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His pilgrimage to the Holy Land last February was kind of like that, only bigger. “This was more important than that because it’s a matter of faith,” Schaller said.
The priest at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, Schaller traveled to the Holy Land for 10 days with a group of 23 priests, including Archbishop Raymond Burke. He went thinking that he might want to lead a Holy Land pilgrimage himself and came back convinced that it was something he needed to do. He wants others in his parish and from the surrounding area to see what he had seen, and more importantly, to feel how he felt.
“It was a remarkable, remarkable trip,” said Schaller, who will lead his own pilgrimage next Feb. 8-18. “To go to those places is a tremendously enriching spiritual experience. It brings a lot more stuff alive. To actually see the Sea of Galilee or be in Jerusalem and see the Mount of Olives, it makes it so much more real.”
Schaller, a 1975 Holmen High School graduate, has twice been to Rome and served in Okinawa with the Marines. But he said all his world travels, even his visits to Rome, pale compared with seeing the places where Jesus walked. And the amazing thing is, he said, much of it remains undeveloped, so it looks like it could have 2,000 years ago.
The pilgrimage in February will be the same one Schaller took this year and will include visits to the Sea of Galilee, Cana (where Jesus performed his first miracle), the River Jordan, the Tomb of Lazarus, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Mount Zion and a host of important sites in Jerusalem, including the Via Dolorosa (Stations of the Cross).
One of the most moving sites for Schaller was the spot where the high priest tried Jesus the night before his crucifixion. The building no longer remains, but the underground cells where Jesus would have been held overnight are still there. The lowest one is called “the pit” and Schaller said that is where it is believed they would have held Jesus.
Schaller and the other priests were able to descend to the pit, where they read Psalm 88, a lamentation psalm of a man who’s being abandoned. “It was most evocative, given where we were standing,” said Schaller, who said he could easily imagine Jesus calling up that psalm from memory as he awaited his fate in the pit.
Schaller will lead the pilgrimage with a priest from Stevens Point, Father Kevin Louis. Every day, they will say Mass at one of the sites visited.
For Schaller, who started at St. Elizabeth in June 2005, the pilgrimage to the Holy Land was just the right amount of time and was the spiritual experience of a lifetime.
“You’re seeing so many things that are part of the faith. ... It was really a tremendous spiritual gift to be able to do that,” Schaller said. “Now when I read the scriptures there’s something that comes to my mind.”
Contact Randy Erickson at randy.erickson@lee.net or (608) 786-6812.
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