On the 24th of December 2024 Pope Francis inaugurated the Jubilee Year of Hope. It was prepared beforehand by a year of prayer and in his message for the 61st World Day of Prayer for Vocations, the Pope said,
“Let us travel as pilgrims of hope towards the Holy Year, for by discovering our own vocation and its place amid the different gifts bestowed by the Spirit, we can become for our world messengers and witnesses of Jesus’ dream of a single human family, united in God’s love and in the bond of charity, cooperation and fraternity.” The Pope invited us all “To be pilgrims of hope and builders of peace, then, means to base our lives on the rock of Christ’s resurrection, knowing that every effort made in the vocation that we have embraced and seek to live out, will never be in vain.”
The pilgrim on pilgrimage: experience, meaning and prayer.
In the New Testament we often read of Jesus and his disciples traveling ‘up to Jerusalem’. They went as pilgrims. Apart from the Passover feast, on at least two other major festivals the Jews of Jesus’ time would make pilgrimages to Jerusalem. These great feasts marked significant moments in the history of the Jewish people: Pesach (Passover) and the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Deut. 1-8), which commemorates deliverance from Egypt. Shavuot or the Feast of Weeks which marks the giving of the Law at Sinai, (Deut. 9-12), and Sukkot or the Feast of Booths (Deut. 13-17) which celebrates Israel’s dwelling in the desert. All of these feasts were great family and community celebrations. We can glimpse this in Luke 2.41 (Jesus as a child goes up to Jerusalem with his family and is found in the Temple), and in John 2.13 (Jesus and his disciples go up to Jerusalem for Passover).
Even from these moments in scripture we can see that pilgrimages were not only solemn occasions, but they were also very much joyous and social ones; happy occasions for gathering as a family, meeting old friends and making new ones. They vividly enacted the memory the whole community; they celebrated Israel’s unique identity and faith. In the experience of the community on pilgrimage – the family, the household, the village, the nation – everyone celebrated their belonging to the history and the promise as God’s people. In each festival, Israel remembered that it was a pilgrim people and that on pilgrimage, ‘memory’ was never just a looking back to the past, it was a ‘living’ forward in hope to its promised future. At some level, in the very act of pilgrim celebration that future was already present and immediate. To experience the ‘anamnesis’ of this living memory is to be present to the power of God’s remembered covenant. Each seasonal festival inscribed in the pilgrim’s experience the reality of God, the One who acts to liberate His beloved people and to lead them into the fullness of His covenantal promise.
Not only did pilgrimages have a socio-theological purpose, however, they were profoundly spiritual journeys also. Here, we can see two dimensions which remain true for our own Holy Year pilgrimage.
First, we never travel alone. Not only is this true in the physical sense, but we together journey with the whole Church: we are always accompanied by the communion of saints. There is a deep consolation in this. The journey is not about being a lone hero. Christianity does not perpetuate such myths and illusions. No matter what difficulties we have to face, no matter how many wrong roads or cul-de-sacs we go down, and especially when we lose our sense of direction and grow weary, or circumstances prevent us even from setting out or falling on the way, the whole community is there to accompany us, to guide us, and to carry us both practically and spiritually. As pilgrims we need each other. We live in solidarity with fellow pilgrims not only in the present, but with those who have made the journey before us, and even with those who have yet to begin but who rely on us to mark out the way for them. Even when we physically can’t make the journey we can make the pilgrimage of desire, like ‘the deer that yearns for running streams’ (Ps.42) , allowing others to carry us in their hearts and in their prayers. This is the great ministry of the pilgrim Church.
Second, in this perspective we can see that every pilgrimage is a journey begun, sustained and ended in hope. Not the manufactured hope of some utopian dream whose future never arrives or the hope that is treated as a product to sell a fictional future of health, prosperity and wellbeing. These engineered hopes always leave us disappointed; always ‘hoping’ for something else or something more. They may hope the hostage of unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire. Christian hope cannot be manufactured out of our intelligence, imagination, science or ingenuity. It cannot be purchased as part of a spiritual capitalism or bargained for among the soul-industries of our cultures. It is the costly gift; we can only receive it, not possess it. The only secure future is the one that God gives. It is God who makes himself our future and it is guaranteed by the hallmark of the Risen Christ. When all human hopes die in death, the crucified and risen Christ comes as he did for his disciples in the upper room or in the garden. As with the quiet confidence of the early morning light the hope which is secured in him enters our lives and our world. It brings its own new day, every day, and speaks to us of forgiveness, mercy and peace. In our time, it opens another time; it refreshes us, calls us to set out again with new energies for now we know that we are not alone, and the promise is true.– He is our Way, our Truth and our unending Life. Mary Magdalene still continues to testify to us and through all time in the ancient Easter hymn, ‘Surrexit Christus spes mea’ – the Risen Christ is my hope (victimæ paschali laudes). This is her Magnificat of hope and so she sings it too with Mary, the mother of the risen Lord. Together, they are the pilgrims of hope, who call us to ‘go rejoicing to the house of the Lord’ until ‘our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem’ (Ps 122.).
The Pilgrim Psalms, The Psalms of Ascent.
There is no better place to experience all these dimensions than in the ‘Psalms of Ascent (120-134) – the Pilgrim Psalms – sung, recited and prayed by Israel and by Jesus and his disciples as made their way up to Jerusalem. They are especially filled with meaning for us in this Jubilee Year as we desire to become ever more completely pilgrims of hope for our suffering and darkened world.
Over the five weeks of Lent we will be offering a short reflection on one of these psalms as we journey together. We begin with psalm 130.
Psalm 130
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,
Lord, hear my voice!
O let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my pleading.
If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt,
Lord, who would survive?
But with you is found forgiveness:
for this we revere you.
My soul is waiting for the Lord.
I count on his word.
My soul is longing for the Lord
more than watchman for daybreak.
(Let the watchman count on daybreak
and Israel on the Lord.)
Because with the Lord there is mercy
and fullness of redemption,
Israel indeed he will redeem
from all its iniquity.
Reflection:
This short but vivid psalm is well known as the ‘de profundis’ (out of the depths) taken from the first line of the Latin version used by the Church for many centuries. Often it is used at funerals or in times of great personal distress. As with all the psalms it can be prayed and recited for ourselves or for others who are in great distress.
Although it can have a communal dimension when the whole community feels powerless in the face of a great disaster or darkness, like so many psalms it has an intensely personal and intimate voice. It really is an anguished cry that comes from the very depths of our soul. There is no posturing for effect and its simplicity rejects rhetorical flourish. Extreme pain and distress, whether physical, mental or spiritual – perhaps all three – do not allow for such literary manoeuvres. The psalm, like the experience, has a rawness which cries out with ear-piercing directness and honesty. When we are overwhelmed or our pain takes us beyond words, the psalm becomes our voice; it tells our truth and sounds the depth of our agony.
In such extreme moments we can feel utterly alone, exposed and vulnerable. Anguish and pain have many layers and take on different moods. With urgency and sensitivity psalm 130 touches them all, even the silences. It cries out of our depths and terror of the abyss we are falling into, caught in the paralyzing fear that no one is there to hold us or comfort us. No one is there to save us, and we will be lost forever. The psalm does not shirk the reality of the experience or the situation, but it knows that it does not cry into an empty silence or an indifferent universe.
Yet the psalm is not the last great and inconsolable cry of abandonment, the confession of an ultimate nihilism. This is the beautiful and subtle reality on which the whole psalm is founded. It arises out of a relationship.
We cry precisely because we know from our experience that the Lord has not, cannot, abandon us. To do so would mean that God has repudiated His own truth and proved Himself to be false. In a strange way, for the psalmist, the very depth of the cry produces its own revelation, its own epiphany of God who is there, who does hear our cry and who keeps an eternal vigilance for us. Even when it is beyond words: the Lord knows the depths out of which we cry, for He has measured them.
The psalmist knows the God to whom they cry – a God who has absolute power of life and death – “Lord, if you should mark our guilt, who would survive” – but a God who has mercy and forgiveness, and this is the very basis of our faith and reverence. The psalmist invites us to know ourselves and who we are before God. But even more, out of our distress and pain comes a new knowledge of God’s own self. We are invited to know the other depth, the depth of God’s love and mercy. Here we enter into the true intimacy, knowing God and knowing ourselves and, above all, knowing that our cry will be heard. We come to know and to experience God’s ‘hesed’ – God’s loving mercy ‘which follows us all the days of our life (Ps 23). Our cry can never be in vain. Our hope is nothing less than hope in God’s own self – the God that we have come to know in the depths (Eph.3.18; Rom 8.31 ff); the peace and confidence to wait in patience, knowing that we will be redeemed. Only when we know the depth of our own powerlessness, poverty and vulnerability, will we know the true depth of God and why with an unshakeable certainly we can count on Him. This is what makes our waiting an act of faith, hope and love deeper than the depths from which we cry.
The psalm certainly shows us the true beauty and strength of Israel’s faith and hope which lives from the sure knowledge of God’s own faithfulness. There will be moments on every pilgrimage and on every journey when this psalm speaks to us and speaks for us.
For the Christian it will have another resonance. Psalm 130 captures the depth of Christ’s suffering, his faith, his ‘waiting’ between Good Friday and Easter morning. And so, we can join the ‘watchmen and women, all those who have waited in faith through the centuries.’ With them, in the waiting, our hope and expectation does not weaken but deepens and increases for already we can see the first light of daybreak. Christ knows the depths out of which we cry no matter how deep and despairing we may feel them to be. And anointed with his loving mercy we are raised out of the depth, even death itself, into the dawn of His life.
We can take time to pray psalm 130 but also let it pray you.
Let it speak to each moment or experience of your life.
Let it draw you into the same honest, intimate, trusting relationship with God.
Let it accompany you and show you how to be a pilgrim of hope – to be a bringer of hope – to a world that so often cries ‘out of the depths’ but without hope.
