Narrow Lies the Way

AM Psalm 50 • PM Psalm [59, 60] or 33
Isa. 9:18-10:4 • 2 Pet. 2:10b-16 • Matt. 3:1-12

Back in the day, when my late teacher, mentor, and friend, James Whitehead, distributed flyers announcing MFA gatherings at his home on East Lafayette Street here in Fayetteville, he would include a line cautioning us to park our cars carefully on Olive Street (which adjoined Lafayette), for “narrow lies the way.”

Jim could well have been paraphrasing a line from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. To demonstrate how to fashion a gentleman, Spenser renders the allegorical (and heroic!) journey of the Redcrosse Knight, who is questing for truth. Spenser writes

“For streight and narrow was the way, which he did show” (Book I Canto 10 line 1596)

Spenser could have been alluding,to this passage in Matthew (which is actually a few chapters past today’s Gospel reading):

“Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it.

For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it (7:13-14).

What a boon it would be to have a wide rather than a narrow way, an easy way rather than hard, in most any area of our lives. For that matter, it might not hurt some of us, depending on the situation, to relax a little bit, to go outside the box, color outside the lines. But in teaching me how to hold my sticks to play the snare drum, my percussion instructor at Syracuse, the late George Ward, told me when I first arrived that the easy way was not always the best way. One of my proudest achievements in my early days at Syracuse was that I learned to hold the sticks the right way.

In today’s reading from Isaiah, the prophet asserts that God requires sacrifice the right way:

Mark this, then, you who forget God,

or I will tear you apart, and there will

be no one to deliver.

Those who bring thanksgiving as their

sacrifice honor me;

to those who go the right way,

I will show the salvation of God.” (50:22-23 my emphasis).

How many times do we tell our young people that they need to keep to the “straight and narrow”? Mark Musa renders Dante’s famous opening three lines thus:

Midway along the journey of our life

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

for I had wandered off from the straight path (1-3)

And later:

How I entered there I cannot truly say,

I had become so sleepy at the moment

when I first strayed, leaving the path of truth; (10-12)

Different world religions have each had struggles with what it means to stick to the “straight and narrow,” to do things the right way, sometimes with bloody consequences. If you’re going to follow the “path of truth,” who gets to decide what “truth” is? Who is the final authority in determining what is “God’s will”? Following the right way could mean helping people, or at least staying out of trouble. Failure to follow the “right way” could result in a scolding, or a rap on the knuckles. Or a date with torturers and executioners.

I once did a paper discussing how The Faerie Queene contains a number of sententiae—for our purposes we’ll call them aphorisms--that seem to be contradictory: The issue was: which ones should we follow? The answer, as in many other aspects of the journeys of our lives, is that it depends.

It might have been Hemingway who said that a sin is something that hurts people. There’s a moment in the movie “Absence of Malice” when Sally Field’s character, newspaper reporter Megan Carter, is dealing with the tragic consequences of a woman taking her own life after reading about herself in Megan’s most recent published story. Megan’s senior colleague, Mac, a “wise old man” archetypal character played by Josef Sommer, tells Megan, “I know how to print what’s true. And I know how not to hurt people. I don’t know how to do both at the same time, and neither do you.”

Was Megan following the straight and narrow by doing her job? Or was she failing to follow the straight and narrow because someone got hurt?

Written by James Gamble

James Gamble studied creative writing with the late Professor James Whitehead, Dante in Translation with Professor John DuVal, and Renaissance literature with Professor Dorothy Stephens, all at the University of Arkansas. He also studied percussion with the late George Ward as part of the Graduate Music Education program at Syracuse University.