Hear in the Holy Land | A Preliminary
On Tourism and Pilgrimage
My very first blogging reflection is that I’m a really bad blogger. Yikes.
You see, my hope was to keep track of my thoughts along this trip on a somewhat daily basis, but four very full days have already passed, and with them my entire time in Tel Aviv. Heck, I had even planned on writing a preliminary post before I left Vancouver to explain my hopes and dreams for this trip — but that didn’t even happen!
And so the temptation to simply give up on the endeavour altogether has some potency right now, but I’m going to fight it if I can. So, let’s go back to the beginning and pretend I haven’t left yet…
Why Am I Here?
Short answer: I won a bursary — The Conway Holy Land Travel Bursary, to be precise. It’s a bursary that Regent College awards, through the generosity of Dr. John Conway, to one student every year for the purposes of making a trip to the Holy Land.
As for my own personal hopes for this trip: first and foremost, I hope to travel as a pilgrim—not as a tourist. Tourists travel to escape, seeking entertainment and service as a respite from their everyday lives. Pilgrims travel to have their eyes and ears opened. Len Hjalmarson puts it well in his book There’s No Home Like Place:
Tourists are trying to forget; pilgrims are trying to remember. Tourists are looking for bargains, and aren’t really seeing at all; and they hate to be surprised. Pilgrims love to be surprised, and are looking to see.
So, rather than going to ‘see the sites’ so that I can take the pictures that prove I was there (that’s tourism), I want to listen to what the land and its people have to say (pilgrimage). Rather than seek out the services of the land (tourism), I want to bear witness to what is already going on here (pilgrimage). I don’t want to leave the Holy Land satisfied and entertained (yeah, you get the picture), but want to be influenced and at least somewhat transformed by my interaction with it.
I’m also actively seeking out local art and its artists. I’m particularly interested in how the art scene is influenced by (and how it is influencing) the ongoing tensions here between the land’s various people groups. I’ve read a lot of books about the social-cultural nature of art, and I wrote a theological research paper for Regent that urges the church to put more effort in fostering local art—because local art develops our sense of place (individually and communally), and sense of place develops our sense of human meaning. If this is indeed true, what does local art look like in the Holy Land, whose place are heavily contested by multiple parties—places whose soil has been deeply rooted into by different people groups?
Of course, I’ll be the first to say that this is all a bunch of abstract textbook theory. What does it really look like on the ground in Israel and Palestine? I have no idea. Will it be way more nuanced and messy than my school-paper theories would like to suggest? Probably. (Okay, almost definitely.) Regardless, I’m excited to find out.
So, hopefully, I’ll keep blogging so that I can keep my head straight on what I’m experiencing—because it’s all coming fast and hard.
PS—If you’re not quite sure about the history or current standing of the conflict in Israel and Palestine, you might benefit from watching this video. (And if you think it’s largely motivated by religious differences, I heartily exhort you to watch it. Because it’s really not.)
