Life as Pilgrimage
Solemnity of the Ascension
Every trip can be a pilgrimage, and every pilgrimage can devolve into a trip. What is the difference? A trip is meant to arrive at a certain place, while a pilgrimage uses the journey to transform something within us. A trip changes our location, while a pilgrimage changes us.
We live in a world obsessed with immediate gratification. Instead of seeing life as a pilgrimage toward communion with God, we often reduce it to the pursuit of comfort, pleasure, and distraction. This leaves us restless and disappointed. God, however, desires to transform us through the journey of life, leading us toward deeper self-gift and authentic happiness.
On the Solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord, the Church invites us to look up, to raise our gaze to the sky. The angels found the apostles with their eyes fixed on heaven, even after Jesus had disappeared from their sight. This is a great introduction to what happens in the liturgy.
Often, we think of liturgy as an obscure concept that refers ambiguously to actions we perform at church. We might associate the word with incense, music, kneeling, and standing. Principally, it is the work that, as a people, we offer to God.
“In the Liturgy, we are lifted into heaven, we are united with the saints in praise of God, and we share their inheritance already, through the virtue of hope” (T. Acklin and B. Hicks, Personal Prayer, p. 187).
The Liturgy lifts us up into heaven. St. Athanasius, in his reflection On the Incarnation, reminds us that God became man, that man might share in the life of God. When we celebrate the liturgy, heaven and earth meet. We pierce the invisible barrier between the physical world we know and the deeper reality beyond our senses. At Mass, we become participants in the Paschal sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.
When we pray liturgically, we unite ourselves to the saints in their perfect praise of God. We use our voices, while we echo the greats of the past: men and women like St. Augustine, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Teresa of Avila. We continue a tradition of praise and are transformed, becoming more like our heroes in the faith.
We share their inheritance already through the virtue of hope. Our understanding of hope is often weak and trite. We think of hope as an inconsequential expectation of everyday things. I hope we have ice cream, or I hope we don’t hit traffic. God calls us to a deeper hope, believing that he is calling us to communion with him and ultimate fulfillment.
Sacrosanctum Concilium, the liturgy document from the Second Vatican Council, reminds us that “in the earthly liturgy, we take part in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims” (Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, 8).
I was scheduled for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in November of 2023. An outburst of violence and the onset of war forced us to cancel the trip. Although obviously disappointing, it served to remind me that at every Mass, we make a spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Solemnity of the Ascension reminds us that while we live in this world, we are not made only for this world. We are made for more.
How can we live each day as a pilgrimage and so escape the risk of a humdrum existence? It is all about the intentionality with which we live it. If we simply get by, studying, working, partying, without any transcendent purpose, we are living our life journey like a trip. If, on the other hand, we recognize that we are going somewhere much more important, it changes our perspective on everything. We begin to recognize that God is the one whom we should be using as the ultimate reference for our lives.
The Morning Offering is one of the greatest tools we can have to make our life a pilgrimage. Each morning, we take a few moments and lift our thoughts to God. We think of what we must do and how we must do it. By offering each moment of our day to God, we make our entire existence into a prayer. This is a great way of living in the presence of God. Live your life as a pilgrimage. Do not simply drift through the changes and circumstances of life. Allow God to transform you into the man or woman he created you to be.