Sauntering

“I am old and move slowly.”     ~Socrates

When I was a much younger man, I used to run several miles a day. When my knees gave out I began to walk—first aerobically and then briskly. Now I saunter.

Henry David Thoreau, in an essay on walking, explains the origins of the word saunter. He says the term comes from the Middle Ages, when wandering pilgrims would beg for alms to finance their journey to “la Saint Terre,” the Holy Land. Such people became known as saint-terrers, or saunterers.

I can’t vouch for the etymology of the word, and I understand Thoreau’s theory is in doubt these days, but I like his explanation better than any I’ve heard, for I myself am a saunterer, a wandering pilgrim, begging for grace, making my way to the City of God.

Let’s hear it for sauntering! My dictionary defines the word as “to wander or walk about idly and in a leisurely or lazy manner; to lounge; to stroll; to loiter.” That’s me: God’s loiterer, in no particular hurry, taking time to see the world around me and sample it along the way.

Very few people saunter these days. Most folks on the green belt here in Boise (where I saunter) are in a hurry—speed-walking or racing around on mountain bikes, rollerblades, and skateboards. I wonder where they’re going, or if they know why. An old song by Alabama, the country group, comes to mind:
 
I’m in a hurry to get things done
Oh I rush and rush until life’s no fun
All I really gotta do is live and die
But I’m in a hurry and don’t know why
 
The same can be said for God’s people. So many of us seem to be in a hurry to get somewhere, running off to this meeting or that, signing up for one course or another, frantically working out our own salvation, sanctification, and service for God as though everything depends on us. I wish we all knew how to saunter.

It’s a great art to saunter. It grows out of our conviction that “all things are from God.”[1] Oh, we must pursue God and His will for us with all our heart, but it is rest and peace to know that every aspect of our pilgrimage is in God’s hands. He has freed us from past sin and guilt and is presently freeing us from its power. Our destiny is not riding on anything we do or have done or fail to do here. It rests on the work of One who is faithful to the end.

Thomas Merton suggests that we . . .
 

“go for walks,
live in peace,
let change come quietly and invisibly on the
inside.” [2]

I find Merton’s words reassuring. Since God is at work in me and has promised that He will never forsake the work of His hands, I can trust Him to bring completion to the process He has begun. It’s been my experience that whatever change takes place in me is fairly slow, occurring in some secret, hidden part of me and often imperceptible except in retrospect. His pace, though inexorably steady and impossible to stop, is also excruciatingly slow.

There are even times of failure when I seem to be making no progress at all. I may even revert to old habits of behavior for a season—regressions that make me believe I’ve slipped back into old patterns of sin. It is good to remind myself in those times that it may be years later that I see what God has been doing all along.

In the meantime, while I saunter toward heaven and home, I can pay attention to those who are in pilgrimage with me. I can take every occasion to listen, to love, and to pray, knowing that I don’t have to rush about and make things happen; God himself has prepared good works for me to do.[3]

Thoreau, though not a Christian as far as I know, often wrote with luminous insight. Thus he concludes his essay on sauntering: “So we saunter toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.”

Thoreau was a wise man—wiser than he knew: Someday soon “the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in his wings.” [4] Then he “shall shine more brightly than ever He has done, shall shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn . . .”

Then we shall settle into a perfect pace.
 
[1] 2 Corinthians 5:18
[2] Notebook, May 1968
[3] Ephesians 2:10
[4] Malachi 4:2

One Response to “Sauntering”

1. peacemaker-2009 says:

   November 9, 2009 at 11:30 am

   God bless you.