June 23, 2003
Readings: 1 Samuel 17: 32-49 & Acts 16: 6-15
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarrita.
Those are the opening verses of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “In the middle of the road of our life, I found myself in a dark wood from which the straight way was lost.” The poet writes, In the middle of the road of our life, I found myself… Not: my life, but our life. This terrible, lonely experience of being barred from the straight way, of being lost–have you known it? Have you not known it? By its nature it seems absolutely one’s own, not our, burden: your responsibility, your guilt, surely the road of your own life–not our life. But this was the way of seeing from inside the thing, a blind seeing before the revealing which God gives. If in darkness and confusion, you have been bent back from your path by forces with more arms and cause than you could comprehend, may there come for you the inward revelation, the amazing grace, of the Spirit in the dark.
Nearly twenty-five years ago, I went in early fall, as is my custom, to the great Adirondack woods for several days alone. For two days, I was on the well-marked trails. Then I made out an adventure on my map. “Old military road” it said, and I traced its path right down to the back road that comes down from the mountains into the hamlet where I spent all my childhood summers. This was to be my adventure–to go home by a secret way.
Crossing a wild river where there was no crossing, I found the northern head of the old military road and proceeded south. After an hour or so, I had to watch harder for the path, since pine trees were rising in it, at first little, then hip-high, then shouldering me. A score of years had passed since anyone had come this way on wheels. Late in the gray afternoon, this now-nearly inscrutable trail dropped me at the edge of a beaver bog. Sure that I could resume the straight way on the other side, I circled wide left around the dark water as a light rain opened. I kept the marshy edge on my right as I moved up into the trailless woods. But all this care and attention only complicated my confusion. With no compass, and no sun, I became utterly directionless. I climbed a tree, high, with a map in hand, to try to match hill shapes at the horizon with contour lines on the page. Confident at last of my orientation, I visually marked which two or three trees would point my path once I was again on the ground. By these I set off in the sure direction which would bring me again to the straight way. Soon, a still brook lay across my way like a big dog in the sidewalk. I would not deviate. Barefooted, but with the whole forty pounds of pack and for balance my staff, I stepped in the water. Instantly, I sank hip deep in the muck and stink of the peat bog. I pulled a left leg upward and the right plunged down; pulled the right and the left oozed deeper. I was up to my chest. My thought scaled the mountains around and looked down. Here, if he goes under, no trace will ever undo the sad mystery of his vanishing.
Obviously, the end was not like that. A way out was made. But here is something not so obvious. I had been married in the spring of that year. Within two months of these woods adventures, my wife would abandon the marriage in a tempest of mental despair none could fathom, and, a year after the wedding, give birth to our child. The story of his childhood, over all, is dappled with long sunny patches, and storm and drought as well. But, no surprise, the adult player in this piece, myself, long, long experienced this hard road as only his own, no more, no less–the road of my life, barred, my error, my sorrow, my wilderness, my just deserts. And you know, the world is with this kind of judgment. You know because you have been on one end and the other of the world’s stick, this unrelenting knowing which is sure that it sees well what is good, and what is evil, who has succumbed and who succeeded. Thus the world sees each one and every thing as separate, each woman on her way, each man making his path, making of it what they can, blessed or cursed with their own faults or strengths–excepting, of course, the married, whom the world sees, too lightly, as if joined upon one road; and the mentally ill, for whom the world sees no road at all.
But I did not see: that in one day of danger in the woods, I had lived the parable of the whole tale of the marriage and its issue–from my first ignoring of the woodland spirits, which had showed me again and again that the straight way was lost, to the near drowning in mire, to the finding a way out and a way down after a night by fire in the rain. Now I marvel to see the parallel in the parable. And now I see the whole story of it–a quarter century nearly–not as just my erring and my life, but our life. We are not alone. Or rather: when we see our separate self on its own road, with none to share or show a way out, sit thee down there, and wait, for thou goest not alone. Wait upon the Lord, humble in thy not seeing. Wait–for a vision is sent thee, a vision visible only in the dark: You are not alone; you are in the middle of the road of our life.
If you are in prison, a captive, innocent or guilty, it matters not: you are in the middle of the road of our life. We are walking hand in hand. If you could not see forward in the thick of your marriage, and left it like a marshy bog, it was our life you were living, our road. If alcohol or drugs blew out your lights while you stumbled into a dead end–a lost job, a ruined friendship–it was our life, our road you walked. You are not alone. If a death has cut you in half–your beloved!–and a barrier there seems on the road before, it was the road of our life you trod. Our life, says the Lord Jesus.
You are not alone. I am the Lord, who stop you in the dark wood, when the straight way is lost. This is how I find you, you who careen and career from this plan to that, from eager youth to an age of judgment, supposing you are on your own, proud and moral and upright but perishing without compassion. I am the stopper-God, who guides by my voice those who have ears, and the I am the stillness in stopping to hear.
Paul had a plan, a mission from God, he thought. With his fellow laborers, he “attempted to go into Bithynia. But the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.” The evangelist tells us no more than that of the experience. Yet it cannot have been a small thing. To be stopped from your destination by a washed-out bridge makes for a month of story-telling. To be stopped by the Spirit of Jesus? This is how it is in the middle of the road of our life, if we are subtle and silent enough to see and to hear. Often you only view the depth of the thing on re-view. The vision comes as re-vision; a humbling halt in the confident judgment you had made upon yourself, upon another, upon a situation.
Where has the Spirit of Jesus stopped you? “This far but no further”–thus saith the Lord? Have you learned what courage it takes to accept the Spirit of stopping, the spirit of not-knowing, not anymore; the spirit of being on a road with Jesus, always…. “good times, bad times–you know we’ve had my share?”
“During the night, Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to us and help us.'” Then Luke writes, “When Paul had seen the vision, immediately we set out to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us…” Now, this is the beginning of God’s word in Greece, in the Western world, in the road of our life. We are in that road, in it with Paul, and with all. It was only yesterday, you know. But the road turned this direction by means of a no and a yes; the “no” of the Spirit of Jesus, and the ‘yes” of a vision in the night, a Spirit in the dark.
Now it will seem perhaps that I have shifted the subject, from life’s very personal matters of failure and success, to the story of the church and its heroes and their failures and successes. But stay. No difference exists between these at all. It is all the road of our life. Perhaps you see this, perhaps you cannot. If not, take the burden on yourself; call it a vision, take it home in a vessel and watch its flame by night. It is often the case that the modern mainline church is not peopled with lives much hobbled or halted by heart-stopping sorrows, apart from untimely deaths. How very often I have heard a long churched person say, with genuine, rippling gratitude, “I have been blessed; I have had a good life.” And as often, such a thankful one showers good gifts on a growing family, and has been surrounded with friends. Yet when the matter turns to those whose lives are shorn of such good gifts, they say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” They don’t know much of persons in such conditions, for the church has been no home to such as them. At best the proverb might mean, “I am no better than they, and cannot account for my ease, and their pain.” Perhaps more often it means, “I am so glad I am not like that miserable wretch.” So here comes the testing point, the stopper-God, the Spirit in the dark.
If you have been stopped unaccountably in any of the manifold ways that cause humankind to suffer, you are on the road of our life, says the Lord Jesus. But if you have not been stopped; if your life, O church, has been blessed, as you say–blessed like Paul, who was a rising star in his congregation, bright and wealthy; blessed like young David, who was strong in form and skilled and comely; then be stopped by the Spirit, says Jesus, and get on the road of our life. Do something this day, this very week, to place your strong, blessed self in the path of Goliath, on the mission road to Macedonia.
Stop in the night, and wait for a vision, for surely there is a voice coming in Williamsville or Snyder or Orchard Park, saying “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” If the churches are stumbling into financial uncertainty, and cannot see into the dark woods, does God’s word offer any interpretation but this, that it is the Spirit of Jesus who is not allowing you to go further in that direction you were going? It is the Spirit of Jesus who is preparing you for the night, wherein you will see and hear your man of Macedonia; wherein you will understand immediately what straight course to take. For this, and this only, your heart was to break in compassion for those you thought so different from yourself. For this, Jesus goes your road, and shows your self in the middle of the road of our life, no matter what you have done. For this, you were sent the story of David, armored not at all, but open, going forth with courage “that all the earth may know there is a God.” For this, David ran quickly toward the battle line: so that you might, whatever your age, do the same in joy and confidence, heedless of the outcome, but with heart and a vision. For this, God has called you to find out how to proclaim good news to those who were far off, and to take again the straight course to Samothrace, and thence to Philippi, and thence to Buffalo. This you saw in the Spirit in the dark, the vision calling, “Come! Come and help us.”
©Stephen H. Phelps, June 2003
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