When I was in high school, one of the “go to” choral pieces was Randall Thompson’s choral setting of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” From the first time we sang this piece our choir was absolutely “heads over heal” in love with it. It spoke so directly to who we were. If we had a little extra time at the end of the rehearsal, our choir director would ask for requests, and the one we always returned to was “The Road Not Taken”.
At the end of the year our choir was to sing at graduation. And as we stood before a gymnasium full of parents, grandparents, and community members, we opened our choir folders and were asked to turn to “The Road Not Taken”. We smiled and turned and then panicked...the piece wasn’t there! We looked up at our choir director in panick, but he gently reassured us with a smile and said, “you know this one...it’s your song...just let it flow!” And believe it or not, we did. Miraculously our voices and hearts converged together into an amazing stream of love and hope as we poured out our hearts to those around us and sang:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
And that has made all the difference.
When we finished, there was not a dry eye in the place. Even the tough guy next to me, a 270 offensive tackle on our football team who had given me a swirly in the men’s locker room when I was a 9th-grader, was crying!
What an amazing poem! If I were to hold a “personal cannon” of the works that have formed and shaped me, these words would be in that “personal Bible”!
But what if we had a chance to rethink this poem?
What if there was another way to look at it?
Recently, I’ve been reading a book by Paul W Chilcote called “The Fullest Possible Love” (I’m offering it as a possible book study this Fall if you’re interested!). And in the preface of this book, Chilcote writes this:
I memorized Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” as many in my generation did, when I was in high school. With those opening words, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” Frost provides a parable about life. He invites us into the age-old story of a juncture in the road and the decision forced upon each of us in that moment. Which way do I take?
But there is another way to look at that path. It all depends on your destination—the direction of your journey—doesn’t it? Instead of a divergence, you could equally view it, from the opposite direction, as a convergence. If you are walking in the opposite direction, the two roads force no decision; rather, they merge and continue in a new, singular path. This different view of the scene also opens the possibility of a relational image. Think of two people walking on each of the different forks of the road toward each other in such a way that they meet at the juncture. The convergence offers an opportunity to journey together as companions.
For me, this is a hope and a dream of what might and does happen in a church community. We all come from such a diverse set of paths, but in the church community we converge. In the church community we are given such a different option than what we see in the world. We are given the opportunity to merge with others...to walk beside each other for a while. And as we do, this new convergence changes us...reshapes us...and has the amazing possibility to make us new.
But in order for that to happen, we need to be able to be willing to allow for that convergence. Every year, at Bear Creek, we have new folks who enter our Bear Creek UMC community. And every year, we have two choices concerning those folks. We can just keep going on like we always do, and hope that these folks “conform” to our ways, or we can do our best to open our hearts to these new companions, and maybe even change our “step cadence” so it somehow allows for two or three or more who are different that we are? And if we do that, who knows, perhaps we will not only find a new friend and companion, but we may even find that in this new way of walking we will meet Christ.
Your friend and pastor, learning to embrace the “convergent flow” of Christ’s River of Lovingkindness, Brook
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