and watch their short video about Bethlehem today.
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