The Sauntering Pilgrim

No one knows who he was, the uncredited actor who played the huge, gaseous, disembodied head given to imperious, bellowing pronouncements in The Wizard of Oz. It was not Frank Morgan, who played the real-life wizard in the movie. Speculation centers on Henry Hull, an actor who worked with Morgan during that time, but studio records don’t name him, and his identity remains speculative.

The real wizard, you’ll recall, was revealed when Toto began tugging on the corner of the curtain that hid the control booth. “Pay no attention,” the wizard said, “to that man behind the curtain. Go,” he said, still in character as the Great and Powerful Oz, “before I lose my temper!” Then, as the realization that he had been discovered began to sink in, the wizard’s voice and demeanor shrank to human proportions. When Dorothy scolded him as “a very bad man” for pretending to be what he was not, he confessed, “Oh, no, my dear – I’m – I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.”

At that moment, I find him the most relatable character in the movie – a very good man who was very bad at trying to be someone he was not and whose revealed and humble humanity is what equipped him to connect Dorothy and her companions with what they were searching for and finally discovered they had within themselves all along.

How like the wizard I have been! How like the wizard so many of us have been and maybe still are, trying to hide our real human selves behind the cloak of what we have been taught we should be. Seminary taught me and my classmates, and most of us in this role, how to be the pastors and preachers the church was looking for, and we learned to wear those masks well. We learned well how to hide behind the curtain and manipulate the illusion we created. Very few of us were taught how to be ourselves – the genuine, honest-to-God, gracefully eccentric persons God was making us to be. Real life, and a lot of it, had to teach us that.

The real occupation of my life has been to learn how to be not the person others expected me to be but the person God is making me to be. Every time I believed I learned who that person is, I found I had only graduated to another and deeper level of learning. And every new level, I’m finding, is only another way to learn the answer to life’s first question, the question Jesus asked two ordinary people who began following him on the spur of the moment: What are you looking for? What are you really looking for in life?

Thomas Merton posed the same question. “If you want to identify me” – and he might have been asking ‘if I want to know myself’ – “ask me not where I live or what I like to eat or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for” (in My Argument with the Gestapo). What are you living for? What are you looking for? Who is the person hiding behind the public image you present to others? What were you looking for when you decided to follow Jesus?

It’s not until late in life that many of us confront that question, but that’s okay because, while there’s much to be gained by asking it seriously and early in life, it’s never too late. What am I looking for in life? What am I living for? Sometimes that’s a positive ask: what am I going to do, and what am I looking for, in the life that opens before me? Sometimes when we try to be larger than life we never hear our true name, and no one ever remembers who we are, who that person was behind the curtain. Sometimes, without ever asking the question directly, the answer to what we’re looking for is known when the curtain is pulled aside to reveal what we’ve missed in life, when we come face to face with our biggest regrets.

After what she described as too many years of unfulfilling work, Bronnie Ware began searching for a job with meaning, and she found it in the field of palliative care, attending to the needs of the dying. There her life was transformed as she listened to the most common regrets the people she cared for had expressed to her. She shared what she learned in a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.

Among all the dying people Ware interviewed, the single most common regret they shared was that they had not lived a life true to themselves instead of the life others expected of them. There were other regrets. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” And “I wish I had let myself be happier.” They came late to the question, “What are you looking for?”

During Advent we anticipated the coming of a messiah. During Christmas we celebrated the messiah’s coming. Now in the weeks following the Epiphany, we reflect on the nature of the messiah who has come, and we face the challenging and risky question of how we are to live as a result of our reflection. The messiah has come, we say, and then, because the messiah who has come continues to disappoint our favorite expectations and illusions, life asks of us, “So, what are you really looking for?”

We consider Jesus of Nazareth the messiah because he came to rescue us from our condition (cf. Isa. 61:1-2), but from what condition did he come to rescue us? Was it from the condition of the world in which we live? Or was it from the prison we build for ourselves when we fail to answer the question, with profound integrity, insight, and authenticity, “What are you looking for?” Do you know what you’re looking for, and do you know yourself well enough to know what prevents your having it?

There are many curtains behind which we hide our true selves, lots of distractions, confusion, tumult, and restlessness. Over all this wild, restless sea of life is a voice that calls us to something truer, more authentic, of an eternal quality. That voice, as likely as not, responds to our curiosity, or our subtle dissatisfaction and restlessness, with a simple question, “What are you looking for?” What is the emptiness, the yearning, that creates the restlessness or dissatisfaction you experience? At the end of your life, what will you most regret? Love the answer to that question, as elusive as it may be, more than everything else that would distract you from it, and follow the question wherever it may lead.