The Experience In centuries past, a Holy Land pilgrimage was a difficult and strenuous trek, and even nowadays, with ease of travel, air-conditioned tour buses and hotels with buffet breakfasts and amenities, there are a few believers for whom such physical endurance is a reflection of the spirit of their faith. The traveling Christian preacher Arthur Blessitt, for example, undertook a 22,500 km pilgrimage trek on foot, carrying a wooden cross through five continents and 30 countries before arriving in Jerusalem in 1977, where he walked from the Mount of Olives to the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and from there to the Garden Tomb, where he preached. While this certainly is not a standard, many pilgrimage leaders believe in the traditional value of a grueling journey and in letting pilgrims be pilgrims instead of tourists. Pilgrims, they maintain, should travel the topography of the Holy Land from North to South, top to bottom. They should feel it with all of their senses, recalling the places they have read about. These thoughts echo the words of St. Paulinus nearly 1400 years ago: “No other sentiment draws people to Jerusalem than the desire to see and touch the places where Christ was physically present, and to be able to say from their own experience, ‘We have gone into his tabernacle and worshipped in the places where His feet stood.’” They were reechoed in May 2009 by Pope Benedict
Holy Land and locate the holy sites. In 326 AD, guided by her dreams, Helena discovered what she believed was the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the holiest shrines for the majority of Christian believers today. If, as some scholars believe, there is a grain of truth to claims that the Empress found the true cross in Jerusalem, together with the nails used in the crucifixion, then Helena can even be said to be the first archeologist in the Holy Land, along with being one of its most prominent early pilgrim visitors). Decade after decade, in the centuries following Empress Helena, the trend for pilgrimage travel kept growing, and reports exist of pilgrimage visits from all over the Christian world at the time. By the 10th and 11th centuries, the great age of pilgrimage had arrived, stimulated, it may be argued, by the significant increase in the construction of Christian buildings in the Holy Land from abound 950 A.D., when millennium panic began to set in, and continuing as acts of gratitude afterwards, when the world did not come to an end. Christians from all over the world sought out the Holy Land, until about the mid-15th century, when the surge in pilgrim travel began to subside. Historians say the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the backlash against church indulgences that led the 16th- century Protestant Reformation, may be some of the reasons for the dampened enthusiasm and for pilgrims becoming the object of satire and ridicule, as can be seen in works of popular literature of the time.
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