Cardinal Pizzaballa: "We need people to return to the Holy Land".At the beginning of the EasterI can't help but think of Holy LandI have been there many times, most recently in 2020, shortly before the pandemic. And my heart fills with nostalgia for a place that I undoubtedly consider as "high".
In the Jewish tradition, going to the Land of Israel means to rise, both spiritually and physically. Israel and Jerusalem have been for centuries, even for Christians, the highest places on earth, the closest to God, so much so that everyone who goes to live or go on pilgrimage there is said, in Hebrew, "'oleh", that is, "he who goes upwards", and even the Israeli flag company is called "El Al", "upwards", for it does not so much lead to heaven, but to Israel, that is, to the highest place on earth, in a spiritual sense.
In a certain sense, to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land is not only to climb to the highest peaks of the spirit, but also to plunge into the abysses of consciousness, exactly like descending from Jerusalem to Jericho and the Dead Sea depression, the lowest point on the surface of the earth: a journey to better understand who we are.
Moments of sublime spirituality, meditation, prayer, sharing with friends and fellow pilgrims, alternate with others of discomfort, tiredness, intolerance, selfishness and confusion. One climbs Mount Tabor, beyond the clouds, to enjoy the harmony of the sky, but then one returns to the harsh daily reality, a reality of Jews, Muslims and Christians constantly fighting each other, dividing walls, Arab villages that have sprung up without any order and logic, Israeli cities made of huge gray buildings, poverty and wealth, misery and nobility, hospitality and rejection side by side, confronting each other.
One moment it is like walking on the clear, sweet, blue water of the Sea of Galilee, which, however, is capable of sudden agitation, due to the winds and storms coming from the Golan; in another, traveling, one passes from the green shores of this great body of water of Galilee to arrive, in a couple of hours, at the muddy, salty, grayish waters of the Dead Sea, the sea of salt surrounded by the desert: here, the green and flowery hills on which Jesus proclaimed the Good News to the multitude give way to aridity and rocks on which rest the foundations of monasteries that have emerged from nowhere and that hide among crevices and precipices.
The geography of the Holy Land: so similar to the soul of the human being.
It seems natural that God would choose the Holy Land to reveal Himself to mankind. Here, the geography of the places is extraordinarily similar - in variability, abrupt changes, alternation between aridity and richness of water, silence and confusion, amenity and ugliness - to the human soul. Many times in life one feels alone and lost as in the Negev desert; very often, the descents from Tabor, the mountain that is symbol of our moments of closeness to God, are traumatic and painful; floating in the calm waters of our happy moments is almost as frequent as sinking in the mud and in the burning salt that kills and incapacitates us to live and make us live, precisely like the Dead Sea.
Personally, after making many trips to these places, I can testify that I feel like this, torn between joy and nostalgia: in the midst of so many good companions on the road, I seemed to be listening again to the words of Isaiah and seeing people I did not know running to me for the sake of God who honored me; it was like witnessing the most sublime thing in the world on a high mountain: communion with dear people; I felt, then, that the Jordan River washed all my impurities, healed every wound, healed every sore.
Then, back home, especially in these difficult times of war, disease, uncertainty, one feels that almost everything slips through one's fingers and even the incomparable beauty of a city as wonderful as Rome (and yet overrun by tourists and so chaotic), the city where I live, seems unable to compensate for the loss of that high mountain, that safe haven, of those people with whom I was able to share so many good moments in many trips.
Once again, I experience separation, which is the denial of God and which impels me to dream of paradise not so much as a lush and pleasant place, but as eternal communion with God and with all my loved ones, all those whom I encountered in my life and from whom I am forced, inevitably, to separate.
Was it all in vain? Not at all!
First of all, I carry a precious treasure with me: the spiritual communion with the same people who accompanied me, who made the land of Israel even more beautiful than it really is. With them, although I am far from the Holy Land, the pilgrimage continues inside and outside of me. Joining them in prayer is like transforming the river of my city, the Tiber, into the Jordan, St. Peter into the Holy Sepulcher, the living room of my house into the Sea of Galilee, for all of us are the new Israel.
And then I remember that there is no longer a Holy Land, or rather, that the whole earth is holy, be it Italy, Mexico, Spain, Chile or wherever in the world, and that we are all guardians and instruments of the Kingdom of God that is already present in our lives, in the things we do every day, in the people who live next to us.
So, looking at the photos of those beloved places in the East, I see, at the same time, the faces of the people who accompanied me and I repeat to myself that we can no longer live attached to the idea of a land and a homeland in this world: our roots are in a different place, in a different reality, perhaps less visible, but certainly much more concrete and resistant to storms, which is our faith.
Every Christian is a pilgrim
Secondly, I think that a true pilgrim is, as he was defined in the Middle Ages, a "homo viator", that is, a man who walks, someone who continually consecrates not only himself and the traditional places where pilgrimages are usually made, such as the Way of St. James, Rome or Jerusalem, but all those small physical and spiritual environments of ordinary life, where he becomes, anthropologically, the instrument of a theophany, of a manifestation of the divine, through the prayers that he fulfills while walking.
In a Christian sense, to make it simpler, a Christian is Christ, for he is a member of the body of Christ, so it is no longer he who lives and walks, but Christ, the same Christ who walked the roads of Galilee, Judea and Samaria and who today continues to walk the streets of Rome, Madrid, Bogota and New York.
Civilizing divinity
In fact, in the anthropology of the Middle Ages what distinguished space ("káos") from place ("kósmos") was a theophany: the manifestation of the divine and the presence of the sacred, through which all that was wild, replete with demons and superstitions, unexplored and uncivilized, uncultured, became land consecrated to God, civil, well-ordered, governed, secure, the "non-being" that became "being". The streets and shrines of medieval Europe, then, were arteries of civilization and the pilgrims who walked through them were the flowing blood, a sign of civilizing divinity.
In the book "The Living Man", by G. K. Chesterton, the protagonist is Innocent Smith, an eccentric character who manages to change for the better the situations and lives of the people he meets, despite being unjustly accused of various crimes, simply because he is a happy man who wishes to transmit to others the joy of his own condition. Through him, even the bad seems to become good. He is that "living man".
Living man and "homo viator".
If we think about it, we Christians, pilgrims in this world, can combine, in our lives, the two concepts of living man and "homo viator". Every day we can re-consecrate the streets, the squares, the neighborhoods of our afflicted countries, in these times of material and spiritual poverty and crisis in every area of human existence. It is not necessary to be so worthy or sinless, perfect and fulfilled in our lives and works. It is enough to nourish ourselves daily from the source of life to become living men and women and, walking the roads of our lives, "homines viatores", bearers of the grace we receive without deserving it.
Thus, even though we cannot leave our cities and our countries to go to the Holy Land, we can walk on water, and not only without fear of sinking, but helping others so that they do not sink.
Happy Easter!
