An Anglican Take on “Footprints in the Sand”

Visit any Christian bookshop and you’re guaranteed to see “Footprints in the Sand,” an extremely well-known poem, on display for punters to purchase. You might even have it in your own home! Typical designs reproduce the celebrated work, whose authorship is disputed, in sentimental font: stylish letters, whiter than a mackerel’s belly, superimposed on some suitably sandy backdrop. Every Christian’s bathroom wall needs one!

I myself owned a copy. The years it was affixed above my bed, I took solace in its main idea: God carries his children in his paternal arms when times are difficult. In the memorable paradigm shift with which the poem concludes, the presence of only one set of footprints indicates not that God abandons us in times of need, as might initially seem to be the case, but rather that he lifts us out of our predicaments.

The context is, you’ll remember, a night of reverie; for the poem begins: ‘One night I dreamed a dream.’ (Stifle that urge to hum a certain West End solo, people!) Freud might have revived, for the modern age, the notion that in our dreams we brush with deep truth, but in the biblical tradition this was taken as read; remember Jacob’s Ladder in Genesis 28, and Pharaoh’s officials in Chapter 40? There are other examples, too, from both Testaments, that we could equally mention. “Footprints” harkens back to such writings.

This is not any run-of-the-mill dream, however. The speaker, we can guess — from the symbolism implied in all the references to nightfall, day’s-end — is a person in the twilight phase of life. Like William Butler Yeats in his poem “When You Are Old,” a piece which is also tightly structured, the dreamer looks back over their time on earth to make some sense out of all those experiences. ‘Life can only be understood by looking backward,’ wrote Soren Kierkegaard, ‘but it must be lived looking forward.’

Another way the speaker transports us into the dream, apart from all these evocations of coastal nightscapes, are the back-and-forth glances from the sky to the sand until the two become barely distinguishable. It all becomes a bit surreal: ‘As I was walking along the beach with my Lord, / Across the dark sky flashed scenes from my life. / For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand…’

If I were to get really theological, and perhaps over-analytical, I see depicted here a unity between two spheres of creation; skies and sands both came to be through Christ, and so their kinship – to mix metaphors – makes theological sense. We no longer have, in the words of Seamus Heaney, ‘Water [sky] and ground [sand] in their extremity,’ but one joined-up creation which exists in and through God the Son. That’s what I’ve chosen to read into this poem, anyway!

Halfway through the poem, the speaker addresses words of direct speech to God, as many poets have: ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God,’ wrote John Donne. The words are a challenge to God’s lovingkindness, that attribute so thoroughly studied in the Book of Ruth – an accusation, even, in the theodicean tradition of Old Testament sufferer Job: ‘I don’t understand why, when I needed you the most, you would leave me.’ Compare this, when you have time, with Job 29-31.

Because God seems absent from our lives when circumstances work against us, we must regularly return to the Church’s teachings, those timeless words of encouragement, in order to be reminded of our Father’s faithfulness towards us. Anglican Collects — a wide-ranging collection of occasional petitions, found in the Book of Common Prayer — for instance, portray God as a sympathetic parent who watches over his dear children with all the vigilance of a sentinel.

There is room, by the by, for disagreement over one sentence in “Footprints.” ‘Lord, you said once I decided to follow you, / You’d walk with me all the way,’ runs the line in question. Those who, like me, take an Anglican approach to the Sacraments would say baptism is when Christian life commences. The Church of Ireland’s Book of Common Prayer has a pastoral note on this: ‘Baptism marks the beginning of a journey with God which continues for the rest of our lives.’ This point is, ultimately, just a side-note.

It isn’t brilliant form, I confess, to judge a poem based on whether or not we think all its ideas are sound. You may well have heard “Footprints” read aloud at weddings or funerals, which means there are many for whom its evangelical theology rings true. Let’s move on, then, from this critical interlude.

What all Christians can appreciate is how the message in “Footprints” hinges on the Lord’s physicality. That is, the poem wouldn’t work if Christ were a disembodied spirit. No: Jesus is fully man. He has two feet, like most of us, which leave tracks in the sand while we’re in his arms; the solidarity which the Lord shows towards his children is, thus, linked with incarnation.

To push this one step further, the hands with which Jesus carries us are crucified hands, and his feet are crucified feet. It isn’t mentioned in the poem, but Christ’s footprints would have holes, where the Romans drove their cruel nails into them. How, then, could the speaker, who presumably was never personally crucified, possibly mistake their footprints for those of Christ?

Remember that, as the communion rite reminds us, we partake in the Lord’s body when we belong to his Family. Therefore, we share his Cross. That is, I reckon, why the speaker is able to look on the footprints of Christ and lay claim to them. Far from a fact which should trouble us, as the speaker initially thinks, this is a comfort. It means, to borrow St Paul’s imagery from Romans 11, that we have been grafted into Christ.

More than even its theme of divine help in times of trouble, as powerful as that is, the reason why “Footprints” has become a phenomenon for Christians lies, I’d venture, in its depiction of unbreakable ties — more powerful than any force in the universe — between the Lord and his people. The two characters in the poem share, to sum up, a bond that no hardship can sever: love.