Pitching the Tent: Holy Week and the Journey of the Soul

We are entering Holy Week.

It is a sacred time in the Christian community, a time when we reflect on the journey of the man Yeshua. I use the name Yeshua because there is a sense in which there was no letter J in the Aramaic alphabet, and so Yeshua is the more accurate rendering. Jesus is more the Greek spelling. But whether we say Yeshua or Jesus, we are speaking of the same person.

This time of year invites us to mark his journey: his journey of self-denial, his journey of being for others.

And in a time like this, that is something we need to explore in our own lives.

Am I being for others?

But part of the challenge of that question is this: am I being for myself?

You see, self comes first. However you look at it, self always comes first.

The same thing happened for Yeshua in the early record of his life. We hear of him as a child, staying behind and engaging the learned men of the day. His mother asks, “Why did you do this to us?” and he responds, “I must be about my Father’s business.” Then, a little later, before his ministry begins, we meet him at the River Jordan, being baptised by John. John recognises who he is and says, in effect, “I should be baptised by you.” But Yeshua says, “No. Let it be as I have asked.”

And then we are told that he leaves there and goes into the wilderness.

The wilderness matters.

Because the purpose of going into the wilderness is to wrestle with his own demons, with those inner voices that would challenge the path before him: Why should you do this? Why go this route? There is no need for you to go this way.

And he wrestled.

It takes all of that at the beginning to make what happens at the end have meaning.

Sometimes we forget that.

We forget that the inner work has to be done in our own lives. So many of us go into life without really knowing who we are or what our purpose is. Somewhere in the developmental process of the West, we seem to have lost touch with that. We do not seem to help our young people find themselves first.

In some places, young people take what is called a gap year. They go off into the world, moving from place to place, discovering themselves. But in our own territory, we have become so fixated on materialism that we drive our children toward a great job, a great opportunity, a great career, and often they do not know who they are.

So when challenges confront them in midlife, they are truly lost.

And then we have to try to get them the help they need, if we recognize it early enough. Often we do not, because they are so guarded that we do not realise they are in trouble until they are deeply in trouble.

So the story of Yeshua helps us, if we would really pay attention to it, to see some of the important things we need to remember.

One of the major ones is preparation.

Preparation here is not schooling.

Preparation is knowing who I am.

In the midst of it all, preparation is self-discovery. It is understanding the inner workings of myself, understanding the parts of me that show up as protectors, the exiled parts, the reactive parts, all those inner movements that have their own agendas and can, at times, be deeply destructive.

This is why it is so crucial to know oneself.

So when Yeshua comes into the full picture and begins his earthly ministry, he knows himself. He knows who he is. He knows why he is here.

The difference with Yeshua is that he understood that he was tabernacling.

That is a powerful term.

It means he was pitching a tent.

This human journey is like pitching a tent for a time. The image would have made sense in his world: living in a tent for a short while, journeying from one place to another, pitching the tent for the night, then striking it in the morning and moving on.

That is what this human journey is.

We pitch the tent.

This overnight stay, as it were, is perhaps one of many, but it is still an overnighting. It is not permanent.

And once we begin to see that, we realise that it cannot be just about the night. My journey cannot be just about the night. My journey is my journey. The night is one aspect of it. This human experience is one part of a much larger movement.

And when I begin to look at life from that perspective, perhaps I begin to realise that there is more.

There is much more.

There is a being with a purpose who is pitching a tent.

Or let me put it another way: there is a soul with a purpose, pitching a tent in this earthly body for a time. It is here to have the experience of this time, but that soul will one day strike the tent and move on.

We need that awareness.

Because when we have it, it helps us realise that our focus must be on the journey through, not simply on being here.

And I think that is where many of our challenges arise.

We become fixated on being here.

So even as we enter Holy Week, we are mindful of Jesus having to suffer and die, and we make much of that experience. But there is also the resurrection story.

And the resurrection story matters.

Because what it says is that he pitched the tent, and then he went on with the rest of the journey.

And when I think of it that way, I find myself asking:

What is it that I am here to do in this night?

Having pitched this tent, what is it that I am to experience in this stage of my long journey?

And we need to help our young people understand this.

Materialism causes us to see birth and death as the only things that matter, and everything between those two bookends as the whole story. We teach our children, often without realising it, that what happens between those two bookends is everything, and there is nothing more.

But those two bookends are only a very small part of the whole undertaking.

So I want to encourage you, during this Holy Week, to approach it from a different place.

See it as the time that came when Jesus was striking the tent so that he could continue the journey.

And then reflect on yourself.

Reflect on your own journey, knowing that one day you too will strike your tent.

And the question is:

Will you have known yourself?

Will you have remembered yourself enough?

Because when we pitch the tent, there is something essential we must do.

We must remember ourselves.

That is what Yeshua’s inner work was about.

He had to remember who he was.

“I must be about my Father’s business.”

He had to remember himself so that as he moved through the night of being in the tent, he would not lose his way. And when the dawn came and it was time to strike the tent, he would be able to do so without confusion, without being lost.

We have pitched our tents.

We are here.

We need to discover ourselves as soon as we can. We need to live from that place of who I am, so that I can be about my Father’s business, so that I can be about my Mother’s business, so that I can be about the business of the All That Is.

That is why I am here.

And that is my deepest reason.

Blessed Holy Week.