“There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.  What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs.”         Luke 12:3

Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees, the learned men of his day, who appeared respectable in society, but whose corrupt inner lives would eventually be exposed for all to see.   This Bible story is thousands of years old, but it’s amazing how much it can speak to our internet era, how more and more our voices can be broadcast from the rooftops (or cell towers, even).

With an eye to the future, our son presented us with an Amazon Echo as a Christmas gift.   Certainly it has potential to be a help in our senior years.  Alexa is truly very smart and can cheerfully search for any information we need.  She can play our favourite music,  and turn on the light.   She can respond to our whisper with a whisper.

It just feels as if there’s not much privacy left.

Cell phones track our movements, financial transactions leave a trail, photos have geographical co-ordinates encrypted within them.  Laptops have webcams.  When away from home, you can turn up the heat, start your laundry online.  Our car is monitored by afar by the manufacturer, and we receive regular e-mail notifications after checkups. Advertisers track our Google searches and Facebook notes our lingering on a post.  It’s as if the whole world is now like a small village, where everybody knows everybody else’s business.

In this kind of environment, we have a real responsibility to live lives of  integrity, consistent in both inner and outer lives.  More than ever, we also need to be cautious of a careless word, or of airing grievances.  It can be amplified instantaneously over the world, echoing off satellites and affecting many more people than ever before.

“You never can tell, when you send a word,
Like an arrow shot from a bow,
By an archer blind, be it cruel or kind,
Just where it may chance to go.
It may pierce the breast of your dearest friend,
Tipped with its poison or balm.
To a stranger’s heart in life’s great mart
It may carry its pain or its calm . . . “

From You Never Can Tell, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850-1919

February, the shortest month on the calendar, often feels like the longest. It has been aptly dubbed “foreverary.”  Winter snows still blanket the landscape, and spring seems far away.  As COVID concerns linger in early 2022, our days are spent in obscurity.

Many artists, labouring alone, have known a similar loneliness.  Vincent Van Gogh, his talent unappreciated in his lifetime, lamented that, “A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.”

The poet Dante is feeling so weary as he makes his pilgrimage through the Inferno,  but his guide Virgil will have none of it.

“Up on your feet!”  This is no time to tire!”
my Master cried. “The man who falls asleep
will never waken fame, and his desire
and all his life drift past him like a dream
and the traces of his memory fade from time
like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.”
(Inferno, Canto 24, 49-51, Hollander)

Though we may never experience their acceptance, we are to be faithful in exercising our gifts.  Van Gogh lived in poverty on the fringes of society, and Dante was exiled from his beloved city of Florence.  If they could see the scope of their art in the world today, they would be amazed.

Jesus tells the ordinary men who followed him that they, too, must be “up and going.”  They have been with him for months as they trekked through the Judean countryside.  They have the unique vantage point of eyewitnesses.  They suffer through his crucifixion and thrill at his resurrection.  Their accounts have a kindling power, though they will suffer for the telling.

When we’re caught in the doldrums, when the February blahs threaten to affect our mood, then it’s time to faithfully do the next right thing.  It may seem trifling and insignificant to others.  No one else may see what you see.

Who knows what will succeed and what will fail until we make an attempt?  When we write a poem, when we create art, we plant a seed for the future that may very well blossom in another place, in another time, for someone yet unborn.

When you have a specified destination and limited time or supplies, it’s best to stick to a known way, but on occasion, choosing the less-traveled path can actually lead to a serendipitous outcome.

One Sunday afternoon, wandering the ravine on my own, I came across backyards of houses and had no idea of what road they were on.  Going back and persuading my husband to accompany me, we traced my route.  Hearing voices, we called out a greeting to the people up above.  Because the back of properties behind us bordered each other in an odd way, they were actually just three doors down from us.  Extending the handle of a hoe, they pulled us up onto their backyard to enjoy some campfire hospitality.  Turns out they were from northern Ontario, and  had just moved in.  We’ve enjoyed a neighbourly relationship since.  Makes a great origin-of-friendship tale!

There are times when we miss so much by taking the wide, well-traveled paths.  Jesus warns that it can be deceptive, though it seems far easier to follow the crowd.   A narrow, less-worn path, though lonely at times,  may be your unique path to get where you really need to be.

In a memorable scene in the Muppet Movie, Kermit tells Fozzie to “take a left turn at the fork in the road.”  A navigator and clear landmarks can be really helpful.  It’s not always that clear!  What we lose in clarity, however, may be made up for in adventure and growth.

Construction or an accident may compel us to take detours.  As much as these slow us down, an unfamiliar smaller road can open up the world, allow us to experience the small towns or villages we’ve formerly only known by names on signposts.    As “shunpikers,” we can avoid a 401 highway where everyone seems hell-bent on getting to their destination.

“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.”

                                                     Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

 

 

 

 

“

“Humans are notoriously bad at walking in a straight line,” observes Dr. Elizabeth K. Andre in her Great Course seminar on Outdoor Fundamentals, citing several examples from her group-leading experience in the back country.  We have little sense that we’ve veering in the wrong direction, and can easily find ourselves miles away from our intended destination.

As a kindergartner on her way home from school in the little village of Ancaster, I once found myself lost in a subdivision maze.   We’d only lived in the village a few months and I had somehow taken a wrong turn.  Even though there was a water tower landmark in the distance, there didn’t seem to be a way to navigate out.    Eventually my weeping attracted a sympathetic young mother at home with her baby, who called the police to help me find my way home.   You don’t soon forget that panicky feeling.

Our home now is above large ravines that cut down to the shores of Lake Erie.  When we first acquired the property, we thought it would be fun to explore this wooded area with friends, perhaps work our way to the lakeshore.  After an hour and a half of climbing over fallen logs,  hopping rivulets and avoiding swampy areas, we decided to climb up to see where we were.  Chagrined, we saw we’d arrived at a meadow only ten minutes away from home.  If we’d followed the road, it would have only been a 25-minute walk to the lake.

It’s not only in a physical sense that human beings have trouble keeping to straight paths.  We’re  intrigued by shiny things, make detours around obstacles and then get confused, we take short cuts, we’re pulled in different directions. We fail to be aware of our surroundings only to find that now night is coming on, and we have no idea how to get home.

At Sinai the Israelites were given clear instructions on God’s ways, laws that promoted harmony and wellbeing.   As they wandered in the wilderness, God miraculously provided the sustenance of manna and water to the people of Israel,  wherever they were.  They might have considered that they’d arrived once they reached the promised land, but in accommodating to the pagan idolatry around them, they failed to notice the little deviations that eventually took them totally off-track spiritually.

Jesus once told his disciples that he was himself the Way, the pathway to heaven that we can follow.  The bread and the wine of communion, his body, is given for both direction and providence for the journey through this sometimes thoroughly disorienting world.

Light of the world
Bread for the way
Live wholly in us
As we travel each day.

When the woods are dark
And it’s hard to see
When the street’s unfamiliar
The wrong place to be.

Then let your Presence
Be the path that you’ve made
For you go on ahead of us
And we need not be afraid.

Trudy Prins

“Oh, how great is the abundance that is stored in granaries so rich above, that down on earth were fields ripe for sowing!    Dante’s Paradiso, Canto 23, 130-132

In his TED talk on cynicism, Jamil Zaki referenced a study on two Brazilian fishing villages, only 30 miles apart.  Fishermen in one village worked together to fish the ocean, sharing the necessary heavy equipment.  Fisherman in the other inland village fished on a lake in small craft.  On the ocean, people trusted each other and worked together.  On the lake, there was competition and mistrust.

We put a lot of time and energy into acquiring, storing and guarding possessions, and it seems as if God has a tough time prying off our fingers from them.  Like the lake fishermen, we are convinced that the world is a place of limitation and scarcity.   It’s as if, Zaki noted,  we think of life as a zero-sum game.

When we begin to understand we are part of a community, a world, where no one wins unless everyone’s needs are satisfied, we can begin to tame the grasping part of our nature that wants to hoard.  We can open our hands to receive, and share what resources we have.  We learn to trust the Giver.

This became abundantly clear to me in the years when I worked to help contract and schedule corn receiving.  The plant needed 40-60,000 bushels of corn daily to process into starches and syrups, roughly 35 trucks per day.    Sometimes, near the end of an old crop season, supplies were tight.  It could feel, as someone jokingly teased, that we were like hens scratching for corn in a farmyard.   So often there was unexpected grace in answer to prayer, along with the reliable suppliers who did what they could,  and our own hard work.  In all the time I was employed there, through prosperous and lean years, we did not run out of corn, though it sometimes came very close.

God laid His character on the line when he challenged the Israelites of the Old Testament on the practice of tithing, bringing the first and best of their produce and livestock to the priests at the temple.   If they were stingy, they would always struggle to eke out a living, have purses with holes in them.  Be generous in this, and they would have more than enough for themselves and others.

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.”   Malachi 3:11

It is a relief to lay down our burdensome worrying and to trust that God’s providence comes out of unending riches, an unlimited ocean.  With joy we receive liberal blessings, far beyond what we could ever ask or imagine.