Weekly Reflection – Pilgrim People

Earlier this week I found myself attending a meeting of cathedral precentors at Westminster Abbey. Not in the Abbey itself, however, but in a rather impressive room known as the Jerusalem Chamber. This was once the principal room of the Abbots of Westminster, before the Reformation, and was built in the fourteenth century. Today, it forms part of the Deanery, and my colleagues and I were thrilled when the Dean allowed us to use it. It’s certainly an impressive space, with a painted medieval ceiling and sixteenth century tapestries on the walls (some of which form part of the same set as those kept at Hampton Court Palace).

No one knows quite why it was named ‘Jerusalem’, though the name played an important part in one of the most dramatic events of the room’s history: the death of a king. It is said that in 1413 King Henry IV, intending to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, fell ill when praying at St Edward’s Shrine inside the Abbey. He was brought to the Abbot’s lodging and laid in front of the huge fireplace in the Jerusalem Chamber, where he recovered consciousness. The king asked where he was and, on being told ‘Jerusalem’, realised he was going to die because it had been foretold to him that he would die in Jerusalem. There was no need for King Henry to worry about never reaching the end of his pilgrimage; he was about to unexpectedly encounter God in the here and now.

Like Henry IV we are all pilgrims seeking to deepen our relationship with God as we journey through life towards our heavenly home. The act of making a pilgrimage seems to entail traveling to a sacred place to encounter the divine. But what many of us fail to recognise is that it is not simply the end of the pilgrimage that is important but the journey itself – the encounters and signs and challenges we find along the way. As a pilgrim people how then do we begin to encounter the holy in our everyday lives? How do we recognise God in our surroundings, in those around us, in ourselves? Let us learn from the story of Henry IV and appreciate that God makes himself known to us not only at the end of life’s journey but at every point along it, often in the most surprising of ways, and often in the most unexpected of places.

In Christ,
Canon Kathryn