Innocents Abroad, Reflections on a Pilgrimage to Israel
February 16th, 2010In 1867, Mark Twain joined a group of religious pilgrims and boarded the Quaker City, a retired Civil War side-wheel steamer with auxiliary sails coming off commissioned duty by the Union Navy in the War Between the States. When the war ended, the ship was retrofitted as a cruise ship for a five-month cross-Atlantic journey that visited various ports of call along the Mediterranean Sea until it reached Palestine, its ultimate destination. Not yet Israel, not even British Palestine, what we call “the Holy Land” was mostly populated by Muslims and Arab Christians and was still a part of the fragmenting Ottoman Empire.
The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims’ Progress, Twain’s best-selling book, was based on an actual expedition and in typical Twainian sarcasm he combined sassy witticisms about his fellow travelers and a surprising reverence about the sacred locales they visited. As was his habit in documenting his travels, the book was originally published as a series of newspaper columns sent to curious readers back home.
Notably, his writing style went from teasing sarcasm to kindly respect once he landed in Israel. The religious piety he had at first mocked in his fellow travelers quieted as he himself became more cognizant of the sacred land he was visiting. How was it that Twain’s biting sarcasm gave way to a softening recognition he was on holy ground? Why Twain’s fascination with a religious pilgrimage we might ask?
The Holy Land was an exotic land just opening up to modern discovery as archaeologists diligently labored to uncover sites where Bible events had occurred but were lost due to centuries of neglect. The age of inquiry depicted by fictional character Indiana Jones had dawned and the risky exploits of University expeditions recognized the need to protect the artifacts by collecting them in museums where they would be shared with the world rather than hidden away in private collections.
Thus, the scholars began the work of peeling back the rocks and dust to uncover long-lost ancient cities with hidden artifacts that brought these places back to life. A new world was being explored beneath the feet and Christian pilgrims couldn’t resist its charms.
Religious pilgrimages have continued since that time to our own as millions of people of faith travel every year. Christian travelers from all over the world make the journey of course, but they are not alone as Muslim pilgrims and Jewish visitors make the trip for their own sacred reasons.
Because the interest in traveling to the land that gave birth to three great religions is driven by one’s spiritual quest to see where the sacred stories occurred, this kind of travel is more than mere sightseeing such as for those who visit the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. Why a religious motivation to pilgrimage to the land where Bible events occurred? I recently made a visit to Israel along with a group of church members and here are my reflections on the value of this trip …
Drinking in the beauty of the locales and inspecting for oneself the connectedness of the sights and sounds opens up a new way of experiencing the stories as one can behold that the stories have a life of their own that cannot be experienced through reading or even diligent study.
Do you see how this goes? The Bible unfolds in the mind and in the imagination of the heart as one travels across the face of the land. The travelers become pilgrims because the nature of the trip has transcended a vacationing group of sightseers. There’s holiness afoot and the pilgrims’ understanding of Bible events takes on new meaning. The group explores sites that are important to the Hebrew Scriptures all the while exploring sites where Christian events occurred.
It’s a powerful thing to explore the holy locales of both Testaments and to see for the first time that they are what novelist Flannery O’Connor might describe as “stories on top of stories.” They are events in a holy drama depicted in places adjacent to and on top of one another in a very literal sense. Walking among the ruins of biblical sites where sacred stories occurred gives us the chance to think about sacred history in multi-dimensions as we think how the woven stories of the Bible are steeped in geography, politics and faith.
I’ve witnessed Christian pilgrims, particularly those who’ve dedicated themselves to studying the Bible their whole lives, walk among biblical sites like little children as they behold places where Bible stories occurred. They inhale its physical dimensions (its length and breadth and height) as deeply as they can hoping to imagine the story that’s been held in the mind’s eye only from reading the stories and watching them come back to life. They drink it all in - in awe that the ancient story occurred at this particular place on the earth’s surface and not just as a story written so long ago that it has lost its meaning as a story in reality.
“This story happened right here,” they whisper reverently to their fellow travelers who nod in quiet agreement. They giggle like little children as they share their sense of awe at having arrived at the particularity of this place that occurred so long ago. Right here, they seem to be thinking. “This story from my Bible occurred right here,” they whisper reverently.
An up-close adventure such as that of a pilgrimage to modern-day Israel helps one see the Bible as an incarnational collection of stories. Whatever one makes of the Bible’s stories (each person makes his or her own meaning of these things), one cannot deny they are presented as happening in the particularity of time and place. Whatever one makes of their meaning a sense of holy awe cannot be avoided or even denied.
Pilgrims encounter the land and discover the stories that have been read passively on the pages of our Bibles are now illuminated and deepened by walking the land and beholding with one’s own eyes these sacred texts as an altogether new reality. In the end, faith is deepened and nothing about the word “sightseeing” is adequate to frame the experience.
In the end, how did Twain view his adventures? All said and done, he validated the positive value of traveling outside our small provincial worlds to explore the larger worlds of others in this telling observation: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

