A Spring Day On the Pilgrim Road

Dear Friend,

With Holy Week on the horizon, I offer the wisdom of the late Father Alex Manville from his Palm Sunday reflections back in 1987:

“As we drove out of Tel Aviv, it was early May, and the grasses and wild flowers got newer and livelier as we climbed toward Jerusalem. As we rounded the last hill, there lay Jerusalem across the Kidron Valley, more wonderful because more subtle in light and shade than the panoramic photo in all the travel folders. We pulled to the side, and after a few minutes of awed silence, we prayed Psalm 122 – for three thousand years the song of pilgrims as they first caught sight of this holiest of cities.

It all came back this Palm Sunday, also one of those lovely days with sun and breeze working hand in hand. After listening to the Passion, a parishioner on the way out of church said to me, “It must have been especially hard for Jesus to die in the springtime.” 

When it comes to dying no time is better or worse than another. But yes, I agree, it must have been particularly tough to die during the few weeks of beauty in that hard and tigerish land.

But if it was the wrong season to die, what a wonderful time for resurrection! You and I have to die many times – to ambitions and expectations and who we’d like to be and how we’d like things to happen. It occurs anytime, all the time; it doesn’t wait upon our schedule. But no matter how terminal to our ego the blow may seem, the seed of new life is in it.

It takes faith. Faith that it’s God’s love that won’t let us settle for second or third best. Faith that any day can be a spring day on the pilgrim road.”

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor