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Finding Spirituality Father Richard Fragomeni Destinations are important. People want to know where they are going and when they will arrive. As a child, sitting in the back seat of my Dad’s ’57 Chevy, I remember asking, “Where are we going, Dad?” and, “Are we there yet?” These questions, coming from the impatience of a 7-year-old on a family trip, never go away. We want to know where we’re going and have an idea of when we’ll get there. Humans need that direction in life. We crave a sense that we are moving toward some destiny, so that life is not a frenetic reaction to day-to-day concerns. That’s why we invent calendars, road maps, strategic plans, goals and objectives and Post-It notes on refrigerator doors. A sense of purposeful movement in an established direction is another way of saying “sanity.” People are sane when they know where they are going. We are insane when we have lost our bearings and have no sense of time or place. On Jan. 1, Christian churches, along with most of the world, reached a destination, the Jubilee year of 2000. Doors were opened, bells were rung, fireworks were displayed, all proclaiming that we had arrived. Pope John Paul II had pointed us in the direction several years before, with his exhortation to “open wide the doors for Christ.” In his writings about the Jubilee, the bishop of Rome stressed that the destination reached at the millennium was to be a new starting point for the church’s ongoing journey in faith. But it’s more than that, too: The Holy Year, announced the pope, is to be a “terminus ad quem:” a destination which then becomes a place of departure to continue the journey into a new era of mercy for all creation. To celebrate this destination\departure during the Holy Year, the pontiff called Catholics to make pilgrimages. These pilgrimages are meant to be journeys of the heart toward our true destiny: life in Christ. We have been asked to travel outwardly, so that we might travel inwardly to the place where God’s mercy can be experienced and shared with others. The pilgrimages we make are ways to express our desire for conversion and a change of life. Our destination of place and time illustrates our willingness to arrive at the source of justice, inclusivity and service: the reign of God. In other words, the pilgrimages we are asked to make are not interesting trips to collect frequent flyer miles of salvation. Rather, a pilgrimage during this Holy Year is a commitment to give God access to our lives, so that Christ may be all in all, and so that the Holy Spirit may transform the world. Pilgrimages express our desire to receive the gift of God’s excessive mercy and to travel beyond ourselves to receive it. Feb. 22 is the first of those pilgrimages. On that day, the doors of the Jubilee churches across the Archdiocese of Chicago will receive pilgrims. It is the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter. This feast celebrates the unity that we know in the apostolic ministry of Peter, symbolized by his cathedra, that is, his chair, and passed on to the whole church for 2,000 years. As a pilgrim people, our destiny is this unity, to become one body, one spirit in Christ. This is the unity that Peter proclaims. Our direction and our sanity, therefore, will only be known when our journey leads us to this holy communion with God. On that day, we will reach our destination and know that we are home at last. Fragomeni is vice rector of the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii, one of the Jubilee sites. He also is associate professor of liturgy and preaching at Catholic Theological Union.
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