I hold my late father-in-law in high esteem not only for his beautiful first-born daughter, but because he was an avid hiker. After his retirement from a college teaching career, Sam hiked the Appalachian Trail, that ancient foot-beaten corridor that led Native Americans and the early vagabond settlers along the spine of this country’s eastern mountain ranges. People are forever walking where some angels feared to tread and others have forged their way through the wilderness.
Robert Frost tempts us to consider the road less travelled, but there just might be some conventional wisdom in staying on the beaten path. Over generations, people have figured out the obvious logic of the shortest distance between two points. Even cows follow the well-worn way to the trough. There is a ring of truth in Emerson’s wisdom: “If a person can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
While there may be a danger in beating a path to nowhere in particular or fooling ourselves into taking the primrose path, there’s something in our bones that is intrigued by the traces of human wisdom in a well-worn trail to somewhere. Paths capture our imaginations and lead us to all sorts of interesting places. Remember the Wonderland that Alice discovered in the hole at the end of the path? Or Dorothy’s fateful trek along the yellow-brick road to the Emerald City.
The Bible is full of paths. We’re all familiar with that path of righteousness in the twenty-third Psalm, but do you remember ancient path of Jeremiah? “Thus says the Lord: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” [Jeremiah 6:16] In the far country of separation, the son of a prodigal father stood at the crossroads of his life and remembered the inviting road toward home. He had used it as an escape; now it would become the route toward redemption — the well-remembered path toward home.
Jesus and his disciples didn’t try to hack a new road through the religious landscape. Nor did they try to force everyone down some straight and narrow trail of harsh legalism. Instead, he paved the way for us to use the path of love to restore our lives and reclaim our relationships. The French political revolutionary, Andre Malraux, puts it like this: “The genius of Christianity is to have proclaimed that the path to the deepest mystery is the path of love.”
For centuries ever after, people of all walks of life, have followed the beaten paths to the doors of cathedrals and churches throughout the world. They have sat for cumulative hours on pews ripe with patina. They have brought their babies to be baptized, witnessed weddings and cried at funerals. They have sung songs and prayed prayers and endured sermons. And in the wonderful familiarity of this well-worn trail, there they discovered with those early disciples that Jesus is indeed the way that finally mattered most.