“Jesus: A Pilgrimage” — Exclusive Excerpt from Fr. James Martin’s New Book and More

At the main TJP site, we have an exclusive excerpt from Fr. James Martin, SJ’s new Jesus: A Pilgrimage, released today:

As I stood under the broiling sun, I was gobsmacked to see rocks, thorns and fertile ground. No one planted the thorn bushes, carted in topsoil or arranged the stones to make the locale look as it did in Jesus’s time, as if we were in a theme park called Jesus Land. They were just there.

It dawned on me that when Jesus used objects from nature to convey his message—seeds, rocks, birds, clouds, water—he may not have been talking in generalities but about these things right here. Not “Think about rocky ground,” but “Look at that rocky ground.” Not “Those people are like thorns,” but “Those people are like those thorns.” It grounded the Gospels, and Jesus, in a way that I never could have imagined. It made me think more about the way Jesus drew on nature in his parables.

…

Facing the Sea of Galilee, I wondered about the people who, in Jesus’s day, sat where I was standing now. What did they think when they heard these parables for the first time?  I thought about how glad I was that I had listened my friends and come to the Holy Land. I thought of all of these things as I stood by the Bay of Parables.

And because we couldn’t just stop there, we also asked Fr. Martin’s good friend, travel companion, and brother Jesuit, Fr. George Williams, SJ, to give us the inside scoop, the “rest of the story.” He tells us about what it was like to meet Jim Martin when he entered the Jesuit novitiate:

Jim’s family was “Culturally Catholic.” Coming from the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia they seemed a bit wary of the Jansenistic Boston-Irish Jesuits who had lured their son from a lucrative post-Wharton School career in the corporate world to the austere puritanical backwoods of New England.

Jim was a curious combination of Philly piety combined with a pronounced “unchurched” side–he wasn’t really sure if there were four or five Gospels and I’m reasonably certain he thought that Peter, Paul & Mary and Ben & Jerry were the first disciples.  But what he lacked in theological precision he made up for in pious devotion.  Sort of like, “I don’t know exactly what it is I believe, but I sure believe it!”

And more importantly, he gives us a glimpse of how Fr. Martin sees and enters the experiences he relates in Jesus: A Pilgrimage, especially the excerpted story of his time at the “Bay of the Parables.”

By following a German priest’s directions to look for “purple rocks,” we discovered a rocky beach that looked exactly like every other part of the shore of the Sea of Galilee, complete with dead fish smell and flies.  Yet to Jim, it was a revelation.  He was so excited I half expected him to run out on the water.  I wondered if the Jerusalem Syndrome would get him after all.

His excitement was infectious and, despite myself, as we moved along the shore of the Sea of Galilee in 100 degree heat with 90 percent humidity, I occasionally got a glimpse of what he was seeing–the very places that Jesus would have seen.  A landscape that despite the roads, telephone poles and banana plantations, was pretty much what it must have looked like in 30 A.D.

Jim sees the world with the eyes of an artist, and it shows in his descriptions of the places we visited.  As in the novitiate, he made me laugh every day and helped me see the Holy Land in a way that I would have missed had I gone there alone with my preconceived ideas.  His book captures the experience beautifully.

Read the whole thing, over at the main The Jesuit Post site.