During the summer months, the Diocese of Bridgeport will be sharing homilies from pulpits all over Fairfield County in an effort to showcase our diversity and our communities of faith.
This week’s guest homilist is Father Frank Hoffmann from St. Matthew Parish in Norwalk.
Back in the early ’90s, I made a trip to Germany to visit some relatives, and I wound up having a chat with a cousin. I don’t know what he exactly is, his grandmother and my grandmother were sisters, so whatever that makes him to me. And he, he was very fond of, at this time back then, every so often he would make a pilgrimage, the famous Camino pilgrimage: that is, to travel from France, through the north of Spain to the great church of San Diego de Compostela. Back then, it was not, I mean, it was, it was a thing. It was a thing for hundreds of years, but lately it’s become kind of an ‘in’ thing. And I’ve known more than a few people have done it.
But it’s interesting that throughout Europe, there are even roads or ways along which people can travel to different religious sites. There’s actually a way from all the way from Canterbury in England to Rome, it’s called the St. Francis Way. It still exists in many ways. And actually, Italy has kind of upgraded it; people backpack and things like that. But it’s the idea of traveling a certain amount of time to come to a place. And the people going to St. James, they wear a scallop shell. That’s the sign that they’re traveling there, to this great place.
And so there are still lots of other places too. Of course, even in England, famously, people made pilgrimages to Canterbury, to the tomb of St. Thomas Beckett, as in The Canterbury Tales, that’s what that is: a story about people making up stories on their way there.
So the idea is that they travel, and that part of that traveling is the whole experience is something happens, especially if you walk it. Things start to kind of go away. You start to start to see things a little more clearly. And I think I thought a little bit of that when I was reading the story of Elijah. The reason Elijah’s on the run is because after a confrontation between him and a huge crowd of prophets of Baal, he’s won out. And God has shown very dramatically that he’s God. And Elijah has slaughtered them all, and the Queen Jezebel ain’t happy. And so he runs into the desert and he figures, as you hear in the beginning story, he’s just like, “I can’t take this anymore. Just kill me. It would be a lot easier to be dead and be dealing with all the things you want me to do.”
But instead, he has this experience. He’s sleeping. He wakes up. There’s an angel, you know, “eat this, drink this.” And then he makes this pilgrimage, this journey, uh, that it talks about 40 days and 40 nights of walking till he gets to the mountain of God. The fact is, literally, if you could walk all day and night, you’d probably be way past the mountain of God. It’s just a symbol for a long time. And that food that God provides him gives him the strength that he needs to make the trip.
The image of the pilgrim or the pilgrimage has long been used to describe our life and the world as followers of Jesus. The idea that we are in the world, but not of the world. That we are traveling to our true home. This is a temporary place, and we will eventually get to the place that’s permanent, that is heaven. Our lives are pilgrimages then to that great place that we hope to get.
Our goal is not the mountain of God, but life on high with Jesus Christ. And we look to see what provides us with sustenance for this journey. And there are a lot of things that we could talk about. Prayer, spiritual reading, care and concern for the poor, the sacraments, of course. And, um, and of those sacraments, the most obvious is the Eucharist itself. The bread of life. As Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. The living bread come down from heaven.” That enables us to share in the very life of God. That gives us eternal life, that enables us to make this pilgrimage, this trip. It’s this bread for the journey. That is why it’s so important that we make great use of it. It is something that makes a difference.
As long as we don’t abuse the idea, receiving communion more often is beneficial to us. If we can receive it every day, that’s a great blessing. A lot of us can’t ,because for a variety of reasons, we just can’t get to church that way, but that grace that we’re given every time we receive. Now, of course, you know, you go to the other extreme, that part of the reason, many of you know, that the Church has always had a rule that you can’t receive Communion more than once a day. And the reason for that was because there were these people that literally would go from one church to another, they’d receive four, five, six times a day, with the extreme version of “more is better.” But we believe that it is what gives us all the strength we need because it is an encounter with the real person of Jesus Christ every single time.
And it’s interesting that using the same image of this trip, this food for the journey, when the church talks of the Eucharist in, in a very special way about receiving the Eucharist just before we can die, and it’s ideally the real last sacrament is meant to be the reception of the Holy Eucharist. Pretty often that can’t happen because people are not capable of receiving the Eucharist near the very end. But when we give it at that time, it’s called “Viaticum.” And that literally means “bread for the journey.” And it gives us that ability to make that final, final push to get to the goal, which you’d call heaven.
It follows many traditions. There are many faiths that have special things that they do at the end to help the person make it from this life to the next life. We give the Lord Jesus himself to assist the person on this very last leg of our journey: the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ. Whether we receive it close to the end of our early lives, or all during it, it is that food that sustains us in our spiritual lives, the true bread that enables us to make our pilgrimage to the mountain of God, the place where we may share in the joys of God’s reign forever.
