An Individual Journey

After being in the Holy Land for over two weeks and as we begin our prayerful preparations for Christmas, this week presents to us an opportunity to reflect on the movements of God throughout our pilgrimage experience.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this experience is to see how each man is having a unique experience, one that God has personally tailored for him.  While a visit to the Mount of Temptation may have been a particularly powerful experience of God's love to one of us, another might have felt dry and detached.  While one can look across the Judean desert and see his own deserts and yearn for God to lead him to green pasture, another simply sees sand and a monotonous landscape.   While we are journeying together during this pilgrimage, each of us is having a different response to the same experiences.  In other words, the Holy Spirit is acting uniquely on each one of us.

The personal nature of the pilgrimage is but a smaller aspect of the personal faith journey that each one of us takes.  While our destination is the same - complete immersion into Trinitarian life and love - the road the each of us walks is beautifully unique.  We can sometimes make the mistake of believing that growing in holiness can only occur in a specific way.  We hear that we are to use the great saints as models of lives of holiness and we can think that we must exactly reproduce their actions.  Rather, what we are called to do is to imitate their passion, their desire for God and their responsiveness to the movements of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit's guidance is unique and personal because each of us is unique. What is the same, however, is the gentle invitation into the Father's loving embrace.  The hardest part, at least for me, is to trust that God is always leading me to himself, knowing that all I must do is follow. 

Holiness can look like many things but, in the end, it always looks like our true self.  The sooner we let go of the idea of what our holiness is “supposed to” look like, the sooner the Spirit can lead us down the personal path that God has lovingly prepared.