About

This trip to the Holy Land is intended to nurture spirituality and reflection among a group of twenty ministers traveling under the auspices of the Wake Forest University Divinity School. It is shaped around the idea of Christian pilgrimage in its historical, geographical, and spiritual context. These travels take pilgrims to the Holy Land and a myriad of places that are sacred to multiple religious traditions, each of which invests those locales with parallel and distinct meanings. Often these places are said to give evidence of hierophany, locations where the Sacred manifests itself in the ordinary. Places where human beings encounter the Divine in one era may become bridges to the Divine throughout history. Nowhere is this more evident than in the history of the Holy Land (contemporary Israel/Palestine). Geographically, this particular pilgrimage takes place in the Holy Land over a two-week period with one week in the Galilee region of Israel and one week in Jerusalem. In this region, geography has particular spiritual, cultural, and political implications past and present.

In an attempt to nurture spirituality—the practice of the presence of God or the Sacred—the leaders of this pilgrimage hope to use history and geography as tools for reflection and contemplation, solitude and community within a group of ministers. Indeed, the trip is designed to provide another kind of personal and communal space for encountering issues of faith in a context that is outside personal norms. It has the potential to encourage serious reflection, not only on issues raised in an immediate location, but on the nature of one’s ministerial vocation in the years ahead. In that sense the trip mirrors historic understandings of the role of pilgrimage in faith development and maturity. Participants embark on this pilgrimage while acknowledging that they follow the spiritual and physical paths of those who have visited these sacred places across the centuries.