If you followed Anna Thomas's pilgrimage blog during the Christmas season, you know how active she is in the Diocese of Bethlehem and how much the Episcopal Church means to her.

"I'm an Episcopalian largely because of how much I love liturgy," says Thomas, who is a lifelong member of Cathedral Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, and is a junior at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. "I love the process and the practice of going to church and using the whole service as an opportunity to meditate."

In 2015, she was a member of the youth representation at the Episcopal Church's General Convention in Salt Lake City.

Read more about Anna Thomas.

The Rev. Dr. Han van den Blink doesn't use social media. He's never blogged before, and you certainly won't find him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr or any other networking sites. So it's a real gift to the Diocese of Bethlehem that you can read his thoughts and reflections as part of the diocese's pilgrimage blog during the first half of Epiphany.

He intentionally has avoided social media in the past, saying, "I have a real reticence to being exposed, because being exposed is dangerous."

He knows of which he speaks.

Van den Blink, who serves as priest-in-charge of St. Paul's Troy, was born of Dutch missionary parents in 1934 in Java, Indonesia, where, from ages nine through 11, he was interred in Japanese concentration camps. From there he was moved into an Indonesian concentration camp (better than the Japanese camps for food; worse for fear of being the victim of a massacre, he says) before finally being released as part of a prisoner of war exchange.

"In the camps, you didn't want to be exposed," he says. "You didn't want to be noticed"

Read more about Han van den Blink, and look for his blog posts starting January 7.

To begin our pilgrimage study and reflection, the Rev. Canon Maria Tjeltveit of the Church of the Redeemer in Allentown has written a reflection on pilgrimage and prepared discussion questions.

"The Biblical Hebrew word translated 'pilgrimage' in the King James translation of the Bible is based on the verb (gur) to 'sojourn'--to dwell for a definite or indefinite time, to abide as a new-comer without original rights. So, in Biblical terms, pilgrimage is more about staying in one place, but not being of that place, than it is about moving.

"On the other hand, we think of pilgrimage as being about moving, going from one place to another. In the Jewish tradition, the specific pilgrimage to Jerusalem is called Aliya larāgel, which literally means to 'go up (Aliya) with the legs (or feet).' This pilgrimage is an occasion for which people pick up their feet and go somewhere.

"As we enter into this time of pilgrimage, both the images of picking up our feet and going somewhere--setting out on a journey of faith--and dwelling in a place where we may not be entirely at home, can speak to us in our diocese."

Find the entire reflection and the discussion questions on the website.