In Via
Planning a trip? Or just on the pilgrimage of daily living? We are the podcast at the intersection of faith and travel, assisting you on the journey to encounter Christ. Hear stories, discover travel tips, and learn more about our Catholic faith. Along the way, we’ll show you that if God seeks to meet us in Jerusalem, Rome, Lourdes, Mexico City, or Santiago, he also wants to encounter you - right there in your car, on your run, or in the middle of your workday.
In Via
A Civil Rights Pilgrimage: Faith, Service, and Unity with Father Dan Dorsey
How can a pilgrimage equip us for mission? Come along this week as we meet Father Dan Dorsey, president of the Glenmary Home Missioners. Glenmary establishes a Catholic presence in some of the most impoverished and racially diverse areas of the Southern United States.
In this episode, we talk to Father Dan about Glenmary's recent civil rights pilgrimage, inspired by Bryan Stevenson's book, "Just Mercy." The journey took participants to historically significant places like Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, and Memphis. We talk about the power of firsthand accounts from those who lived through the civil rights movement and the importance of empathy and unity in building a compassionate society. As we reflect on this unique pilgrimage, we are reminded of the call of the United States Bishops: “We must create opportunities to hear, with open hearts, the tragic stories that are deeply imprinted on the lives of our brothers and sisters, if we are to be moved with empathy to promote justice.”
https://glenmary.org/
Welcome to In Via the podcast where we're navigating the pilgrimage of life. We are all in via on the way and we are learning a lot as we go. I'm your host, joan Watson. Join me as we listen to stories, discover travel tips and learn more about our Catholic faith. Along the way, we'll see that if God seeks to meet us in Jerusalem, rome or Santiago, he also wants to encounter you right there in your car, on your run or in the middle of your workday. On today's episode, I am joined by Father Dan Dorsey, the president of the Glenmary Home Missioners. We talk about the work of the Glenmary Home Missioners and a recent pilgrimage that all the men in formation took to civil rights sites in the South a civil rights pilgrimage. Well, I am very excited to talk to you today, father Dan, and I would love to start with you just talking a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about who Father Dan Dorsey is.
Father Dan:Well, my name is Father Dan Dorsey. I've been with the Glenmary Home Missioners since 1972. Actually, I graduated from college, from Christian Brothers University, in 1973 with an accounting degree. Thank goodness for myself and for the whole accounting industry that I never went into, but anyway, as I began to really look into my life and to what I wanted to, do I was in Memphis and I really liked the South and I loved the people of the South and I was looking for something challenging.
Father Dan:So that's why I ended up discerning with the Glenmary Home Missioners and it's like the good old days of going into a shoe store where you tried on shoes and you found a pair that really fit. And so over these years I've had a number of different assignments. The last five years I've been in as the president. Before that I was our novice director. Before that I was eight years as president. Before that I was a pastor in Arkansas in southeast Arkansas, which is really the poor area of Arkansas. So every day is different. There's lots of challenges, but I've just enjoyed it. In fact, I just celebrated my 50th anniversary of my first oath in Glenmary Missionary. So anyway, it's been quite a ride.
Father Dan:I'm still originally from St Louis, missouri. Most of my family still lives there full time. There was five of us growing up. I was in the middle, as you know, the forgotten child, and so I have an older sister, an older brother myself, a younger brother and a younger sister, so I've been very blessed with family and have a close relationship with all of them. So other than that, that's about all I can think of. I have studied accounting, I've studied theology at Catholic University, I've studied spiritual theology at the Gregorian in Rome, and so I've had a variety of experiences over the years. It's one of the great things about being in religious life. You really meet a lot of different people in a lot of different circumstances from the whole spectrum of who people are.
Joan:Yeah, I love it. I don't think that you can be forgotten, Father. I have to say you say you're the forgotten middle child. I think anybody who's met you I don't know whether you're ever forgotten
Father Dan:I'm trying to be more extroverted in my life.
Joan:That's your goal. That's your goal. Well, could you actually talk a little bit more about Glenmary too, Because I think some people I have the honor of knowing the Glenmary home missioners through living in Nashville, Tennessee, but I think, for some of our listeners who maybe aren't from an area where Glenmary is active, could you speak a little bit about the mission there?
Father Dan:Yes, so we were started back in 1939. In fact this is our 85th anniversary and our whole purpose back with our founder, father William Howard Bishop. He was a diocesan priest from the Diocese of Baltimore, and Washington and Baltimore were in the same diocese at that point. But his idea was, and he had this concept, he had a map of the United States and he was somebody whose idea of mission just grew and grew and grew. He was a Dossus of priests that in the first 10 years he was in a place called Clarksville, maryland, and it was a tiny. Now it's one of the, if not the largest, parish in the whole Baltimore diocese, but at that time it was kind of on the outskirts and so he had this idea of mission.
Father Dan:And the longer he was a priest his idea of mission grew to the point where he looked upon all the United States and he saw there was a great mission need that he asked himself kind of a simple question. He said how is it that we said he was very mission-minded, so it was not to be in competition with others, but it was simply to acknowledge and recognize that what Vatican II did is we're all called to be missionary by virtue of our baptism. So he thought you know, we send missionaries to China, to Africa, to all over the world. Yet we have a tremendous mission need right here in the United States. So in 1939, he started the Glenmary Home Missionaries.
Father Dan:And we have a singular purpose and that is to go to places where there has never been any kind of Catholic presence. We pick out places that are poor, that are very racially diverse, that have an economic need and with few or no Catholics, and then we go and we establish the presence of the church, starting small and then hopefully one day, maybe 10 or 15 or 20 years later, having a church large enough, self-sustaining, that we can turn it back into a diocese and go on to the next place, next county. We work by counties and one of the important things is we never stay in a place forever. You know, we don't go into a place and just say we're going to be here for the next 50, 100 years.
Father Dan:We go into a place into a county, into a territory, with the sole purpose of establishing a vibrant, a vibrant and viable community, and then one day going and starting another place. So that's pretty much our story.
Joan:Yeah, it's beautiful and I think for those Catholics who maybe grew up in especially maybe, the Northeast, they can't even fathom a county not having a Catholic church. But you find that in the South and so often when you all are in I know that the county that you were in Tennessee there was no other Catholic church and you were going into this place to establish this church Um, and I just love that idea of mission territory right in our own backyard sometimes and to serve the Catholics right here.
Father Dan:One of the things I've always said to people is um, let's just imagine I grew up in St Louis, missouri, very, very.
Father Dan:Catholic area, so you know some days we would usually go to the same Mass as a family, but if there was something going on we'd say, okay, what Mass are we going to go to? And if we couldn't make it at our parish church, we'd go to all kinds of churches all around. You know, you could kind of choose exactly what you wanted. So let's just say you had four or five kids, like our family, and you had to drive an hour to get to Mass and the only Mass was at 8 am.
Father Dan:And what kind of commitment would it take to go to Mass every Sunday? I mean, it's a whole different ballgame and ballpark when you have an establishment like that. And so you know, it is really and it's refreshing to start communities from the very beginning and to watch them grow and it's almost, as you see, all the different aspects of the community taking, you know, kind of like we're taking responsibility for who we are and what we are. When I was in Arkansas I said you know, someday we're all going to move on as far as the priests and brothers that are here. If this church is going to be viable and exist, it's going to be up to you, because we're at the far end of the diocese, so you need to make this a vibrant, very vibrant community.
Father Dan:Didn't mean to interrupt you there.
Joan:I love that. No, no, this is this was. It's beautiful and it leads really into um, our topic today, where we're going to. We talk about pilgrimage. This is a podcast really about pilgrimage, and I am really inspired that you all went on a very particular pilgrimage, a very special pilgrimage, a very unique pilgrimage, and to learn, um, actually how to probably do your mission better, and I think sometimes we don't talk about that aspect of pilgrimage. The pilgrimage can really equip us for mission, and so you knew your mission territory. You know your mission territory and you went on this pilgrimage so that you could do your mission better and learn more about the people you serve, if I'm not mistaken. And so today we are going to talk about this beautiful pilgrimage you all took as civil rights sites, a civil rights pilgrimage through the South. So could you tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind this pilgrimage or what led you to plan this incredible pilgrimage to all these civil rights sites in the South?
Father Dan:So I think it would be helpful, joan, just to give you a little bit of a background. So I went to school, as I mentioned, in Memphis, tennessee. I went to Christian Brothers College now it's Christian Brothers University. So I played one year of basketball and I say that not because I was really and I'm not being humble I was no good, I was just a walk-on. And in those days, the first year, freshmen could not play with the sophomores, juniors and seniors, so there were two separate teams. So I was a walk-on for the freshman team. So there were 10 of us on the team. Basically half of us were white and half of us were black. So this is 1969. And it was still very, very rough. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated the year before.
Father Dan:So we as a basketball team and Memphis, if you know geography, is right on the border of Mississippi. So as a basketball team we would take these trips down into Mississippi to play these other small schools. And I'm telling you, it was a rude awakening. I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, a neighborhood that was basically all Catholic ethnic but still all white, and so you know, it was an awakening for me to go into these areas and to have this with my friends on the basketball team, to some of the things that we were subjected to. So you fast forward. So I have a niece and my niece gives me books for Christmas. I think she always wants to educate me, so she gave me one of the books she gave me two years ago. It was a book called Just Mercy.
Father Dan:Now many people have probably seen the movie. I don't know if you've read the book. It's by Bryan Stevenson and he was a Harvard lawyer that came down to the South to work on the death penalty and those who were unjustly in prison, on death row. So I read this book and, as my niece, we would read it together and we would talk about it. But I read the book and then I thought I was praying one night and in my prayer I thought you know, I, we really need to do a pilgrimage. I, we really need to do a pilgrimage and I, I the whole concept of pilgrimage, which is very Catholic. It's the idea that you walk the journey and that it's not just simply, um, like going on a sightseeing tour. It's, it's founded and it's based in faith and it's based on spirituality and it's based, in our case, it was based on our mission call but Jesus Christ and who he is. And then I came to kind of this, to this realization that you know, we're all pilgrims and if you think about what we just heard on Sunday about the man in the desert, we're all in this desert and we're walking as pilgrims toward the promised land and our time here on earth will end.
Father Dan:So I thought, as much as I think I know about civil rights, as much as I think that we all know who are older about civil rights, we can always learn, we're always going to be and I am always going to be a pilgrim, and so I especially wanted to get our guys in formation. We have guys whose country of origin is outside of the United States. But the more I thought about it and prayed about it. I thought it's for a lot of us, all of us. There's not a single person that I know, myself included, who cannot learn and grow spiritually on something like this.
Father Dan:So our head of justice, peace and integrity of creation, polly Duncan Collum, had very deep roots in the South. Her husband is from Greenwood, mississippi, and so she and I I I approached her with the idea. I said let's do something, let's get a bus and let's get let's about 31 of us and we're going to go to some significant civil rights places. And she knew a lot of the people and so it took two years in the planning. I would like to take a lot of credit, but I could take probably about 25 credit credit for planning, planning like something like this.
Father Dan:I had no idea what we were getting into in the sense of just all the details. I'm more of a big picture person and the details at times were just very, very. It takes a lot. You would think somebody in accounting would be really like details. Well, I never did like details, thank God, as I said, that I didn't take those. So anyway, it took two years and this past May we went and I just will hold up this book.
Father Dan:So we went to these. I sent Hugh Joe and a copy of the book and it really is just reading through it it was. We started basically at 8.30 in the morning and went to about 8.30 or 9 o'clock at night. I was exhausted by the end of the six days. We went to some of the. We started in Birmingham, then we went to Montgomery, then we went to Selma, then we went to Canton, mississippi, we went to Greenwood Mississippi, we went to Jackson Mississippi and we ended up in Memphis, Tennessee. And it was emotionally just like.
Father Dan:There's these interpretive museums in Montgomery. One is just from enslavement to incarceration. The second one is about all the lynchings, the thousands of lynchings, and the third one is the sculpture part and you're just drawn into some of this and you learn the history and you relearn, but you're again from a profoundly spiritual aspect, you're drawn into and the question that really haunted me, as I more as we went along, is why do I, why do all of us, why do we hate so much? What is it in our human being that we can take innocent people? So you visit the house of Medgar Evers in Jackson Mississippi, a very simple house where somebody waited all day and then shot him, assassinated him in front of his family. Then you take a guy like Emmett Till, who is a young man, 15 years old, who goes from Chicago to visit his family in Mississippi, apparently, was accused of looking at a white woman, was brought out, was beaten, was tortured and then was killed. And then you take, obviously, dr King, who's murdered at the Lorraine Hotel. So it was haunting, it was deeply spiritual. For me personally it was just engaging to see.
Father Dan:So during the day we usually visited these interpretive museums. At night we met with different community organizations. There was a Franciscan group that started a mission the Franciscans sisters, brothers and priests in Greenwood, mississippi, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We met with a group there. The Franciscans have since moved on, but there was a lay group that still is there, that still continues and the poverty and the issues are still very prevalent. We met with a community organizing group in Memphis excuse me in Jackson Mississippi. We met with a Catholic community in Montgomery, the Resurrection Catholic community, and we just learned in the evenings about firsthand from people who were there, people who experienced it, all of them African Americans. I just tried to listen and try to just be open and I think that's one of the biggest things to learn is you just listen, listen, listen. And you know you try not to make any judgments that all of us are prone to make, but, as I said for me personally, by the end of the six days I was emotionally drained.
Father Dan:It was just so powerful to do so from a spirituality of just the love of Jesus Christ. And how all of us, no matter who we are. We're made in the image and likeness of our Father in heaven. So why is it that there's these blocks, these blindness, that we hate each other on some very basic reasons that, at the end of the day, really don't make a whole lot of difference? So, anyway, that was the whole idea behind, and the history behind, the pilgrimage.
Father Dan:It was powerful.
Father Dan:It was powerful From across the board, everybody. I was kind of amazed because I was worried about some of the details because I had to be one of the organizers. People were completely cooperative, they were engaged. Some of the quotes we had along the way it was. Just nobody is free until we are all free. And it was funny because, with the upcoming convention of the Democrats, there was a group from Jackson, that actually tried. Democrats who tried to get into the convention in 1968 were denied.
Father Dan:You know again it's all this how do we see things through our own lens and how do we try to see things through the lens of Jesus Christ and all our sisters and brothers? And, as I said, I came away, I was deeply moved and, at the end of the day, the one thing I always knew is I am a pilgrim today and tomorrow. I won't be no longer be a pilgrim until the day I am in the kingdom of God.
Joan:Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful, father and just like thinking about not looking at these things just as something that other people did or from far away or that I'm not capable of, but like really entering into it spiritually, say how can I love today, how can I like who do I hate today, Like how, what I have to look at my own life and say how can I be more like Jesus Christ, rather than just looking at this as something that happened once in history and we move on. But what's the spiritual lesson for me and how am I a pilgrim and how am I a sinner and how do I continue to try to love? I think, because I think it can be tempting just to look at all this as history and we know it's not. We know it's not. We know that today we still have to learn and we have to grow and that we're still pilgrims. I'm interested how often you were able to.
Father Dan:But I think you know, one of the significant reasons for us is that where we work in the South, in rural areas, is and let's just for instance, where I worked in Arkansas, half the population was white and half was African American. So it was , its um, and the issues, One of the things that sat with me most in my nine years in Arkansas was just about every conversation I had with somebody, race came in as an issue, every single conversation. And you know I'm thinking how can we continue to be these people and how how do I? How am I converted my coin on the uh, how am I going to be more of an example of an apostle and an ambassador of who Christ is? I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Joan:Yeah, no, no. I think one thing that really struck me about the pilgrimage itinerary was how often you were able to meet with people and with relatives, that this isn't just something for museums, but that you, as you mentioned, were able to really listen. And what was it like to meet with relatives and people who actually either experienced these things or knew people who had experienced these things?
Father Dan:Well, first of all, the husband, danny, of our leader of JPEC, justice, peace and Integrity of Creation. Her husband grew up in Greenwood, mississippi, and so at his age it's right around my age he's a little bit older, I believe but so he grew up in the midst of all this chaos and all this turmoil and was really deeply touched and so he knew a lot of these people. So he could, even as a white person, as someone who grew up in the South, as a Southerner, could kind of relate his experience.
Father Dan:But we, most of the people, as I said, that we engaged in in the evenings, almost all of them were African Americans who were older who had not only experienced it but continued to experience what it was, and so I think the key thing for us always was just to sit and to listen to them and to try to understand not only where they were, what happened, but what is still in our own world, in our own life. How can we make it better? How can we become better apostles and ambassadors? So that was an important part and even though by the end of the day, by 830 or 9 o'clock at night, you just wanted to go to the hotel, go to bed, because it was. It was exhausting. And again, not only physically exhausting but emotionally, just because you saw the lynching museum in montgomery, for example. I mean, there's thousands upon thousands of people who are lynched and most people will never know one of the things that really struck me that I had never even you think again, you know a person my age. You would never think that half would. I would think that I would have thought about this before, and it's this.
Father Dan:It really struck me on on this pilgrimage and I really think that a lot of these were just graces within my life is. The reality was that when people were enslaved, let's imagine there was a family like my family that I grew up with others, a mom and dad and five children. Well, oftentimes, if not all the times, once somebody got to be my age, as far as 15, 13, 12, families were split up. They were sold off. So you can imagine each of the brothers and sisters, the husbands and wives they were all sold off. So you have now seven people all going to different places, probably going to different states, never again to have any contact with any of your siblings or your parents or your grandparents or your uncles or your aunts, to be kind of like that thing that just floats out there and what an identity.
Father Dan:What a loss of identity. For some reason, that never really impacted me like it did on this pilgrimage. I thought, man, who would I be as a human being if I never knew who my mom and dad was and are, I was separated from them and I didn't know what happened to them, or my brothers and sisters, who are the best gifts in my life right now? It's a who would I be? How would I have reacted, how would I have turned out? I'm? You know that that's just one of the many um things that happened with regards to slavery, enslavement, it was, it was, uh, things that you know, most of us have never even thought about. You just think well, there's somebody in shackles. Well, it's much more profound, and also the economic impact of that. So, anyway, it was for me, 73 years old, and it was an eye-opening experience, spiritually, profoundly, and everything I'd ever hoped for on a pilgrimage happened to me personally and I think it happened to the participants.
Joan:I was going to ask you about the other participants and the fact that this really was part of you know. You saw it as part of the formation for those in formation for Glenmary Home Missioners. How do you think it impacted that, like the formation going forward, those in formation to have these experiences? If it impacted you, how do you think it impacted others?
Father Dan:Yeah, I think it impacted them also profoundly and I'm going. You know it's hard to speak for somebody else, but one of our people in communications interviewed them and you know I talked to the people. That was another thing that was a byproduct that I never thought about. We're on a bus for six days together. We're eating our meals together, we're doing this together.
Father Dan:We're doing this together, so it really created a deeper bond, a deeper sense of community, and I think it had tremendous, as one of the people said to me you know, he's from Kenya. We learned about this in school when we were growing up in Kenya, but we never, ever had what this?
Father Dan:really was like and that was one of the things that on this pilgrimage that you really experienced, was as much as you could, you really began to understand what this was like. So I think it had to varying degrees, but I think it had a tremendous and profound effect.
Father Dan:I would like to do this again, to open it up to a larger group and also maybe to make it every two years for every member who is in our formation program, because isn't that part of the formation that we learn? I remember when I was studying in Italy, one of our professors said it's not a matter of learning another language, it's a matter of learning the language of an other. So learning the language of another person, so going on pilgrimage, you learn the language of what it was like, what it's still like and who these people are and how they can speak to us even today. So I think it had a great impact. Again, I, I I don't know how much you can measure that or what way you can measure it, but I I really feel like, just with the guys, they were all completely cooperative and it was not only our men in formation, we had other people, we had a number of our coworkers.
Father Dan:I liked the we were a bus of whites, blacks and browns, and people from Mexico, people from Kenya, uganda and United States, different countries of origin and just seeing us as a group. To me, that's a great image of what we're called to be. We're brothers and sisters, we're all one, and so it was just a tremendous gift.
Father Dan:And we did so. Again, I want to emphasize it was a spiritual. We began, we were Eucharist-centered, we began each day with prayer, and so we prayed throughout the whole thing, the whole days, and so it was always calling us back to in one sense, which is very significant it makes a difference between that and just going on a tour, but this is always go back to the root of our faith. Jesus christ is why we're here. Jesus christ is what we're about.
Father Dan:Jesus christ is whom we are, we need to learn about and to be open our hearts to. And so, to begin with eucharist, to begin with prayer was always an important way of trying to ask the Holy Spirit really to come down upon us and all the hardness of heart, our eyes, our ears to you know these Psalms they have eyes but they do not see. They have ears but they do not hear to really ask the Holy Spirit to change us personally that we might have those eyes, ears and have the hearts that really are open to the message that Jesus has for us.
Joan:Amen, yeah, it's only possible with him. It's only possible. Could you speak a little bit about Sister Thea Bowman For those who might not know her story and that she's up for canonization? Could you just give us a little snippet about Sister and her work and how you encountered her in this pilgrimage?
Father Dan:So we went to a place called Canton, mississippi, and we visited Sister Thea's home there. She was a convert to the Catholic faith and I believe I can't off the top of my head remember I think it was that she joined a Franciscan group that was out of Wisconsin and it was all white so and she gave a great talk to the, to the USCCB, back before her death I think it was about a year before her death and she was a powerful, powerful speaker and just again, you know, calling people, recalling them about what we are as followers of Jesus Christ, especially with the sense of the race issues that oftentimes are part of our lives.
Father Dan:So we, just we, we went there, we prayed and we saw her house. Kent, mississippi, is just a small little town and all those towns are pretty small, you know, as far as, and a lot of poverty and you know you wonder what's ever going to happen. One of the things we know in Glenmary, the rural areas where we are working pretty much, are dying and they're being emptied, emptied out, so place I can't. You just wonder what the future of a city like that is. But it wasn't. It was a spiritual experience just to go to her house, just to pray and just to to learn more about her. But we, we watched, uh, her, uh, her address to the usccb, which was very good. She One of the funny things was not really funny, but it was. She had the bishops all standing and holding. You know how they do. We shall overcome and they were all kind of going back and forth in this video. We shall overcome and we shall overcome sin, we shall overcome racism, we shall overcome all things that define us, so she's an inspiration.
Joan:Yeah.
Father Dan:Yeah.
Joan:And in the show notes I'll put links so people can find out more about her as we wrap up the episode. Father, do you have any words for us about what we can do, what you would recommend us doing? I think sometimes, in the face of racism, we can do what you would recommend us doing. I think sometimes, in the face of racism, in the face of hate, we can feel powerless, we can feel like there's nothing I can do and so, coming off this pilgrimage, what would you recommend that we do, or what would you encourage us to do, especially when we get overcome with maybe just feeling powerless in the face of hate?
Father Dan:So so I actually, joan, I am humbled by your, your question, because I really don't know. In one sentence I would say it's easy to preach the sermons. It's much more difficult and challenging to live the sermons.
Father Dan:And you know?
Father Dan:and again, the question that burned inside of me and it grew louder and louder is why do we hate? Why is it? And I think the first thing is to even examine our own lives of how oftentimes I, making an I statement, I judge people and whether it's regard to no matter what it is and do. I try to see each person as the image and likeness of the creator, of our God, our father in heaven. So I think that, and also to realize that different people are going to see things differently and I may not always agree with them and I don't have to agree with them, but you know, just I'll give you an example.
Father Dan:It really was so. Obviously, as we wrap up here, I'm sorry if I'm going a little bit longer, but one of the things when I was a novice director back between 2011 and 2019, a couple of our guys were from Kenya, so their skin is black. So that was one of the times when all this racial stuff was especially heightened and there was stuff going on and I would lie awake at night and think you know what happens if I'm, let's just say, eric get pulled over, and I don't know how to react and you know, I get out of my car.
Father Dan:The police officer doesn't understand what I'm doing, I don't understand what culturally I'm supposed to do and something happens bad. So I, I, I just I wrestled with that because I thought, you know, just sometimes we've had this happen to our admissions. You know, because of your skin color that's who you are and of course it happens everywhere. So I went to the local police I said you know, here I am, can you just sit down with our guys and just tell them?
Father Dan:if you ever get stopped by a police officer.
Father Dan:Here's what you do. Here's step one, step two, step three. And they were really good and we did that. Step two, step three, and they were really good and we did that, and it was so positive. You know it's so culturally, so how do I interact with it and how do I with people? So I just think and praying to God to open my heart, to my very eyes and ears.
Father Dan:But also as I said at the very end of the pilgrimage, to come to the realization that I am a pilgrim. I don't care if you're nine years old, if you're ninet years old, if you're the most enlightened, if you're the least enlightened, we are pilgrims as people of faith. We are pilgrims as people o. We are pilgrims and our pilgrimage is based on not what we are, but on who Jesus Christ is and how we're called to live like that. And each day when I get up, I can learn, I can be open and I can learn and walk more in the way of Jesus Christ and our Father in heaven. So that's the advice I would give. But I am humbled because after the end of the six days I knew one thing for sure, and that was I had a lot to learn and to go and to change in my own life.
Joan:Well, I think that's a great lesson of pilgrimage. I think it's a mark of a great pilgrimage if we come away from it changed, but especially just wanting to change and wanting to grow and wanting to be more like Jesus. I think that's a successful pilgrimage.
Father Dan:Yeah, yeah.
Joan:Well, thank you, father, I'm going to put in the show notes um a lot of the links to the places that you visited so that people can check these places out for themselves. And I'm really honored and I think I'm just really inspired. I should say you're approaching these places in the spiritual way that it was a pilgrimage and you began with prayer and you, you know, centered it in Christ. That we're approaching these historical places, but in the spirit of Christ, I think is really important. So I'm going to share some of those places with our listeners too,
Father Dan:thank you, very much Thank you for having me, Joan.
Joan:Yeah, it was great. Thank you, Father and listeners. Please share this episode with somebody who maybe just needs to hear this and maybe this would be food for thought for them, or they maybe just be interested in hearing this pilgrimage approach to this important time in our country's history that we can't ignore and that we need to always grow from and to figure out how we can be more like Jesus Christ. So please share this episode and continue to tune in to In Vi a to find out more about the pilgrimage of life. Thanks so much, Father.
Joan:Thanks, Joan, God bless.
