As we prepare for the upcoming day of recollection on Saturday, March 11, what can you, dear Pilgrim in Christ, learn from these simple words, spoken by a fellow pilgrim reflecting on the day of recollection held last year?
- It was a helpful day [of recollection] for many reasons.
It is striking how quickly we pilgrims stop thinking about pilgrimage and forget the lessons that we have learned.
It is very important to get pilgrims together, in the same place, to remind one another of the lessons, and of the need to continue to walk together.
Plain observation tells that few or none of us has the will to act if we only receive e-mail messages/requests.
We need to see one another, face to face, and be present when the hard questions are asked. “Is this what Our Lord Christ is expecting or asking of us?” “Will you or I or someone else do what he is asking?” “Did you, or I, do it?” “Why didn’t you, or I or we, do it?”
Each Christian needs to exercise personal accountability to the other, especially one charged to lead.
My take-away is to get better at what I have been doing for fellow pilgrims: asking people to lead, to take responsibility; asking for a commitment, asking them – for the love of Christ and to save souls – to recruit others to help, finding an assistant for myself, and them. I think about these things often and work at them as I am able.
Because summertime is an extremely demanding period for me and my family at work, we have to force ourselves to attend to these questions, and realizing good habits of pilgrimage, all year round. As every pilgrim-organizer knows, there is never enough time to prepare for all the responsibilities of pilgrimage.
Procrastinating — not fulfilling the duties God imposes in the time HE CREATES for us to accomplish them — is the main enemy: one of the “principalities & powers of the higher realms” that St. Paul says [Eph. 6:12] we must struggle against to restore the likeness of Christ in us, lost by sin.
When will you, pilgrim, reflect a spell on those words, and then get together with another pilgrim to search for the will of Christ?
“For where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Mt. 18:20
Pilgrimage for Restoration
Come to restore. The rest will come.
28th annual — 2023 A.D.
Friday – Sunday
29 September – 1 October
“Now is the acceptable time.”
“No one makes pilgrimage alone.”
Oremus pro invicem.
In unione orationum.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
