No Longer Strangers and Pilgrims On the Earth?

Hymn #3, Now Let Us Rejoice

“these all… confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”


Can you imagine that sensation, where this world is a foreign place to men and women who have lived their entire lives here? Can you imagine feeling like this is just an echo of the place you once called home?

We get this same sense of earthly disconnection as Nephi’s brother, Jacob, writes near the end of his life:

“the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers…”

Aside from being one of the most beautiful poetic lines in all scripture, can you imagine that feeling? Have you ever felt so poignantly the passage of time?

When I think about how quickly life has brought me from playing night games with friends around our family trampoline to seeing my own children make their first steps and conversations with me, it seems kind of like what Jacob described. Then when I think back on my two years as a missionary, I really relate to the feeling of time passing away like a dream. Often my journal is the only thing able to recall certain memories to my mind, though I wonder how I could have forgotten such things as I read them.

That brings us to William W. Phelps’ Now Let Us Rejoice. Beyond the tone of the first line, the second line is what really struck me initially. This line addresses that profound disconnect between our souls and this earth we inhabit, but does so by declaring its end.

“No longer as / strangers on earth need we roam” (1).

Considering the often nostalgic and somewhat languishing nature of our spirits, this becomes all the more striking as you continue to the end of the first verse. This is Christ’s future call for us to "Come home", and it's repeated at the end of the next verse. (6,12)

As I read those last two words, Come home, I felt tingles across my skin. That is a powerful sequence to a very powerful idea, especially considering how distant we sometimes feel from heaven. We long to Come home.



This is the thing that prophets long for, as evidenced by Alma the Younger's vision of God sitting upon His throne. Alma writes of the vision that "my soul did long to be there" (Alma 36:22). Then when Christ personally ministered among the Nephites, nine of His disciples chose exactly that as their greatest desire, to "speedily come unto [Him] in [His] kingdom" (3 Nephi 28:2). They were called Blessed for having desired this.

This hymn takes us through that process of return, and anticipation of return. We go from the vague "when" of the first two verses to a more dramatic, and prophetic "Then," where we see all the promises fulfilled to our imagination's eye.



The tone set by the first line is fitting for such a glorious, long-anticipated homecoming.

"Now Let Us Rejoice"

Hear Now Let Us Rejoice sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!