During lock down I took photographs of paths. The ones I like are the well worn ones, the ground shaped and the landscape etched by thousands of footsteps over who knows how many years. With so many people walking for their hour's exercise it becomes clear that they discover short cuts, and so new paths are made.
I read somewhere that an architect designing new housing developments suggested putting grass down and only designing one or two obvious paths. After six months it becomes obvious the walking routes people use to the shops, the bus stop and navigating between streets. The paths were then laid where people were already used to walking. Something like that happened on some of the common ground where we live – people's walking had created new paths.
Two of the most familiar texts in the Bible are about paths. "He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake." Sung at weddings and funerals, in Psalm 23 there are deep resonant images of life as a journey and the importance of taking the right 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 your paths straight." The book of Proverbs is about wisdom, good choices, moral integrity, ethical relationships, honesty with money, care and truthfulness in speech – these are the paths of life, that lead to life. This verse distils all that into one maxim, "Trust in the Lord…he will direct your paths." (Prov. 3.6 KJV)
So I like paths, I'm comfortable and content walking a known way; known at least by those who have gone before me, countless times. But one of the realities of lock down and living with the ambiguities and disruption of a pandemic is that many of the known paths seem to have disappeared; there is disorientation, a sense of displacement, a strangely unsettling loss of confidence that we know where we are, and where we are going.
Sheila and I walk a lot, have done all our time together. Often as she walks ahead, I'm aware of the journey we share, the companionship of a lifetime, the sense of moving forward together. The sunlit path, but with shadows and light, and life experiences that are likewise variable, changeable, unpredictable and in the end contingent, these are the given material out of which we make of life what we can. But we do so in concert, in step, on the same path which, though at times has been harder than we could know, is the path we have chosen to walk as both intentional journey and shared adventure.
An old hymn has remained a constant source of inner longing and spiritual sustenance ever since I first sang it as a new Christian convert, still trying to work out what in heaven's name had happened to me! I chose it as my ordination hymn, and at each induction service since.
Christ of the upward way, my Guide divine,
Where Thou hast set Thy feet, may I place mine;
And move and march wherever Thou hast trod,
Keeping face forward up the hill of God.
When I try to define what it means to be a Christian, like the Anabaptist tradition, I use the image of "following faithfully after Christ." Following with faith in Christ, following the faithful Christ, knowing Christ goes ahead of me, on the path I'm called to walk, faithfully. Those first followers of Jesus were called followers of the Way, people who walked a recognised path, the way of the cross.
During these past weeks of pandemic lock down there has been time to think. Reviewing the photographs I've taken has been an exercise in self-examination. Not the guilt hunting type, nor the introspective worrying about how I feel and why, nor that inner audit to check if I measure up to my own self-expectations.
A gentler questioning of why certain things interest me enough to want to stop and take a photograph in the first place; a more reflective and non-judgemental exploration of such a world as this, its beauty and significance, its capacity to perplex and fascinate, its evocation of wonder and endless possibility; a deliberate act of pausing, to look and to see, to be present to and to pay attention, to move from such slowed-down taking an interest to the gradual recognition that all of this that we call our lives, takes place in the presence of the God who is before us and behind us. The dynamic movement of the journey, this life of mine that is inextricably linked in love to another, and beyond her to countless others, these moments of encounter and attentive expectation before a flower, a path, a clouded sky, a blue tit, golden gorse, far horizons, these are also moments of praise and prayer, of contentment and longing, of self-discovery and self-forgetting.
To recall the interrogative technique of the wonderful David Frost; It is, is it not, a wonderful world.
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