Holy Land Pilgrimage: Day 1

Monday, May 1, 2023; 11:30 a.m. EDT

The day began early, with my alarm going off at 3 a.m. for a 4:15 Uber pickup for a 6:59 flight. All was well … and even blessed from the start. After all my hyperfocused packing, and me taking a little too much pride in using my new compression bags to fit everything into a carry-on sized bag … I noticed, putting on my clothes in the bleary-eyed predawn, that I’d neglected to pack any socks or underwear. I looked in the drawer and thought, “Why do I have so much underwear here?” Ugh. So far, I haven’t noticed any similar flubs with the passport, phone, chargers, wallet, etc. Praise God for clean underwear, as well as the prompt to bring it with me.

On the way to the airport, I had a good conversation with the Uber driver, a young man named Abdulai. He’s a dad of a 2-year-old, starting his own business doing oil changes at people’s homes, on top of driving folks to the airport at 4:15 a.m. We talked about longing for peace for Israel and Palestine, as well as the way power turns leaders toward self-interest. It’s a lot to think about already.

What seemed like bad news....

And as I waited for my flight from Kansas City, I got a text from Delta saying that my 2:20 p.m. flight from Atlanta to Tel Aviv has been delayed to 5 p.m. With both schedule changes from Delta (one a month ago and one today), I’ve now gotten up in the middle of the night for a late-afternoon departure. And, as I told Fr. Dominic Barrington, the pilgrimage organizer, if that’s the worst thing that happens to me today, I’m blessed.

Dominic had emailed me by the time I landed in Atlanta, saying he had gotten word of the schedule change and already notified the person picking me up in Tel Aviv. I’m grateful.

Monday, May 1, 2023, 8 p.m. EDT

We’re 10 minutes into the flight to Tel Aviv. Thanks be to God.

I mean that in a couple of ways. Certainly, thanks be to God that we’re in the air – that they found a plane without mechanical issues (in fact, one that just flew in to Atlanta from Lima, Peru); that the hours of sitting in Gate E14 are over; and that the last leg of this first step of the journey has begun.

But also, thanks be to God for the odd gift of waiting and the chance to talk with some people nearby. Some were church people taking pilgrimages, some were Israeli families presumably going home, and some were observant Jews who might have been of any nationality, including a few gathering in the corner to say their prayers together. To one side of me was a group of about 12 that defied categorization. Many looked related, so my guess would be an extended family. They spoke in a combination of English and Hebrew, I think, though my ear for Hebrew isn’t very good. But they were traveling with, and seemed to be led by, a priest. He was Roman, or at least high-church enough to be talking about Mass; but he also was studying Hebrew and maybe Aramaic with some of other members of the group. It would be great fodder for a short story.

On the other side of me was a younger Black woman. We spent most of the time doing our own thing, but I noticed that she was watching a YouTube series about Gnosticism. There were 20+ episodes, both about Gnosticism in history and in contemporary spirituality. She was also writing a blog post. Eventually, she asked me to watch her stuff while she walked around, and we chatted about how unbelievably cold it was in the terminal (she’d gone off to buy a blanket). It turns out she is Nikki Walton, and she does a daily podcast, CurlyNikki. She’s a spirituality influencer with a great journey – grew up Roman Catholic, left the Church, went to work on health-and-wellness media projects with Dr. Oz, worked at Home Shopping Network pitching cosmetics and personal-care products … and then had an awakening. She came to see that no one needed the things she was promoting; what they needed was love and the practice of spiritual presence. Eventually, she left HSN (after saying on the air about the item she was promoting, “It’s good and everything, but you don’t really need it”) and became a spirituality podcaster and blogger. Now she’s struggling with monetizing it. She had “six-figure” offers from two companies but couldn’t see how she could authentically tell people they should buy certain products after preaching for five minutes about how the presence of Love, the living Christ, is all they need. But she’s doing well enough to travel the world and make a living as an influencer.

We’d been talking for maybe half an hour when another young woman came up, saying that she hated to interrupt but she could see our auras lighting up and knew we were talking about en-spirited living. She follows a practice of herbalism and finds the divine spirit in trees and other plants, and she just wanted us to know we were glistening. She gave her name – two names, actually, but I only remember the second: “... or you can call me Nova.” It was a truly surprising, maybe astonishing, moment of connection that let me see how deeply and differently people find the Spirit that empowers us all. “God of many names” begins to capture it, but that’s still too theocentric. What we share, and what we long for, is so much more powerful than the differences reflected in our theobabble. After all, the more we talk about God, the smaller we whittle down the immense reality that will always defy analysis and categorization. Here’s where the three of us could certainly agree: God is real as God comes to us in what we feel and how we live. I might call that “incarnation” while Nova might call it two people glistening with Spirit.

It was the last thing I expected from today, especially from a five-hour delay at gate E14. But God is good – and, as my spiritual director likes to say, quoting her spiritual director, “God’s got skills.” It’s a good mindset for a journey without an agenda.