Two paths diverged in the woods...

Imaginative formation, reading to children, and selling fear

In what has become a hackneyed cliche to use for graduation speeches, Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is often read as the pinnacle of personal choice. I’d like to think about it in terms of imaginative formation. Here it is:

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 kept 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.

In the graduation speeches, Frost’s poem is basically a call toward expressive individualism — take the less-traveled road! forge your own path! — but David Orr in The Paris Review describes this reading as immensely popular and immensely wrong: “The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.”¹ This narrative construal can be self-deceptive, but as I’ll write about more below, it’s also fundamentally human.

Photo by Ethan Dow on Unsplash

The narrator of the poem notes that each road is actually pretty similar to the other; each is moderately traveled. Orr’s point is that whether it is the road taken or the road not taken, we tell ourselves stories (“I shall be telling this with a sigh…ages hence”) about how Choice X logically lead to Outcome Y. How Road A lead to Life A and Road B lead to Life B and how glad we are for A=A, or, in Frost’s words, “how that has made all the difference.”

I’m less concerned with Frost’s poem in itself and more concerned with what it points to: we tell ourselves a narrative to make sense of our choices. While this could be self-deception, it need not be. Philosopher Jamie Smith writes: “we know reality storiedly.”² That is, when it comes to making meaning of ourselves and our contexts, we turn to story, what Smith talks about as liturgical anthropology.

In Imagining the Kingdom, he emphasizes a sort of bodily knowing that shapes our desires, provides a people to belong to, and a mission and purpose to our desires and action in the world. He mentions: “…we first imagine what we ought to love, because significance, for creatures like us, is first and foremost incarnate.”³ Bodies, imagination, desires, action, metaphors — these are all pieces whereby we accrue a story of a meaningful life. Stories prime the imagination, giving contours that shape our loves. These loves operate under the surface to fashion our desires, which motivate our action in the world.

Much has been written and studied about we know through story, how our neurons mirror the emotions of a storyteller when we hear a story as if we were the one experiencing it. Stories aren’t a helpful fiction, or just ways to distract oneself at the end of a long day: they are the primary way that humans make meaning.

If stories are how we make meaning, then I have more questions about how this happens and how it relates to Christian practice; specifically I’m curious about the gap between what we say we believe and the manner with which we go about our work in the world.

Even more specifically, the question I’ve been haunted by recently has been about two roads in Christian practice: How does one person take one road and come out with a robust discipleship, a framework for understanding the bible and culture, and who exhibits increasingly the fruit of the Spirit, while another person takes another road getting tangled in conspiracy theories, consumerism, and whose sympathy for others grow increasingly narrow?⁴

What are the elements that make up a robust, generous, resilient Christian imagination?

While we can’t expect that once we’ve named these elements, we can plug them into someone like a math equation expecting the same results each time, it’s still worth giving our attention to — especially if you’re a parent, or someone in the church. I’ve got a few inklings about what could comprise a robust, fruitful imagination. A robust Christian imagination must start with story. And it must eschew fear.

As my children grow, I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about how well and poorly we’ve prepared them to fly the nest — our mistakes and foibles, our coming down too hard or not hard enough, our lack of regular devotional time. But one thing we have done well is give them stories.

Photo by Klim Sergeev on Unsplash

My children (whose ages range from 10 to coming-up-on 17) have been immersed in story. Especially when my teenagers were little we spent hours upon hours reading through The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter; as they grew we discovered the Wilderking Trilogy (fabulous on audio!), and they found The Hunger Games, The Divergent books, and others. Stories have shaped them. They dressed as characters. They wanted to be the Pevensie children, or fight injustice like Katniss Everdeen, or believe that in doing the right thing, there is still a much bigger plan that makes sense of suffering.

While none of the reading guarantees an outcome, from their littlest years we have presented stories that ignited their imaginations for what is possible, what virtue is, and what a good life of faithfulness, and self-sacrifice look like. Their imaginations have been primed.

We’ve also prioritized Sunday worship. They have participated with their bodies in the liturgy of the church; they’ve said the Creeds. They have welcomed people into our home with us as part of the normal rhythms of hospitality. They have been welcomed into other homes and people have seen the ways they are at ease with themselves; and church people, who have (mostly) accepted their child-like antics with grace, not (usually) expecting perfection because their the pastor’s kids.

We’ve given them stories to belong to — in their heads and in their bodies. When they lose their way, we pray those stories won’t just be nice memories but also deep reservoirs of belonging that get at a deeper well of what it means to be human that they will continue to hunger and thirst for. I use this example not to prescribe a parenting tactic, but to remind us how stories usher us into contours of meaning, of telling us what’s possible.

A robust Christian imagination also must eschew fear. Fear sells. Turn on any news channel and what keeps you glued to the screen isn’t just information, but a girding up your loins sense of panic: If X wins, we’re doomed, so do XYZ (meanwhile the other channel is using the same fear tactics by swapping out people and issues).⁵ Fear operates underground. (There’s much that could be said for our dopamine-addicted neural pathways here, but I’ll leave that to others). But when we’re sold and keep buying a story of fear, we tend to lash out or self-protect, neither of which Jesus says characterizes his disciples. Furthermore, if fear rules, we squeeze out the possibility of transformation.

If something good is going to grow from the soil of our Christian belief and practice, a motivating fear can have no part. This means we risk pain and vulnerability and failure — all things that an upwardly mobile, Western world says should be meticulously avoided, but what the Christian story and witness says are worth risking for a treasure kept where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves will not break in and steal.

Friends, we have a better story to belong to! We have a story that is given in bread and wine, that is lived out amongst every tribe, people, tongue, and language around the globe week-in and week-out and that travels through past centuries, to our present, and moves towards a future, where we will all gather around the feasting table, clinking our glasses at the Feast of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. Surely this story can grip our imaginations.

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Over to you —> I’d LOVE to hear what elements you’ve noticed in your own life and growth that contribute to a robust Christian imagination. What has made one path more viable than another? What part has suffering played?

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This is a part of a new (generally) weekly series on creativity and a generative life, based off my reading. Earlier pieces include: On Generative Work, Creating Amidst the Machine, On Boredom, Women, Work, and ‘Women’s Work’, Wendell Berry and the Influencers, and If not Me, then Who?

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For more of my work, check out The Willowbrae Institute, my books (Finding Holy in the Suburbs and A Spacious Life) and The Cartographers Podcast (where we’re talking about formation, technology, suffering and hope).

1. David Orr, “The Most Misread Poem in America,” The Paris Review, Sept. 11, 2015, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/

2. James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, p14n26.

3. ibid, 125.

4. This is especially vexing when it seems they’ve been given the same sorts of practices (a ‘habitus’ Jamie Smith would say) and yet have wildly different outcomes.

5. Please hear me: this doesn’t mean that people and issues and voting are all interchangeable or that they don’t matter. It does mean that both “sides” often traffic in fear.