“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.”

—Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

We had been walking in the deep wood on a one-track path through spindly undergrowth, a carpet of moss, under a scaffolding of Spruce for some time. However, we weren’t far from the cabin. Walking with Helder was slow partly because he walked with a stick in each hand. Not for balance so much as to relieve the pain in his hips. But as he said, “It’s jus’ pain.”

Mostly, though, our modest progress was because of his curiosity. Each mushroom, flower, and Beatle was a reason to stop, examine, discuss, and sometimes a photograph.

At an outcrop, a valley of pine accented by micaceous lakes far below stretched to the horizon where the Elk mountains rose to greet the pale blue; we sat, legs dangling over the precipice with nothing but exhilaration between us and the sudden stop at the bottom. We broke out the Cliff Bars and water bottles and enjoyed the silence. A young mulie doe came out of the shadows to our left, normally quite shy, belly deep in white blossoms. Curious brown eyes, alert, interested. Her ample mule ears, this way and that, forward now back, expectant, hoping, apprehensive. Nibbling as she came.

Helder remarks, “Don’t you jus’ love a great path!”

• • •

Never lose an opportunity
of seeing anything that is beautiful,
for beauty is God’s handwriting–a wayside sacrament.
Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky,
in every flower, and thank God for it
as a cup of blessing.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We explored the Western Colorado wilderness on foot for many years, often with children in tow. It did not surprise Claire and me when, after many twists and turns, we finally had to admit that while we knew where we intended to be, we no longer had any idea how to get there. At these weary and discouraging times, we realized we had only two choices: one; we might press on, hoping that our next selection of left or right at the fork in the trail would get us there, which has not served us well up to this point, or, as a last resort, option two, wisdom might prevail. We accept our disappointment, acknowledge our exhaustion, and retrace our steps, hoping to discover where we took the original wrong turn and, this time, choose the correct one. As N.T. Wright once said,

“Some things simply cannot be fixed by turning Left or Right but require us to return to the place where we originally took the wrong path and, this time, choose the right one.”

“This family story has, in my humble view, parallels with Western Christianity, given the path the church chose as it approached the end of the Jesus movement early in the second century. And now, we are at the point in Western Christianity when having exhausted all the even remotely possible lefts and rights, we must admit that we have lost our way. At last count, we are some 45,000 denominations further down the road from the prayer of Jesus, that we “all may be one (John 17),” and far from how he taught us to be in his ‘sermon on the mount.’

Leo Tolstoy noted in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894).”

“Christianity is at once a doctrine of truth and a prophecy. Eighteen centuries ago, Christianity revealed to people the truth in which they ought to live, and at the same time, foretold what human life would become if they would not live by it but continued to live by their previous principles and what it would become if they accepted the Christian doctrine and carried it out in their lives. And now, after eighteen centuries, the prophecy has been fulfilled. Not having followed Christ’s teaching generally and its application to social life in nonresistance to evil, we have been brought, despite ourselves, to the inevitable destruction foretold by Christ for those who do not fulfill his teaching.”

“Having articulated the principles, in the Sermon on the Mount, by which to guide people’s lives together, Jesus then said:”

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock, and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand, and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

—Matthew 7:24–27

As an example, I knew a well-known Christian Pastor, the Dean of a Christian seminary, who professed that the Sermon on the Mount is an example of Jesus being sarcastic, saying, ” It’s not possible that Jesus was being serious. No one could live that way.” So sad.

• • •

We are hopelessly lost, and as Eldridge and Curtis pointed out years ago in The Sacred Romance, “the men are bored, and the Women are tired.” As Claire and I have been in the above short tale, we are weary. Many of us are discouraged and demoralized, and some of us can no longer imagine a scenario where we would feel comfortable identifying ourselves publicly as Christian; we are too ashamed of how the church, which was supposed to be the kingdom of God on the earth, is now perceived, and deservedly so.

It is past time that we acknowledge our failure, our weariness, our disappointment, our shame, and return to the beginning, the place where we took the original wrong turn…this time choosing the path that the Spirit intended for us, this time founding our hopes on the rock; the wonderful news once delivered to us by Jesus.

So where did we take the original wrong turn, and how might we begin again, start over? As Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Nick, you are so far down the wrong path endorsing a wrong god, that for you it is going to be like “being born again.” The paraphrase is mine.

• • •

Starting Over

“Starting over. But from where? “

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

—Jesus of Nazareth, John 4:21-24 (English Standard Version)

As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, Everyone is worshiping a god of their own understanding. “I suggest we must first have the right God. As Fr Rohr wrote in Falling Upward,”

“Most of us do not see things as they are, but as they are.”

So…most do not see Spirit as Spirit is but as they are. From my “view from a point” (R. Rohr), I am careful to affirm the Father of Jesus, as revealed by Jesus.