I’ll never tire of walking into Jerusalem through Jaffa Gate, the road thick with local Jews and Arabs, the Ethiopian and Irish clergy, the German monks, French sisters and crowds of pilgrims from Indonesia, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, or Russia. Jerusalem is, and always has been, streaming with diversity, a meeting place of tri-religious prayer and encounter. The richness and the wideness of this devotion are a glimpse of the eternal Jerusalem, the kingdom of God, where “the wealth of the nations shall come to you.” All the riches we can muster cannot sufficiently glorify God at the Holy Sepulchre, al Aqsa Mosque or the Kotel, but we must try. Like the kings, what can I bring to give? What can we bring: the very best of us? our nation? family? parish? This is what God wants – every gift and richness at God’s service; this is true worship! 

—Fr. Garrett Gundlach, SJ, is a Midwest Jesuit priest based at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem and serving diverse local communities.

Lord God, 
 Too often when I don’t notice, 
 I make myself too large – a king of my kingdom - 
 and nothing else seems to matter until I handle
 just one more matter to settle things, 
 and this goes on and on and on and on.

But then, in rare moments, I see you face-to-face
 and I shrink so small before your glory – 
 how could I ever have pretended or forgotten my way
 into becoming so big? 

But you, Lord, want neither.
 You raise me up from my smallness;
 you Call me, and
You want my bigness - but my true bigness, 
 my dignity, my gifts, my very best –
 and you want me to put it 
 at your service
 at the service of those,
 who, by decree of the kings, 
 are condemned to feeling small,
 forgotten, excluded, marginal.

Show me Lord, my best, 
 and show me where to give it,
 like at a manger of migrants from Nazareth or further south,
 bearing hope and little else,
 until they, too, discover their bigness 
 before and because of you. Amen.

—Fr. Garrett Gundlach, SJ