Pilgrims In Motion
Psalm 84:4 “Happy are the people whose strength is in you! Whose hearts are set on the pilgrim’s way…”
I like the word “pilgrim”. A traveler. A wayfarer. Someone on a journey. Bruce Cockburn sings in his song The Gift that everything is motion and therefore to the motion be true. I love that line! He also says in the song that not even Death can make us static. We keep journeying. Pilgrims are in motion; they refuse to grow stale, refuse boredom, refuse the status quo. Eugene Peterson would have agreed with this. He wrote about the movement of God’s love and how it moves us into new places of creativity, and yet the crazy thing is, that movement can start with loss.
The need to let go of the trapeze bar, hang in the air for what seems like an interminable amount of time, then grab onto the next bar. Having arms so full we can’t receive anything new - we have to let go of all that stuff in order to get something fresh and new. We can feel deprived in these instances - deprived of things, deprived of safety, deprived of the familiar, deprived of the comfortable. And yet we are called to be pilgrims, people in motion. Letting go of the old to make room for the new.
My pastor, Beth Larocca Pitts, preached on Luke’s version of Jesus’ Beatitudes. Luke has weal and woe, blessed are and cursed are. And each of them border on absurd: blessed are the poor and cursed are those who laugh now. How can being poor be blessed? What’s so wrong with laughing? Beth suggested that Luke is showing that all things are in transition, nothing lasts, not the bad nor the good. Impermanence. Things come and things go. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about this idea in his essay “Circles”. This too shall pass is the basic premise; the Circle of Life sort of thing. It’s all in motion. It’s up to us, with God’s help, to keep up with it all.
A poem called The Road of Life by Unknown (found in Tim Hansel’s excellent book Holy Sweat) is all about meeting Jesus and inviting him to ride on a tandem bicycle with you. Eventually Jesus suggests that he take the lead and then the real adventures begin - wild rides and gorgeous vistas, taking him places he never would have gone on his own. An adventure. Steven Curtis Chapman sang about this. The Great Adventure, the wild west, setting off in unknown directions, seeing new beauty, life untamed and unpredictable and glorious - a life with God. Motion. Exploration.
Eugene Peterson writes, “The road we travel is the well-traveled road of discipleship. It is not a way of boredom or despair or confusion. It is not a miserable groping, but a way of blessing.” Travelers on the way. Living life to its fullest. Yes, we work and eat and pay bills and sleep, and wake up the next day and do it all over again. But God implores us to not just live for the weekends or long for that next vacation. God wants us to be pilgrims; God wants us to be in motion, every day. To see Life as God sees it. Feeling bored, restless, discontented? It’s time to look to God with fresh eyes so that we can really see the world and our life within it; willing to let go of the comfortable and go where God leads. Willing to risk loss and deprivation in order to bear new Life into our world. We are called to be in motion, to resist being static. We are called to be pilgrims.
