I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me.

so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear

without my contriving. — Rainer Maria Rilke

During my year of college in England in the early 1970s, I hitchhiked as often as I could. The roads were less crowded then, I dare say it was safer too, and students wearing their college colors could almost always get a ride with lorry drivers or other travelers. On a fine autumn afternoon, I set out from my college near Windsor for Stratford (as in Shakespeare), a short hop of less than 50 miles. I was used to getting a ride within half an hour, but I grew impatient as the afternoon waned. So I crossed the road to the opposite direction and got a lift within five minutes. The driver was headed south and west, whereas I had been heading north. But that was alright, so I went along.

The protocol for conversations ran along fairly predictable lines. I would jump in, he or she would state where their destination was, the driver would ask where I was going, and off we would go. Often, the next set of questions would be, “Where are you studying?” or “What are you studying?” or more generally, “What brings you to this country?”

After my response that I was studying religion, the driver glanced over at me and gave a short laugh. He looked to be in his fifties, wearing jeans and a jean jacket, short, graying hair, a ruggedly handsome face.

“I wonder if you can help me,” he said. “My marriage is breaking up—my third marriage—and I don’t know what to do. I have a cottage out in Cornwall—“ he paused, “and I guess I’ll stay there until I figure something out. You’re religious; what should I do?”

I was a sophomore in college, 19 years old, unschooled in the ways of the world, and near the bottom of the list for reliable marriage counseling. But I did have malpractice insurance and it was this: I had made a pact with God that if I got a lift I would speak of my faith in Christ as the opportunity presented itself. I added a rider to the agreement that only if the driver initiated the subject would I “witness” of my faith. I’d had enough of running into roaming packs of overenthusiastic Christian youths in Berkeley and San Francisco to know that imposing or tricking people into listening to a witnessing spiel was not for me.

So here it was: my cue to speak. I should also mention that the final clause in the agreement was that I be given the words to say. Not asking too much, I reasoned, given the stakes. So we talked, or rather I talked and he listened as we puttered along in his little Citroen. He listened intently, with a question or two now and then, or he smiled and nodded. Finally, up ahead was Stonehenge, where I had decided to get out, and with the stones silhouetted against a blazing sunset, we coasted to a stop by the road. We sat for a moment, gazing in wonder at the sight. Then he turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, “Will you pray for me?” “Of course,” I said, and opened the door to get out. “No, I mean now,” he said, and put a hand on my arm. “Here, right now.” I gulped, and then I prayed with him. We shook hands, I got out, he drove off. And I stood there with a full heart and a mind full of questions.

Here’s the thing: when I got out—and even in the days that followed—I couldn’t remember anything of what I’d said, except that at one point I recited I Corinthians 13 in its entirety—a passage I had never memorized to my knowledge. Now, some 46 years later, with a memory I no longer trust out of my sight, that recitation is still all I can remember saying. I don’t know what happened to that man; I hope his life turned around. I know mine did. Theory turned into practice, hoped-for faith into action. It was enough.

We often describe our youth as lost, when they just may be seeking a point from which to launch. If you don’t have a destination you can’t be lost. It’s only when we establish a goal or a time limit or a linear point that we become concerned about losing our way. But on many of our life journeys, we don’t know the final point and we may not even know the way. Our lives are moving illustrations of faith as a rolling wave, traveling in a general direction without a specific landing point.

***

Somewhere in his many writings Kurt Vonnegut sardonically tosses out the fact that the universe is expanding in every direction, whistling past our ears outward at thousands of miles per second. Everything else, he intimates, pales beside that. By contrast, Northrop Frye says in his classic, The Great Code, that our default demand for unity and integration, for drawing reality in around us, can only rise as high as our finite imagination.

We choose our metaphors, but before that they somehow choose us. Our descriptions of our paths through life (there’s one!) are the images of what draws us onward (another one!) at certain points in our trajectory (you see?). They may change as we change; the important thing to remember is that we adapt to live up to them.

For many people today, their life metaphor is exile and homelessness. Even if they live in the Hamptons, Aspen, or Palm Beach, they feel themselves to be adrift. Another group, often evangelical Christians, revel in the faintly militaristic strains of “We’re marching to Zion,” and while the route ahead runs off the edge of the map they plunge ahead with confidence. Still others, as advanced in years as they are free to be both curious and experienced, will see their lives as a guided wandering, neither aimless nor pre-determined.

We need to wander until being “lost” doesn’t matter.

We need to wander until our reference points are behind us.

We need to wander without fear or assumptions.

But how long can you travel before it’s too far to return?

Frye says that if we really want to see past the event horizon we need to follow a way or direction until we reach the state of guided innocence symbolized by the sheep in the twenty-third Psalm.

Even though I walk through the

darkest valley,

I fear no evil;

for you are with me. — Ps. 23:4

Frye goes on to note that Jesus was a wanderer and that the diffusion of early Christianity “is symbolically connected with the progress of man back to the garden of Eden (159),” the “wandering but guided pastoral world of the twenty-third Psalm.”

The “wandering” motif runs against our linear, goal-driven, deadline-clutching lifestyle, and while there’s a necessity for all of that, there can also be a place for unfettered curiosity and the luxury of wandering without necessity or obligation.

Try it sometime: take a stroll through the gospels or the prophets or the Psalms, finding a text that lights up the imagination and following its references and associations until you reach a place you’ve not been to before. What do you find? Who is there? What do they smile or frown about? What makes them laugh and what are they completely serious about?

Try on a new idea or flip an old one around and see what difference it makes. Imagine that God is in search of us; that your co-worker poses no threat, but is struggling to get through her life; that a good word in due season is on the tip of your tongue; and that truth still really matters.

I look back on those hitchhiking days and I marvel sometimes. I would set out with no money and a light heart, sleeping in fields, trudging through the rain, alone on some country road with no traffic for miles—but it was all good. Countless times there were strangers who protected me, friends who gave me shelter, warmth, and a cuppa, country churches and city cathedrals which opened their arms to me, fields and meadows that welcomed me—there was even delight in adversity. What I didn’t know freed me, what I was learning strengthened me, what there was to learn lured me onward. Be it ever so.

Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (1996). Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. New York: Berkeley Publishing Group.

Photo: Murray Mahon, The Village of Hambledon, Hampshire, UK