December 22, 1999
TC residents part of Holy pilgrimage
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
Christmas will never be the same for six Traverse City area residents. Last month, they accompanied a tour of 50 people from northern Michigan to a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, visiting the most significant sites to Christians ranging from the birth and death of Jesus Christ.
"It was the trip of a lifetime," said Lynn Stradinger of Long Lake Township. "So much of the country is 2,000 years old and what they are living in is just like the Bible."
Led by Father Dennis Stilwell of the Cheboygan Catholic Community Church, the pilgrims left for Jerusalem on November 2. For the next nine days they traveled throughout the Holy City and on to places including Bethlehem, the Dead Sea, the Church of the Annunciation, Tiberias, Mount Tabor and the Mount of Beatitudes.
The pilgrims also completed the Stations of the Cross, carrying a replica of Jesus' cross to the Holy Sepulchre, which stands over the place where Jesus was crucified and his body entombed. Many were also baptized in the Jordan River and Father Stilwell led mass and gave communion in Jesus' Tomb.
"Everything there has a huge significance," said Stradinger, a mortgage processor at Old Kent Bank. "You could feel what must have happened at each place, like in the Church of Flagellation, where as a mother I thought what Mary must have felt. She was there the whole time, when he was whipped, told he was going to be crucified, carried to the cross, crucified and when he was cut down."
Stradinger went on the trip with her mother, Doris Skipski, whose lifelong dream had been to travel in the Holy Land. When they heard about the trip last summer, they decided to take the opportunity and go. They were told the trip required extensive walking and stair climbing, so both began an exercise program to get into shape. Without their training, both Stradinger and Skipski admit they never would have kept up with the itinerary.
"Every place was upstairs, downstairs, up mountains, down mountains," Stradinger said. "There was no resting at all, we just kept moving."
As they were whirled with their fellow pilgrims from site to site, from dawn until late at night, the women were constantly awed by what they saw. Each place was a piece of Christian history and they were deeply moved to visit places they had read about in the Bible their whole lives.
"All the churches were beautiful, it was mind-boggling," Skipski said. "We were on the hill where the shepherds saw the star the night Jesus was born and on Mount Beatitudes where he preached. We saw nomads still there in the fields with their goats, just like in the Bible."
Bernadette Dzwik found the trip vastly deepened her faith as a Catholic and Christian. She was profoundly moved by all that she saw and did; she knows that Christmas and Easter will never be the same for her after visiting the Holy Land.
"It's never going to leave my heart, this trip went to the depths of my soul," said Dzwik, a Traverse City resident. "I can't find any words to describe it, it was all just so beautiful. When I go to church now and they are reading from the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Gospels, I can see the places they are talking about."
"I just felt honored to touch the cave where he was born, where Mary put him down in the manger."
The group did find time to squeeze in a few lighthearted moments by riding camels, shopping in an old marketplace in Jerusalem and wading in the Dead Sea. Many brought back a multitude of pictures, gifts and memories that they will treasure for the rest of their lives.
"I would like to go back," Skipski said. "Now when I read the Bible it comes alive."