Fr Antonio Pineda
n June this year, I am going to Fatima for the first time. I am excited because I have always wanted to go and now it’s finally happening. I’m excited because it’s going to be a pilgrimage, which means I can leave behind everything for a while to go somewhere to focus on my relationship with God. In the Gospels, we read about Jesus going to quiet places to pray. This is how I feel when I go on a pilgrimage.
However, this Sunday’s Gospel reminds us that our entire life should be a pilgrimage, a journey, a path. If we truly see life this way, as it truly is, we will expect what pilgrims expect: joys and adventures, yes, but also hardship, danger, and suffering. But if we expect somehow to achieve perfect happiness with no hardships here and now — then we open the door to constant disappointment, frustration, and deep sadness.
A pilgrimage is like an adventure, because it is full of surprises — both good and bad ones. But it is also different from an adventure because it has a purpose.
Some adventures are only for fun, like going on holiday or mountain climbing. But there are adventures that have a real purpose, a real meaning and these are called quests. Bilbo Baggins, in JRR Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit, went on an adventure. Frodo Baggins, his nephew, in Tolkien’s classic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, went on a quest. He had a mission to accomplish.
The Christian life is a quest. Our mission is to defend and extend Christ’s Kingdom. Our Quest is to bring ourselves and as many others as we can safely to the Promised Land of Heaven. If that’s how we think about life, everything changes.
In the 1993 Academy Award winning movie, Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler is a selfish businessman who, halfway through World War II, turned his profitable factory into a very unprofitable cover operation to save Jews from the gas chambers. At the end of the movie, as the war ended, Schindler was standing with the people he had saved.
He looked around at their faces and then he started to break down. He held up his watch and said that if he had sold that he could have saved another five people. He did the same with his cufflinks. Then he started to list all the ways he could have saved more people if he had been just less lazy and less self-centred just a little bit sooner. He had discovered his mission, but he regretted that he hadn’t discovered it sooner.
We too have a mission. We are on a meaningful journey, a pilgrimage. Christ doesn’t want us to have any regrets, and so he reminds us of this again this Sunday, and at every Mass, when the priest tells us, “Go and spread the Gospel of the Lord”.