June 26, 2009

Polish Pilgrimage - August 6-9, 2009
www.walkingpilgrimage.us

Many of you have joined us in previous years for the annual four-day walking pilgrimage from Great Meadows, NJ to the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown, PA. Commonly called the “Polish Pilgrimage,” it is a smaller version of a pilgrimage Polish Christians make each year to their own shrine in Poland to honor and venerate the ancient icon of Our Lady, an icon that tradition holds was painted by Saint Luke on a tabletop made by Our Lord Jesus.

This letter to you serves as an encouragement to those living in the NY/NJ/PA area to join us... but you can even come from CA, TX WI, or FL if you’d like.

The pilgrimage is organized and administered by Polish Americans in the area who have been running this event for twenty-one straight years. Our community of friars and sisters leads the English-speaking group of about 200-800 people from start to finish. We walk sixty miles in four fully-packed days of prayer, praise and worship. Mass, adoration, confessions, talks, sacrifice, camping, kielbasa, beautiful countryside, self-reflection, conversion, penance, laughter, offerings, thanksgivings, miracles, and community - all by God’s wonderful grace and mercy and the prayers of the Blessed Mother.

The pilgrimage serves as a sort of retreat for the spiritual life, revealing to us where we are with the Lord. Am I grateful to God? Am I fooling myself in how holy I am? Am I returning love for the Love I receive? Am I trying to give myself to God and others as Christ gave himself to me? Am I greatly self-seeking, self-dependent, or selfish in thought, desire, and motive? Is there anger and conflict in my heart that is blocking God’s grace and mercy in my life? Do I know how deeply loved and cherished I am by God? What should I do about my family, my job, my relationships, or my vocation? On the pilgrimage, we ponder these things through prayer, praise and thanksgiving, extended silence, reflection, self-denial, charity, sacrifice, and nighttime polka-dancing.

Just to share a little personal testimony, this event has become for me a monumental highlight each of the two years of my friar-life. Having not really known Our Lady prior to my joining the community, and therefore not really knowing Jesus either, she has continually made herself very present to me these last two pilgrimages, and left me with graces from her Son that I am still unpacking. I know now how very much I need her motherhood, love, tenderness, compassion, sweetness, companionship, purity, self-gift, intercession, example, correction, comfort, protection, nurture, and affection.   Through these four days with her, I’ve begun to learn who and what she is in my life. She very much wants my whole heart, mind, soul and body for her own because she wants to give my whole self to Jesus - which I need, and he wants! Mary is not some lofty idea, but a real person, and the pilgrimage has become for me a time to discover more of her, to surrender more of myself to her and thus to Jesus, to die more to my own sins, to come to know more of myself and how much I need my Savior, his grace, and his mercy.

Pilgrimage is about conversion - a change of heart and mind. We offer up annoyances, inconveniences, discomforts, poverties and pains, and we reach out to those we meet along the way instead of just associating with those we already know. We let God manifest himself to us in our encounters with new people, leaving us with a sense of his power at work in the lives of those around us, and therefore strengthening our hope. We learn to give thanks to God and to recognize the blessings he has already worked in our lives. We come to recognize the joy, peace, love, and freedom that the world cannot offer but come from the Lord alone. Conversion involves changing our lives from complaints to thanksgivings, from pessimism to optimism, from sorrow to joy, from selfishness to selflessness, from doubt to faith, from despair to hope, from sin to the freedom to live eternally today!

Ave Maria!

Br. Aloysius Marie Mazzone, CFR

St. Lawrence Friary, Bronx, NY