“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. 

~Jeremiah 6:16

Several days a week, I sit in a coffee shop in my neighborhood reading, writing or, truth be told, sometimes just staring. Amore Coffee sits at the crossroads of Annapolis and Smith Avenues in West St. Paul. It is a crossing of roads that leads to the Mississippi River in at least two of the directions and forms a border that becomes St. Paul. I sit and watch as people make their daily rounds taking them along various routes that are mystery to me. But for the one moment I notice their passing, I like to believe we are linked in some way.

Crossroads. When I think of this intersection, I often remember these words from ancient lips…”stand at the crossroads and look…ask for the ancient paths…where the good way is…walk in it…find rest for your soul.” I would love to also believe that the road each of these travelers is taking brings some rest, some soul nurturing experience. I would also hope that they are finding good ways in which to walk, ways that bring life to themselves and others.May it be so. 

The image of crossroads is both real and metaphor. One of the most influential literal crossroads in my life is found on the Isle of Iona, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. It is a place that has been a deep, soul-feeding place for me. On this little three mile island there are two roads. The roads come together and cross in a place that provides the many pilgrims that travel there a choice of which way to turn. Each choice will eventually bring them to the sea(it is an island after all)but the path will be very different. Each person traveling these roads searches for something different yet all have hopes of moving into a deeper soul place. Never has the experience of crossroads been so palpable to me, so visual. Since that time, the metaphor of crossroads has traveled with me, lives someplace within me.

Of course, crossroads appear to us daily. There is the sunrise and sunset, the crossroads of a day into night, night into day. December 31 and January 1 invite us to the crossroads of a year. There are the many choices, decisions we must make each day that imply a crossroad. This or that? Here or there? There are the big life experiences of birth, death, relationship, graduation, accident, illness, career choice. All crossroads of sorts.

And here we are at some given point of this pandemic. For more than a year we have lived in ways that were unfamiliar and difficult and confounding. The isolation we all experienced in varying degrees seems to be opening. And yet to what? This crossroads has no clear direction for which way to turn. We each will, in the end, have to find our own GPS that will lead us to the ‘what next’, our post-COVID crossroad turn.

One of the most famous pieces of wisdom about this experience of crossroads comes from the poet Robert Frost:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I have to admit that I was unacquainted with the two lines that lead up to the last three that many can quote. “I shall be telling this with a sigh…somewhere ages and ages hence.” These words capture the depth of spirit with which most are approaching this crossroads between our pandemic life and what life may be like in a few months. Sighing…deeply sighing. A sigh that will breathe us into ages and ages that are yet to come. With that in mind, may we stand at this crossroads and look with wisdom, patience and compassion toward each turning. Our turning may make all the difference. For ourselves, our communities and our world.