If you want a trail to stay alive, walk on it.
The ultimate test of a road is not whether or not it is bumpy or smooth, or narrow or wide, or long or short. The ultimate test of a road is whether or not it can take you where you want to go. A road is only as good as its destination; without a destination, a road is simply useless concrete. With a destination, a road can be a crucial means to get where we need to go. On my recent trip to the Middle East I had the opportunity to travel on two very ancient roads: the Via Maris and the King’s Highway. Both of these routes have been used by travelers and traders for thousands of years, and they are as heavily traveled now as they ever were for one very important reason: they still get people where they need to go. The pavement may have changed over the years, but the basic route hasn’t.
When we talk about religion in our modern world we often talk about someone’s beliefs or belief system or theology. We don’t often refer to religion as someone’s road or path, but that may in fact be a better way of thinking about it. Christianity was first referred to as “the Way” and its adherents were called “Followers of the Way.” The first Christian communities had some definite beliefs, but they were not organized around dogma, they were organized around a way of life. The Christians had a goal or destination to which they were headed: they wanted to be saved by their God; to be one with him and to be freed from lives that simply ended in death and meaninglessness. They found in Jesus of Nazareth their way or their road to an eternal promised land, just as the Children of Israel generations before had found in Moses their route to freedom.
God may give us the destination, and God may give us the road to get there, but we are the ones who must have the will to move. As anyone in New Jersey can tell you, even the best road to the greatest destination is still pretty useless if your car is not moving. From the earliest records we have, people of great faith have been people on the move: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad and the list goes on. All of these individuals had an active faith and not just a passive belief system. They did not look at religion as simply another way to categorize themselves; for them, religion was their road or path to a relationship with God. They had the destination, they had the road to get there, AND they had the will to walk down it. Too often people think that they can just stand out in the middle of the road and wait for God to come by and pick them up, but in the Biblical story of the Exodus, God may protect the Children of Israel and guide them along the way, but ultimately they are the ones who must move, not God.
I have a friend who insists to me all the time that faith is a gift and you either have it or you don’t. I think that that idea is absurd. It is like saying that an athlete is born with big muscles or just develops them over night. We know that our bodies require constant work to stay healthy, so why do we imagine that it is any different with our souls? Our muscles are built over time and depend upon both the food that we eat and the exercise that we do. Faith is built in a similar fashion: it relies upon both the material with which we feed it (what we read, what we watch, and what we listen to) and the work we do to exercise it. The longer we walk along the road the stronger our faith will get. Not that there aren’t stumbling blocks, potholes and detours along the way, there always will be, but ultimately the journey is ours to make or not make. If we fall we can decide to lay there and stop moving or we can get up and keep going. We can trip over others who are sitting in our path, or we can simply go around them, never allowing anyone to prevent us from reaching our destination.
We can think of religion as specific customs, rituals, beliefs, and dogmas that separate us from each other, or we can think of religion as different roads with the common destination of God. The ultimate test of these roads is not how bumpy they are or how hard they are to travel; the ultimate test is whether or not they eventually bring us to God. My religion, or my path, is thousands of years old. Countless millions have walked this way before me, and many continue to walk this way today. I like to imagine that my tradition is like the Via Maris or the King’s Highway: ancient, but still in use because it still gets people where they want to go. But where the road is headed is really only one part of the equation; we also have to ask ourselves how willing we are to actually do the work, walk the path and practice the faith, because in the end, if we aren’t willing to move, any road can take us nowhere.
