It’s no secret that traveling, something a lot of people do this time of year, does plenty of good for the body and the mind. It helps us break with routine while promising the potential for new experiences. It also can make one pine for something new or have a greater appreciation for what awaits them at home.
But for a Christian, traveling as a pilgrim does something more. It does good for the soul.
When I say “pilgrim,” don’t think that I’ve just visited Mary’s house in Ephesus (Turkey) or walked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain — although I hope to do both sometime soon.
Rather, my pilgrimage experience came during a visit to family in northern Arizona over an extended and very secular recent American holiday.
It is a long drive, about eight hours plus if you include stops to eat and rest. Add to this equation a 6-year-old grandson who asks approximately 21.4 questions per mile and insists on calling out the names of every car we see based on the manufacturers’ logos he has somehow put to memory, and that trip can feel a lot longer. Once there, we had a grand time with my brothers, nieces and nephews, and their expanding families.
It always goes fast, a good sign of how beneficial these visits are, but eventually our departure day arrived. It landed on a Sunday. A good chunk of that extended family gathered one last time at the 8 a.m. Mass, another tradition that, due to the scattering of the clan across the continental United States, has become much less frequent than I like. But that’s just the way life goes, I guess.
When Mass ended and we said our goodbyes, my wife and I girded ourselves for the eight-hour return drive with a 6-year-old grandson strapped in a car who never met a question he did not like.
As I prayed for patience (thank you St. Monica) and prayed for safe travels with gratitude for the opportunity to spend time with my family, I thought about the Mass we had just left and how beautiful but different it was from our home parish back home. When people, who will remain nameless, spend too much time worrying about the state of things in the Church, they tend to see the cloud that resides within every silver lining and believe cataclysm for the Church is just one ill-informed internet exposé away.
My experience at that Sunday Mass in Arizona proved to be the tonic for such silly worrying. It was Catholic life on full display. Babies were crying all over the place. A toddler was misbehaving in the pew in front of us, I almost got kicked in the head. Dad took him out (he came back a sadder but wiser toddler, and Mass continued uninterrupted). The Gospel was about Jesus sending his disciples out to spread the word and here I was, receiving that word in my travels. My own spiritual rhythm synchronized with the familiar cadence of worship that surrounded me.
That’s not to say this parish has everything “right” or “figured out.” Its demographics (age, ethnicity, for example) are different from my home parish’s, and also differs in some of the ways the Mass is celebrated. But in the end, those things fall to the wayside when the bloodless sacrifice is reenacted on that altar whether that altar be glistening marble, hewn granite, or polished oak.
Masses look different and the same simultaneously. It is a very Catholic way of looking at the world, and attending Mass as a “tourist” makes it even more pronounced. I have attended Masses in countries where I did not understand a single word of the vernacular of the Mass or could decipher particularly cultural rubrics, yet I still knew what was happening on that altar and was filled with that same sense of belonging.
As I drove through the Mojave Desert and patiently (thank you St. Monica … again) answered every question about every automobile company logo that my grandson did not recognize, and a couple of questions on heaven, hell, and purgatory thrown into the mix, I realized how blessed and fortunate I am.
We made it back home safely, we survived the inexhaustible inquisition from a 6-year-old, and I will be going to Mass in my own parish with a renewed sense of joy and peace. Tolstoy famously said all happy families are alike and unhappy ones are different. When it comes to the Church and all her enclaves around the country and around the world, the minutiae of their differences is outweighed by the overpowering force of Christ’s love for pilgrims wherever they may be.
