Saturday, December 28, 2013

Packing and unpacking


We are getting close to our departure date (t-minus 3 days), and so I am finally starting to compose my mental list of what I want to bring with me to Israel.  As usual, the greatest problem of any seminarian is what to read.  We always get lots of books from various people for Christmas (in my case, my teaching parish pastor, the vocations director, the rector, and the Archbishop), which when paired with the books that we should have been reading over the semester, and fun literature means that I have a lot of options to pick from.

The other thing that I needed to do was go to confession.  This helps satisfy the paranoid part of me that if something happens when flying (I hate to fly), I’ll die with fewer sins on my soul (and so get to skip over or spend less time in purgatory).  But all joking aside, I know that when we travel in these large class groups, I tend to lack patience, and so it’s better to be fortified with grace before getting into these stressful situations traveling with large groups.
Fortitude from the Saint Paul Seminary.  I wanted to include
 the painting of patience from the dome that's over the high altar
at the Cathedral, but couldn't a picture online.  Fortitude is the
 governing virtue for patience per St. Thomas Aquinas
I still have a lot of packing to do before leaving, but I’m starting to get really excited about our pilgrimage.  Please keep praying for us, and if you have any particular intentions, feel free to leave a comment.
-JP

Friday, December 20, 2013

Pilgrim's Path: Egeria

We at the seminary are finally done with finals, which means I have no excuse not to update our blog.  I wanted to post something about packing, but I haven't even come close to starting.

Instead I thought I would post about a (possible) Saint who has made the pilgrimage that we'll be making in 11 days.  Egeria (also known as Aetheria or Etheria or somehow Sylvia) was a Galician matron (Galicia is the Roman province that composed most of Spain and matrons were wealthy, usually landowning women with a certain status in the Roman Empire) who wrote about her experiences on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the early 380's.

Livia, the wife of Caesar Augustus, dressed as a Roman
 matron.  Though the official clothing of Roman matrons didn't change
 much in the 4 centuries between Livia and Egeria, Roman society did.
 This is important because she wrote the first travelogue of the holy sites, and much of what she wrote about tells us about how Christians in the holy land were living just after the legalization of Christianity, especially how they prayed and conducted liturgy.  She also tells us about how Christians in the early Church were preserving various holy sites, which helps confirm their pedigree and even mentions some relics that were eventually removed by St. Helena to Constantinople (St. Helena will be another one of these posts) and then somehow ended up in Rome (relic theft wasn't against canon law at the time).
Roman matron from about 80 years before Egeria.
Unfortunately only fragments of her letters back to her community in Spain survive, but she still is a valuable primary source for what life was like in Christian Palestine.  You can go to a interactive website tracing her writings by clicking this sentence.
My borrowed copy of Egeria' writings. The
student worker was not happy that I tried to
check out 10 minutes before they closed for Christmas.
I hope everyone has a very blessed and merry Christmas!
-JP

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

A new trip and a new blog

Welcome to the blog for the Saint Paul Seminary's class of 2015's trip to the Holy Land.  That's quite a long descriptor, but it's the best we have.  For those of you following us from last year's blog from our trip to London, welcome back.  For anyone new, welcome.

The point of this blog is to help you keep up with our upcoming trip to Israel.  We'll be leaving December 31st and be back on January 24th, so please pray for us during our trip, and if you want us to pray for you, please leave a comment either here or with one of the men of Theology 3 who will be going.
-JP