There is a trail that runs through Israel. It is about 620 miles long, from Dan in the fertile north country to the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea. It was constructed in 1995 by the Israel Trails Committee and can be completed by an average-speed hiker in about six weeks.

I have never been there, but it is on the top of my long-distance-trails-to-do list. Of course, many other trails would have more appealing scenery: much of the southern portion of the Israel National Trail is a trudge across the Negev Desert, and the northern trail, though pleasant enough, affords little by way of the kind of high-altitude views that hikers seek out.

However, this trail provides high-altitude views of a different sort. This is because it is the Holy Land. Just as we in the United States set aside certain lands that we consider special, making them national parks, so the land of Israel has been set aside by the Lord—a land to be regarded as peculiarly his own. To walk through it is, therefore, to encounter a place that has been set apart from all other lands by the Lord himself.

Having Once Walked in Eden

A long time ago, our first parents lived in a special land. We call this place the Garden of Eden, and it was itself a sort of original Holy Land. The Garden was a place where man resided with the Lord. In fact, so close was this mutual residency that sometimes the people there “heard the sound of the Lord God walking about in the garden” (Genesis 3:8).

But this Holy Land was lost, and thereafter the idea of a place where man could reside with his God became the stuff of legend—but also the stuff of promise.

According to the biblical tradition, near the end of the Israelites’ tramp across the desert, Moses took a hike up a mountain—Mount Nebo, just east of the Dead Sea’s northern tip—from which he surveyed all of Palestine:

The Lord showed him all the land—Gilead, and as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, the plain (the valley of Jericho, the City of Palms), and as far as Zoar. (Deuteronomy 34:2–3)

Then God tells him, “This is the land about which I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will give it to your descendants’” (Deuteronomy 34:4).

What is this gift of land? Certainly, there are the basic goods: a fertile region that will provide food, a place of security in the midst of enemies. But more than this, through this blessing, God has begun to restore mankind to himself. He has given his people a land like the Garden, where he himself dwells in a special way.

Jacob, journeying through this land as a young man, stops for the night in Bethel, in the northern hills of Judea. That night, the Lord visits him in a dream, and when he wakes, he exclaims, “Truly, the Lord is in this place and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:16). Later, Jacob returns to the land after a sojourn to the east. Just as he reenters his homeland, he meets “God’s angels,” whereupon he exclaims, “This is God’s encampment!” (Genesis 32:2–3).

In short, this is God’s land. The Lord has given it to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their descendants, and he calls it their home because it is the place where he particularly dwells. Since the Israelites are his people, and since he is their God, the only place where the Israelites should be truly at home is the place where God has made his home. It is like someone giving you a new house, and you go there and discover that it is actually your benefactor’s house. And then maybe you say, “Oh, I must have misunderstood you—this is your house.” And he responds, “Exactly. I wanted there to be a place that we could both call home, you and I together.”

The Land the Lord Walked

After living in this land for a time, a curious sound was heard. It was too subtle to be noticed by many, but for those who were listening closely, it triggered an ancient memory. For the first time since leaving the Garden, men heard the sound of the Lord God walking about in their midst. “It happened in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee” (Mark 1:9). Those who noticed responded with wonder, “It is the Lord!” (John 21:7).

And for a space of several decades, the Lord walked about in the land. Like Jacob before them, the people would marvel, “The Lord is in this place and I did not know it!” And, “This is God’s encampment!”

The people had already been dwelling in the Lord’s Land. But now the Lord had made this land his home on a far more intimate scale. Now he could be seen, touched, heard. His people could talk with the Lord and eat with the Lord; they could lie down at his side. They had already been in the Lord’s encampment. Now it would seem they were in his very dining room.

This reality continues in a hidden mode to this day, as God dots the globe with his presence in the Eucharist, with his presence in the Church. In fact, by virtue of the Eucharist and the Church, the whole world has become the Lord’s Holy Land—a world-land where the Lord dwells with us and we with the Lord. The ancient memory of the Garden is being awoken as the ancient promise of the Land is being fulfilled.

Awaiting the Inheritance

And yet, we also still await the Land. The sound of the Lord’s footsteps were heard in Palestine twenty centuries ago, but he was in a certain way hidden in the humanity he had taken on. We see the Lord today in his Body and Blood which are offered at each Mass, but he looks like mere bread and wine. The whole world has become the Lord’s Land, and yet we know that there is a yet more perfect land, a yet more perfect home, where we may live with the Lord yet more perfectly. It is this ultimate and final Holy Land that Jesus is speaking of when he says: “I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be” (John 14:3).

This is what we call heaven. Heaven is the final Holy Land because it is God’s ultimate home. And this was God’s ultimate referent when he told Moses, “This is the land about which I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’” God was revealing the image while having in mind the heavenly reality.

The Final Holy Land

In the meantime, there remains the land of Israel. It sits there still, like an ancient artifact—our first model, if you will, of the Lord’s Land; a miniature of the Final Holy Land.

The Israelites of old erected stone altars and memorials to commemorate the Lord’s action or presence in a given place. And this is what the whole land of Israel is today: a great monument—to the Lord in himself, yes—but also to the Lord’s presence among us, to the weight of his feet upon the ground.

The land of Israel is, therefore, a kind of really big icon. Icons allow us to see into spiritual realities by way of physical signs. When our eyes take in the wood and paint of an icon depicting Jesus, we behold something of the holiness of Christ. When our eyes receive the lines of movement and color from an icon depicting the Trinity, we behold something of the inner life of God. And when our eyes consider the land of Israel, we behold something of that final “place” where we will dwell in perfect union with God.

This great icon lies there, day after day, under the sun and under the stars, for all to see. Just by lying there it speaks of the home of the Lord, forever bearing witness to the final Promised Land. And just as it is right and good for us to consider the lines and color of a painted icon, so too is it right and good for us to consider the lines and color of the land of Israel—to journey up Mount Nebo like Moses, whether in thought or in person, and look upon the topography of the land, naming the color of the desert spreading out to the south, beholding the Jordan valley descending from the north, smelling the salt on the wind blowing east from the Dead Sea, looking west to Jerusalem, the city of the Lord, pondering Mount Zion, the mountain of the Lord, speaking the place-names of the land: “Gilead, and as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, the plain (the valley of Jericho, the City of Palms), and as far as Zoar.”

By contemplating this first prototype of the Real Land, we prepare ourselves to enter the Real Land of Promise.

As with the land of Israel, there is a trail that runs through the Land of the Lord. It was made expressly for us, long ago, by the Lord himself. For he has not forgotten the promise that he made to our fathers, to bring us into his Promised Land, where he will be our God and we will be his people.

To download a printable PDF of this Article from
Dominicana Journal, Winter 2014, Vol LVII, No. 2, CLICK HERE.