True Life in God Pilgrimage 2007 Testimonies from Youth and
Clergy
A Testimony from TLIG Youth
 It
was the last day of the pilgrimage. Nobody wanted to return back
to the world - and how could anyone desire that anyway?
After we've spent ten days with people we have never met -
and at the same time felt like we have known them for ages, as
if from long before the pilgrimage - how could we now separate?
After being able to share with everyone our deepest thirst for
God, how could we return home where so few can understand us?
After praising God and singing day and night, how could we
return back home where we are absorbed by our daily duties?
After we have ALL been ONE under the name of God yet among those
who before the pilgrimage were strangers, how could we return
home and be alone now among our own? Those were ten refreshing
days I will never forget. The bonds between the members of the
TLIG family are tightened. The youth group was amazing! The
songs were inspiring! The praising was powerful! The faces were
happy, joyful and luminous! Every mass, every prayer, every song
commended a deep spiritual experience! The presence of God was
noticeable! A foretaste of the Kingdom To Come! Now we are
back. The pilgrimage has ended but the effect it produced in our
hearts and our spirit remains. We received a fire in our hearts,
and we are to show this fire of love to the world! It is up to
us to keep this fire burning, by being open to the Holy Spirit,
through prayers and action! Thanasis Ioannidis, TLIG Youth
A Testimony from Clergy
Below is a personal reflection on the 2007 True Life in God
Pilgrimage, written by The Rev’d Canon Dr. Gavin Ashenden,
Lecturer in the Psychology of Religion at the University of
Sussex, Theological Canon at Chichester Cathedral.
 Any pilgrimage takes place at several levels all at once;
places, prayer, purgation and people, and so it was with this
one.
PLACES:
Perhaps this is the most immediately accessible aspect of a
pilgrimage. One visits places that were important in the history
and experience of the Church and the wider pilgrimage through
time and space. Everyone’s reflections on these will be
different, but for each of us one or two of these places will
have a special impact. It was captivating to see the tombs in
Cappadocia, where Christians hid in times of trouble. The
landscape was like nothing I have ever seen before.
But what struck me most was the house of Mary in Ephesus. A
number of people talked about the effect of this place. I did
not know what I was looking for, although one of the ways in
which the True Life in God messages have changed me is to open
my eyes to the importance of Mary, our Lord’s Mother. To go on
pilgrimage is to know that one’s views are going to evolve, be
clarified and sometimes completely change. I had always known,
as an Anglican, that She was important theologically. I had
always treasured Her title of Theotokos. But it was other
priests and people who talked about their closeness to Her
rather than me. I was a little bemused by this, and thought that
perhaps it was just part of the psychological profile; a way of
interacting with the feminine perhaps.
Then I found in the messages how vivid, alive, important and
involved St Mary was. And I realised that it should no longer be
a matter of personal preference, but should become something
much stronger in my prayers and my relationship with the Lord.
Her house and the place it was set added strongly to this
developing awareness. There was a particular strength of colour
in the place. The air was a little more luminescent, it seemed
to me. The grass had a lusciousness that was out of the
ordinary. It was fertile and rich and deep and vibrant. The
Eucharist was particularly joyful. This was not a matter of
group dynamics; it was entering into a deeper place in God, in a
way that is simply given. That place gave it; which of course
means our Lady gave it. The place does not provide exclusive
closeness to our Lord and His Mother, but it shows to what
depths we are being called. And perhaps by our prayers and
attention, we ourselves can allow Her and our Lord to make the
places we are set in wider and more luxuriant gateways into the
Kingdom.
Ever since I knew we were coming to Izmir, Ephesus, I have been
hearing in my mind an echo of the chant ‘Great is Diana of the
Ephesians’. It’s clear from Scripture and history that Ephesus
was a magnificent place, understandably full of its own
importance. Walking down the main street, my admiration for St
Paul grew immeasurably. To arrive here with the Gospel and take
on all this power, wealth and vested interest, and to become so
threatening to them as Acts describes, as well bringing people
to an experience of the risen Christ…. what courage and what
holiness.
Patmos was the most moving of all for me. It may have been my
imagination, but I felt as through there was a grey veil over
Turkey, and it began to lift as we moved towards the Greek
islands. It felt like metaphysics rather than atmospherics, but
whatever it was, it was real and much more than the weather.
Shortly after being converted as a young law student I had met
an Anglican priest who told me of how deep an experience of
renewal he had experienced when he had gone to Patmos and sat in
St. John’s cave and read the Apocalypse in Greek. One day, I
thought, I want to do that. The day had finally come, 30 years
later.
And so another change the pilgrimage effected; relationship with
the last book in the Bible. In academic theological circles, it
has long been assumed that the Apocalypse was not written by the
same person who wrote the fourth Gospel; and if John the beloved
disciple wrote the fourth Gospel, then another John wrote the
apocalyptic. But my experience on Patmos has started to inform
my outlook again on the dynamics of the kingdom of heaven.
The argument goes that the style of writing, of grammar,
vocabulary, the grasp of Greek itself, is very different between
the two texts. I learnt now of St John’s secretary, known in
tradition even if not trusted in academia. The possibility that
some of the responsibility for this belongs to John’s
amanuensis, who did the writing, restored the book to me as a
source of revelation and inspiration. It has been put back on my
theological map. More important even than that, was my discovery
that in certain parts of the TLIG messages our Lord quotes
widely from the Apocalypse. My theological mind has been
changed. If Jesus is right, I must be wrong. And I find myself
becoming attuned through the messages to a new taste for
metaphor and hyperbole that I already recognised as an accent of
our Lord’s in the Gospel, but which is particularly vivid in the
TLIG messages.
And my imagined view of the cave had been all wrong! I had seen
it as a traditional cave on sea shore. Instead it was more like
a womb in the hillside.
PRAYER
I found something of a shift taking place in my experience of
the concelebrated Eucharist. The first experience had been
astonishment that such a thing could happen in front of my eyes.
To see a Cardinal Archbishop reverently sharing in the Eucharist
presided over by the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem was more
moving than I can find words for; a healing of so much
misunderstanding and antagonism.
On the last pilgrimage of 2005, I saw these celebrations as a
futuristic prophetic witness of what God wanted, but might only
make available in the Church at some long distant time in the
future. This time I saw them as utterly normal. It was what we
did more regularly in our denominational fragmentation that was
the aberration; this togetherness around the altar was the
Church. This was normal. This was more real. At last, like a
Christmas day when a family that had been scattered to the four
corners of the earth and out of touch with each other too long,
came home to sit around one table and celebrate. We are not the
Church without each other.
Inevitably the TLIG pilgrimage raises the question of how right
it is to suspend the theological questions that constitute the
road towards sacramental unity. In the messages we find that the
Lord reverses our preoccupation with the theology. When the
Eucharist was celebrated each day with the different faces of
the Church, Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican, all infused by the
Holy Spirit, the answer became so clear: around the altar first.
Instead of the Eucharist and our sacramental theology and Church
politics being the determining issues, here instead was a healed
Church; our Lord’s Body restored: the glory of the separate
strands woven together as He became present amongst us in the
bread and the wine, and in the devotion, adoration and love.
These daily Eucharists turned a theological viewpoint into the
foretaste of the Kingdom of heaven.
Each celebration had its own flavour of delight. But the two for
me that held the most intensity were at St. Mary’s house in
Ephesus where the air and ground was charged with a sweetness
that flowed into our prayers, and at Pentecost on Patmos where
standing above the cave in which St John was given a glimpse of
the future of time and space, drawn together in our Lord’s
purposes, we too were given a glimpse of the Church drawn
prophetically together in the Lord’s purposes, become one in the
Eucharist, drawn together by the centripetal energy of love.
But there is a cost in this. Now at home, when the Eucharist is
offered, I look round and say, where is the rest of the Church?
PURGATION
Something happens when one reads the messages. I have become
aware of some internal work taking place. Perhaps it is because
they are a conversation with the Lord, and in any conversation
the heart is opened up in dialogue. And if opened in dialogue,
one is never exactly the same person after the conversation that
one was before: however infinitesimally small, a change has
taken place.
During the pilgrimage this process seemed to be sped up. My
mind, which earns its living as an academic as well as a priest
was brought captive to the adoring heart in a way that reverses
the normal pattern of life for me. For some time now, I have
been pondering on how the mind and the heart should relate to
each other in discipleship. My clue should have been found in
the Orthodox aphorism that one is to come before the Real God
with the real Self, with the mind in the heart.
I found during this pilgrimage that many of my normal views were
changing fast. The heart had priority. The mind has a job to do,
and I love it. But the priority was the heart, and the mind was
invited to stand in the heart, enclosed by the heart. In
worship, the mind steadily quietens as the heart becomes the
dominant partner. Something in the pilgrimage evoked the heart
in a particularly stirring way. It may have been being in the
company of the whole Church – it may have been so much prayer
preceding it – it may have the potency of the united Church in
love and worship in such a unique way; but it had the effect of
speeding up the inner cleansing that the presence of God brings.
PEOPLE
One of the most exhilarating aspects of a pilgrimage is the
expectation of the people the Lord will send us to and send to
us. Each of the two TLIG pilgrimages have etched people in my
memory quite as much as places. So, casual words at a meal can
become incisive words, sculpted by the Holy Spirit, that speak
to a situation that one hardly knew even required addressing.
The pilgrimage almost takes the form of a drawn out confession
in which things get shared, absolved, and processed into the
dynamics of the Kingdom of heaven. There was such a lot of
wisdom. And even in less charged conversations there was a flow
of love and intimacy and kindness that decorated the days.
Without recounting the conversations themselves it is not easy
to give a flavour of how the days seemed to have this benign
intensity of encounter. Perhaps most of all, there was this
comfort that one’s longing to love the Lord, to encounter Him
and to stay close to Him, was more normal that the routine of
every day life away from these companions sometimes suggested.
Throughout my Christian life I have been so delighted when the
presence of Christ leaps out of the eyes of someone who carries
him in their heart. In this pilgrimage, one of the strongest
memories will be one or two fellow priests, particularly those
whose English was poor or non-existent, but with whom I felt a
profound bond of love, and a very deep respect as I saw how much
of Jesus they carried in their eyes, and minds and hearts. This
was the unity of the Church, the charism of Christ. This was my
food for the journey of this True Life in God pilgrimage as well
as the other one that is the gift of my life.
Fr Gavin Ashenden.
The Rev’d Canon Dr. Gavin Ashenden,
Lecturer in the Psychology of Religion at the University of
Sussex,
Theological Canon at Chichester Cathedral
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