The Sauntering Pilgrim

“In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa. 30:15). For as long as I can remember, those words from Isaiah have spoken to me at some deep level, and my appreciation of them continues to grow and deepen. Mind you, I don’t yet fully understand them, but I’m growing to appreciate them in a way that’s beyond understanding.

The words remind me of the prodigal son who, when his life was at its lowest, “came to himself” and decided to return to his home and family, to where he was rooted and grounded in life (Luke 15:11-32). They remind me of the hymn that was used so effectively in the film The Trip to Bountiful: “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me; see, on the portals he’s waiting and watching, watching for you and for me. Come home, come home, you who are weary come home.”

Our spiritual homecoming is not like the 1970s pilgrimage my grandmother and I made to the little farmhouse where she grew up in the early twentieth century. We went there to visit the treasure house of her memories of a golden past, the home at the center of the enchanting stories I heard when I was a child. We arrived to find an abandoned, derelict shell of a place that had once been and was no more. No one can return to a golden past, the perfect way life used to be, however precious the memories may be. Those places are only dreams of what was.

And we don’t come home to a place reserved for us in the future, some “new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:2), a place so far in the future we’ll never reach it in this life. So we busy ourselves with lesser things, things of this world, while waiting for something better tomorrow. The invitation to come home is not an invitation to a golden future, the perfect way life will one day be. Remember the dinner companion of Jesus who commented on how blessed they would be one day when they would feast at God’s great banquet, and remember how Jesus told a parable about another great banquet where those who came late were locked out of the celebration (Luke 14:15-24). It’s now or never, Jesus said; feast now, or stay forever hungry.

It’s tempting to look for our perfect home in a golden past or a golden future, always somewhere else, but sooner or later it will dawn on us that we can never abide there. It will dawn on you, as it did on me, and as it dawned on Dorothy, that “if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with!” The invitation to come home is not to another place or time; it’s a call to wake up to what’s right under our noses, to the God in whom we live and move and have our being today (Acts 17:28).

That’s what Jesus invited his disciples to do as he was preparing them for his death. Quickly enough he’ll give them the new commandment to love one another (John 15:12), but before they can love one another or love the world to which God was sending them, they must be grounded in the love Jesus experienced from God, the love into which he drew them. “As the Father has loved me,” he said, “so I have loved you; abide in my love” (v. 9). Before you can love others, you must know yourself as loved. Abide in God’s love for you. Be rooted in God’s love for you. Stay grounded in God’s love for you.

If you hang around me long enough, you’ll hear me speak of the mythical giant Antaeus, who was invincible as long as he kept his feet on the ground, as long as he stayed grounded, connected to his mother, the earth. Hercules was able to defeat him by lifting him off the ground, severing his contact with the source of his life and strength. Whatever we’re called to do in the name of love, we’re able to do effectively only as long as we are grounded in God’s love for us.

Do you know you are loved by God – you? You don’t have to earn that divine love, that cosmic love; you have it already simply because you are here. You’re valued by God in the order of creation, and the proof of it is that you are here. You have an essential role to play in God’s continuing creation, even if you don’t have a clue what that role is. And without you – yes, you – all of creation would be essentially diminished. That is love’s good news, love’s gospel. Abide in that love; dwell in that love; remain grounded in that love.