The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken
Psalm 1

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

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


Robert Frost's poem is a great retelling of Psalm 1.  There are choices in life.  Once we make a choice, that choice leads to options of other choices.  One fork in the road leads to other forks in the road.  Each time we choose, we will soon have to choose again.

"Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back."

That's the grief that comes with our choices.  Once we make one choice, that means we usually can't choose something else.  One choice necessarily excludes another, or many others.  You don't get to go back and re-choose.  You only get to move forward and make new choices.

I have always been a big "free will" guy.  I have always lauded the fact that we have free will.  We can say yes, or we can say no.  It's up to us.  Most of the time we don't fully see the consequences of our yeses and nos.  Of our choices.  Not until it's too late.  But, hey, it was our choice to make.  We make our choices based on such little information.  Yet we assume the opposite.  We think we've got all the facts straight. But it's an illusion.  A falsehood we convince ourselves of.  So  we end up rolling with the punches.  We fly by the seat of our pants.  We keep pulling up on our own bootstraps.  We keep exercising our supposed freedom.

But then it hit me.  The truth of this Psalm and of Frost's famous poem destabilized my free will world.  What choice is made that isn't built on all previous choices?  Free choice is a fairy tale.  It's a bold faced lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves think we are really in control.  That we are "free."  The truth is that every choice we have made before has directed us to all future choices, and on and on.  We have created our own fate.

And others around us, including our parents and siblings and children and friends and teachers are all making their own fateful choices that affect us as well.  Our supposedly free choices are actually wound up with so many others.  All of that sets us on a path, fates us if you will, to a certain direction, determining where we are going and how we're getting there.  There is no such thing as a totally free choice, or free will.  It's all smoke and mirrors.

This is heavy stuff, huh?  It's the stuff of Psalms and poems.  And truth.

The deeper truth of Psalm 1 and Frost's poem is about positioning.  It's not about free will or choices as much as it's about where and how you position yourself.  Where you position yourself will determine what kind of choices you get to make from then on.

Psalm 1 gives us several options as to the places where we can position ourselves.  We can position ourselves in the advice of the wicked.  We can position ourselves on the path of sinners.  We can position ourselves on the seat of mockers and cynics.

I like the way The Message opens up this Psalm:
you don't hang out at Sin Saloon,
you don't slink along Dead-End Road,
you don't go to Smart-Mouth College.

Those are three of the options of where we can position ourselves in life.  There are two more possibilities, according to Psalm 1.  We can position, or plant, ourselves by a life sustaining stream.  Or we can position ourselves with the people of God.

Seating.  Planting.  Placing.  Those are the images of the psalm.  Those images are all about positioning.  Once we have positioned ourselves in one of those options, our choices accumulate along a certain direction.  The more we choose, the more we move along that direction, the less and less we are free.  It all depends on your primary positioning.  Your starting point.

For example, if you position yourself on the seat of the scoffer, your life becomes one big sneer.  People who scoff and belittle become people who care for nothing or no one.  Positioning yourself as a scoffer turns into a sickness that trivializes everything and everyone, including God.  Negativism turns into cynicism.  Which leads to isolation and estrangement.  But what you may not recognize, at least at first, is that to position yourself on the seat of scoffers is only a diminishment and disintegration of the self.  That's a dangerous place to position yourself.

So, the question, the most important question Psalm 1 bids us ask is, "What is my primary position?"  What is my starting point?  Where do I move out from into all other future positions?

There is a connection between where you primarily position yourself and your destiny.  If you initially position yourself negatively, future choices, future forks in the road will necessarily follow a negative path.  But if your primary position has to do with planting yourself near the nourishing stream of God, or in the midst of God's people, your subsequent choices, your subsequent forks in the road will reflect that.  So there is a connection between your devotion and your destiny.  That which you are devoted to will be your destiny.  That which you are devoted to will determine your destiny.  One road or the other.

Being devoted to God means first positioning yourself in him, and then turning toward him again and again.  Being devoted to God means, possibly, positioning yourself again in him if you have chosen the wrong way.  Starting again.  Positioning yourself again.  After you have bought into evil advice.  After you have followed sinners on the wrong path.  After you have sat on the seat of those who sneer at life, and maybe even at God.  After any or all of that, you can still start again with a new primary position beside the stream of God, and within the place of the people of God.

To be devoted to God, to make God your primary position, your primary starting point is to refuse every temptation to turn to the advice or the way or the seat of those who would keep you from that place.  To be devoted to God as your primary position in life is to become devotedly stubborn in your unwillingness to serve, obey, or even listen to the option of any other primary position.

Maybe your first and last free choice is the one you make about your primary position, from which you will travel down that road of life.  As Robert Frost says in the last line of his poem, that primary positioning "has made all the difference."