#13: The Broad and Narrow way


It seems important to guard against both the complacencies of mysticism and the exhortations of western Biblical teaching in the matter of broad and narrow thoroughfares.  The Bible’s book of Matthew (7:13-14) insists that “wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction” and, as someone who too often sits idling in the stop-and-go traffic on Highway 401, I take Matthew’s point.  On the other hand, despite the unromantic, fully-declared, hurtling openness of a superhighway you often feel inclined to pit its eventual practicalities against the slowly unfolding sweetness of the small, meandering by-way, personal in scale, rich in sensuous enjoyment (birds, leaves, rocks, dust, bumblebees).  The narrow way is seductive.  The difficulty is, we no longer live in a narrow world.  Who can find the pathway to a pathway anymore?