Path

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

    and do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

    and he will make straight your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

These verses are special to me for several reasons, and I'll share two of them here.

First, I remember learning these words as a song at summer camp back in 1984 or 1985. To this day, some of my fondest memories of my life are from that camp, where I spent three weeks in the Colorado Rocky Mountains for a couple of summers. So this verse, and this song, always takes me back to the time before I went through my faith "deconstruction," a time that, faith-wise, felt very content and secure.

Second, one of my favorite books from childhood is "Little Pilgrim's Progress," a children's version of Bunyan's classic. Because of that book, I've always thought of my life as a path, a spiritual path where I might be following a well-marked trail or bushwhacking through brambles. When I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2000, I often thought about this metaphor, and I was thankful that the physical act of hiking was much easier than the spiritual act of discerning and staying on a path.

When I was in my mid-30s and an atheist, I starting writing my own version of "Pilgrim's Progress," one where I walked a straight, simple, easily identifiable path as a child, but one where the path broke down and became unfollowable as I aged. In the end, the "simple path" was going to have been some kind of dream or fable, and the main character would end up "making do" and finding fulfillment in life, even among the brambles. And then the brambles would grow into a more forgiving environment as the result of the main character's making a home there, and there would be kind of a happy ending after all.

Sad to say, my vision of green fields replacing brambles never quite happened in real life.

But then, that whole path has changed for me again last year as I went through "reconstruction." As I began to realize what was happening I (of course) began writing furiously again about Life as a Path. I thought a lot about how the spiritual path I was on (the one that started simple, became unfollowable, and then materialized again) might look as a story, an allegory.

Perhaps that story I started writing all those years ago is still relevant, and true, as far as it goes ... but the ending to that story, whatever it will be, has changed. And maybe I'll write it all down someday. For now, I'll just keep walking the path.

Hiking trail in North Carolina (I think).