Words of Faith: Maybe Robert Frost was right about that road

When Robert Frost wrote, “take the road less traveled,” I can’t imagine he was talking about any place in Fort Mill. I don’t think there are any less traveled roads; it seems as if, more and more, there are only overcrowded roads.

I can’t quite figure out how building the infrastructure always comes after building all the houses, but I’m sure somebody smarter than I am knows why that is. But the roads are full of people who in these frantic times want to move quickly from one place to another, it’s getting harder and harder to make that happen.

I guess Frost wasn’t really talking about a community like Fort Mill. When I imagine the roads in the woods he describes, I think about being deep in the woods. Sometimes, deep woods are cool and inviting and exactly where we want to be.

But sometimes, deep woods are dark and lonely and frightening.

In our congregation, we have begun a journey in this season of Lent during which we will explore what it means to be in the dark wood moments of our lives. Times of uncertainty, of discomfort, times of pain and lostness. We all have them.

We tend to be fearful of such times. Whenever I think about the dark woods, I think of a scene in the first Harry Potter movie. The first year students are coming into the dining hall, and experiencing Hogwarts for the first time. Dumbledore, the headmaster, gives part of the welcome – and some warnings. He warns them against the forest, and a certain hallway, unless they want to die a horrible and painful death.

Whenever I think of our dark places, our scary times, I hear Dumbledore’s warning. We make the dark woods out to be places to be avoided at all costs. And we believe that if we are in the dark woods, our only task is to get out as quickly as possible, as if life can be good only if we’re nowhere near the dark woods.

But as the characters find, going to the dark woods is sometimes the only place to get to light and freedom and possibility. It is sometimes the place where we have to have courage to go, and to stay a while.

Certainly an example of that is with grief after someone dies. Our only thoughts are often about the quickest way through or around the deep woods of grief. But from study, personal experience, and being with hundreds of people in the midst of grief, I know for sure there is no avoidance of grief, there’s no way around it, there’s only moving through it. And often the movement through it is very slow, no matter how much we wish it would speed up.

I also believe this to be true of other times when we find ourselves in dark woods. We want escape, but there is none.

But when we are in the deep woods, and we stop looking for an escape, we can find that there are gifts available to us. Gifts of grace and compassion, the gift of a hand held out by someone who has been on that road before us. And most significantly, we find that even though we think we’re there alone, and even though we often feel as if we are alone, we are not.

The One who created us, the One who loves us beyond measure, never leaves us alone.

In Lent we remember the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness before beginning his ministry. Although his wilderness was desert, it was certainly the emotional dark woods. We remember his courage and his patience and persistence, in the face of all that came after him. And we remember that even given the opportunity to run, to escape those dark woods, he knew that the path of courage was to stay right where he was, to learn the gifts of the dark woods, and then to proceed to the ministry of freedom and reconciliation to which God called him.

So maybe Robert Frost was right. Maybe that road less taken is the one that keeps us in the dark woods longer, long enough for us to perceive the deeper and richer gifts of life.

This story was originally published February 24, 2016 at 2:37 PM with the headline "Words of Faith: Maybe Robert Frost was right about that road."