The Places that Anchor Faith, Hope, and Love

Pilgrims depart from the Holy Land grateful to be a part of a people and tradition that has passed on the great gift of faith. These are the places that anchor our faith, hope, and love:

• Golgotha reminds us of the terrible beauty of LOVE: we are called to love with all of our might, with all that our bodies can give. Love places demands upon us that we might wish to avoid.
• The tomb reminds us of the roots of our HOPE: new life waits for us beyond death. The tomb’s emptiness gives us courage to face death, to live well and fully, and to cast out fear.
• The pilgrims who visit these places from all over the world—an unending stream of faithful people—remind us of the FAITH that animates the community that gathers around the person of Jesus Christ. We cling to Jesus as the revelation of what God intends for us—abundant life—and this faith binds us as a family. It also imparts a mission to share this gift with others—to embody it with our own lives and make sure it is handed on to others.

After visiting the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one can’t help but notice that Jesus was buried and risen in the same manner that he was born: in a small, humble space whose concreteness and specificity defy the notion that God comes to save us out of the blue and in the abstract. These are specific, tangible places that we can touch and smell—they prove to us that God completely committed to us in our limited, physical experience of the human condition.

In these terms, it is not a scandal that Jesus is divine—that we can believe. The scandal is that Jesus is so thoroughly human—that he was willing to so fully enter our human experience that he shows us what it means for us to become divine like him. It is scandalous because it asks us to be transformed into his image, for he means to make us holy, to share divine life with us. That is why he was born in Bethlehem, and why he was willing to die on Golgotha, and why God raised him again from the garden tomb just outside of Jerusalem.

Pilgrims come away from these places in the Holy Land with the sense that God is not inaccessible to us just because we live in 2016 in Indiana or Arkansas or Oregon. Jesus lived and died and rose in a specific time and place, which proves that God is willing to enter our story, wherever and whenever it takes place.

Pilgrims also sense that God is not inaccessible to us just because we are imperfect. The crowds gather around these sites all day, every day, just like they gathered around Jesus himself. He has something we need, and he wants to give it to us—in fact, he gives us himself, his very body, to make us holy. It is because we are imperfect that he came among us and died for us. We should not refrain from approaching him because of shame.

We began this pilgrimage with two guiding principles—two maxims. One was the idea that tourists pass through the sites, but pilgrims let the sites pass through them. Pilgrims encounter holy sites with prayer, seeking to more deeply experience the mysteries of our faith. The places where Jesus was born, died, buried, and rose again anchor these mysteries in our imagination, where they will continue to wander through us as our lives unfold day-to-day.

The other guiding principle was that the Holy Land is the fifth Gospel. The sacred sites there can help us know Jesus better and more intimately, and this knowledge can lead us to desire to love Jesus more fully.

Pilgrims who can’t make it to the Holy Land, but who can visit the University of Notre Dame, might be interested to visit the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on campus. Between the main altar and the Lady Chapel is a reliquary chapel that holds relics from nearly 800 saints. Visitors can find in the chapel relics from Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection events, including a piece of the manger in which he was placed as an infant, a portion of the True Cross, parts of his burial cloth, and a fragment of the tomb in which he was buried and resurrected.