One Road or...
- Padre
- Jun 28, 2019
- 4 min read
The Hermitage
June 28, 2019
This meditation actually begins back during my hospitalization earlier this month. As many of you know, one of my favorite poems is Robert Frost’s “Two Roads.” As it turns out the picture at the foot of my bed, which I stared at for three days, was a picture of a road.
The central focus of the picture is a tree, which I first assumed was an oak draped in Spanish Moss--placing it in familiar territory. Turns out the foliage was long draping branches of leaves--something I have never seen...and therefore placing it in unfamiliar territory. And here the meditation begins.
You have to remember I was pretty brain fogged from the thyroid storm and all the meds (side effects - brain fog, confusion, etc.) so if you find this train of thought hard to follow I’ll understand. Since it weaves in and out through the hospitalization and my time at home it may be pretty spacy--I’m still not 100%.
Let’s start with the tree being in unfamiliar territory. For those of you who have been following my ramblings in the past, finding my new “path” or “road” has been a preoccupation for the past few months. So unfamiliar territory would describe my state of mind and of being. And yet it felt like the meaning of the picture conveyed, “It’s okay. You’re on the path.”
Looking more closely, yes, there was a path running behind the tree. Seemed to be well used, but not enough to qualify as being a road. Pondering it left me wondering where it came from and where it was going. Great life review on the first part...not so much on the second, but intriguing anyway...several more hours wondering what the future holds.
That night I woke up with a clear thought in my head.
“Follow the light.”
Sure enough, the following morning showed there was a strong light coming from the “West” casting long shadows from the tree and lighting the path with the brilliant golden colors of a sunset. What an affirmation!
Until my weird brain kicked in, like it so often does, with “On the other hand…”
What if the picture was drawn looking “North” in which case it was a sunrise, not a sunset. Following the light was then an admonition to look to the future. After unscrambling that I realized--that too was an affirmation!
Coming home from the hospital I continued the meditation. This time, though my brain was really being scrambled by the medications. So follow this if you can, otherwise either drop down a few paragraphs when I think things may get more coherent, or...go find something better to do with your time instead of trying to decipher a crazy old man’s mental maelstroms.
As I was beginning to say...I took the phrase “Follow the light” literally. If you do that it doesn’t matter which way the picture was oriented. You just have to go toward it. But just for the sake of argument let’s say it was oriented to the sunset in the west.
Simple. You just follow the road until...
The sun sets and it gets...dark.
Pitch black dark.
No moon dark.
Inside a cow’s belly dark (to use an old flying metaphor.)
What do you do then??
Stop!
The Dante’s Inferno kind of stop--
waiting in the darkness on the ledge--
listening in the darkness to all the sounds of tormented souls--
long in the darkness for Beatrice to come take you to safety--
kind of stop.
But wait! Morning finally comes! The sun rises! A new day! So you begin to follow the light again.
Now here’s where my mind really got messed up. Take the instructions literally again.
No sooner have you started east, than the sun rises over your head going west...so now you’re going west again...until noon when you don’t go anywhere because the sun is directly overhead.Then you start west again into the sunset and… You start all over again...back and forth...back and forth...never going anywhere!
Here’s where things began to get interesting. I was in this conundrum for two days before they changed my meds and my mind began to clear.
And, after this long, long, story, I finally got a message…
Everything I just wrote is true!
Whichever part of the story you chose, it doesn’t matter. As weird as it sounds, every part of the meditation is true. It’s the circle of life concept!
Then, finally, I got
The Real Message
Following Jesus has--and is going to--lead me into some pretty squirrely places and through really weird experiences…
But what matters is to
keep on keeping on.
Follow the Light!
Epilogue
Today’s “Our Daily Bread” was one more confirmation of the message. Called Divine Diversions it deals with the Acts 16:6-7 stories of Paul, Timothy and their companions being restrained “by the Holy Spirit” from preaching in Asia and Bythenia. The ODB meditation concludes with the paragraph:
“Who among us hasn’t grieved what we initially thought to be a painful loss? We’ve felt wounded when we didn’t get a certain job, when a service opportunity didn’t materialize, when a relocation got derailed. Though such things can momentarily be weighty, time often reveals that such detours are actually divine diversions that God graciously uses to get us where He wants us, and we are grateful.”
Till then…
Thanks for journeying with me.
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