The Sauntering Pilgrim

There’s a scene in Disney’s 1994 movie The Lion King that could come straight from our scriptures. The lion cub Simba, having run from his past, reaches a crisis in his life. He wanders into the savanna at night, burdened with guilt and fear, thinking of his dead father Mufasa. He looks into the water, expecting to see Mufasa, but sees only his own reflection. As the ripples settle, Simba sees in himself a resemblance to his father and begins to understand the connection between them.

As Simba watches, Mufasa’s image forms in the sky, and his voice fills the scene, telling Simba he has strayed from his path. Then he says to Simba, “You have forgotten who you are and so forgotten me.” He urges Simba to remember his identity, his place in the circle of life, and the responsibility he abandoned.

That scene is the turning point upon which everything that follows depends. It reframes Simba’s failure, fear, and guilt as things he can rise above. It ties his identity not only to his ancestors but also to his responsibility to something larger than himself. It’s not Mufasa’s image in the sky that speaks to Simba, it’s something deep inside that he has forgotten, a voice that reminds him who he really is. Simba reclaims his true identity and is reborm from exile and loneliness into purpose.

As Luke tells the story, just before the risen Jesus departs from his disciples, whom he now calls apostles, he says to them, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). He tells them: you will remember who you are, and so you will remember me; you will reclaim and live into your true identity; you will be reborn from exile and loneliness into purpose and responsibility.

We who have been baptized into the body of Christ, and who are members of the church, have not entered a waiting room where we await fullness of life someday in the “sweet by-and-by.” What we have chosen to enter is spiritual adulthood, where we stop waiting for life to become easy and instead choose to meet life as it is, consciously and courageously. We have chosen to face honestly our struggles to be human without pretending to have magical answers. We don’t shout enlightenment and inspiration to the world; we echo whispers of truth that come to us from that still, small voice of authenticity within.

Matthew’s gospel tells us that Jesus spoke of building our faith on a rock instead of on sand in order to withstand the blows and challenges life inevitably throws at us (Matt. 7:24-27). In some ways our relationships as members of the body of Christ are such a rock, and we can stand firm on them. But I want to say a word about the value of a life of shifting sand.

Have you ever run your fingers through sand and thought about what you’re handling? Most sand is made of quartz, a mineral especially resistant to weathering and erosion, along with tiny parts of rock, shell, and coral. An individual grain is undeniably solid, but when sand accumulates, it acts more like a liquid: particles flow around one another, taking the shape of their container. When you kick a sandpile, the grains collide in the air, resembling more of a gas.

Sand resists being put into categories (solid, liquid, or gas); it organizes itself somewhere between stability and uncertainty in a complex system of relationships. Grain by grain, it accumulates in a pile until something triggers a large-scale collapse in a little avalanche. In certain deserts, these avalanches make sound. As grains cascade down the slopes of a dune, the sand sings, becoming an instrument, amplifying vibrations from tumbling grains that synchronize and resonate with each other, mimicking distant thunder, the strings of a cello, the pipes of an organ, or even the keening of a human voice.

Maybe our lives more often than not are built not on solid rock but in communities of sand. St. Paul said we are given our times and places in life so we “would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27). Our times are fleeting and always changing, not like rock at all; they are full of hard and shifting realities that defy understanding or explanation. We grow and collapse in endlessly repeating cycles as the wind blows.

A single grain of sand can be older than life itself, carrying histories of ancient continents and landscapes long lost, and as it moves, it sometimes sings. We carry with us, each one of us, ancient and unremembered histories. We come and go, grow together and collapse as the Spirit blows, our lives full of hard and shifting realities that defy understanding or explanation.

Through it all, in community with each other, we celebrate the mystical reality that our lives are parts of the same flow of sacred history that sustains us and carries us all along. And in that flow of community, we remember who we are and so remember God, we reclaim and live into our true identity, and we are reborn from exile and loneliness into purpose and responsibility. And sometimes in our ever-shifting relationships, we sing. Oh, how we do sing together with the music of the spheres, raising a song of praise to God.