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February 17, 2008

Around the church in 365 days

By Tania Mann

STAFF WRITER

Nicaragua, Israel, Uganda and Spain all in one night. A dream: 365 days in 365 different places, each destination a new opportunity to experience Christ made flesh in our world today.

“Forget about it,” the dreamer was told by his spiritual director. “If you can forget about it, then it was nothing; but if it keeps coming back to your heart, then it is something of the Spirit, and we need to pay attention to it.”

He could not forget.

David Heimann, 33, pastoral associate at St. Ignatius Parish, 6559 N. Glenwood Ave., made his dream a reality, having visited 365 different parishes around the globe in 2007 for daily Mass, with the support of Ad Solidatatem, a group initiated because of his idea and dedicated to “evoking solidarity in the Roman Catholic Church through prayer, education, and development of the poor by building personal relationships with Christians throughout the world.”

“I abandoned everything I knew,” Heimann wrote in the daily blog he kept up during his travels. “I left my fishing nets at the boat. I followed.”

Every day, he began with the same simple prayer: “Lord, lead me where you need me to go and show me what you need me to see.” And every day he said he felt his prayer was answered.

Stripping himself of preconceptions and securities, Heimann experienced human-to-human encounters that he said gave him a different sense of sanctuary.

“I visited the tomb of the Holy Sepulchre, Lourdes and Gethsemane, but when you truly can recognize the presence of God in the simple and the poor, that’s when you know you have really achieved the spiritual journey of a pilgrim,” Heimann said. “When I met another simple pilgrim in a Sierra Leone village who works in the mines, who comes to the church because he experiences God there — that is close to the holiest sanctuary I have ever visited.”

Eucharist everywhere

Throughout his travels, Heimann realized that true holiness comes from Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, wherever it is celebrated.

“The Eucharist was the center of the experience — even when I felt lost and abandoned, I always understood the Eucharist,” he said. “You can go to a poor village in Zimbabwe and still experience the same love. It was always there.”

Heimann said he now has a better understanding of “the mystery of the church as one body yet diverse in its members.”

“The Eastern church has a heart to the church, and the European and American have an intellect,” Heimann said. “Africans have the soul of the church. The Latin church has a certain passion, almost like the blood of the church, and together they make a whole.”

Only as a unified whole, he said, can we live Mark’s message in 12:28-34, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

Finding recognition

It was amid these diverse cultures that Heimann came across a different type of abandonment.

“I wish I could show people [here] how their fellow Christians are begging for recognition but they feel forgotten and abandoned,” he said. “I wish I could show [them] that they have so little, yet they have so much more faith than us with so much privilege.”

Heimann said he now realizes that, more than a physical journey, it is the spiritual journey that counts. “America doesn’t do pilgrimage because we think we’ve already arrived,” he said.

“We think this is the Holy Land. In doing so we’ve lost that sense that there’s another journey that we must make, one to the center that lives in the heart of every human being. This discipline of being a pilgrim is recognizing that our ultimate home is not here. Our ultimate home is in heaven.” To read about Heimann’s trip and view photos from the places he visited, visit www.adsodalitatem.org.

Stops on his trip

Here are a few of the parishes Heimann visited in 2007:

  • Korean Martyrs shrine, Saenamteo, Seoul, South Korea
  • Xikai Cathedral, Tianjin, China
  • Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, Mapachapa, Mexico
  • Basilica de San Sebastian, Diriamba, Nicaragua
  • Cathedral of Azogues, Our Lady of the Clouds, Azogues, Ecuador
  • St. Joseph Parish, Njala-komoya, Sierra Leone
  • Cathedral of the Angels, Los Angeles, Calif.
  • Holy Spirit Parish, Kumasi, Ghana
  • St. Sebastian’s, Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria
  • Christ the King Parish, Rwanda
  • Family of Dennis Kiyenje, Uganda
  • Ss. Peter and Paul, Kijenge, Tanzania
  • St. Joseph’s, North Pretoria, South Africa