The Road is Holy

          In this 50th year since its publication, I’ve been reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. You’ve no doubt been hearing about it lately. It’s a rambling novel about rambling, based on Lowell native Kerouac’s own experiences crisscrossing the country alone and with friends during the half-decade after the end of WWII. It reads more like a travel diary on steroids. Kerouac’s character, Sal Paradise, and company combine rootlessness and little purpose beyond a passion to experience life, especially different places, sex, wild philosophizing and jazz music. It became linked with the so-called Beat Generation of the time. Its place in modern American literature also has largely to do with its exuberant “jazzed-up” prose.

          Why do I mention it here? Well, as amoral and lacking in conviction as the book seems on the surface, there is a depth of love for life, along with its understanding of the road as a metaphor for existence, that we who are “spiritual” might recognize. Strangely enough, “holy” is one of Kerouac’s frequent adjectives. And as he says in ending one of his chapters, “the road is life.” It certainly was for Jesus, and his apostles. And from some other reading, I understand that Kerouac himself was a believing if not very practicing Roman Catholic.

          I bring it up here not to urge you to read the book, but as a reminder from a surprising source that life is a journey, and the way is holy. Even as folks who are generally rooted, going from day to day with a relatively routine existence, we can see ourselves on a path from birth to death, shaped by our experiences and sometimes helping to give shape to life around us. For Christians, the road is a metaphor for Jesus’ journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem.

          And Jesus, along with teachers of the “holy” from many traditions, conveyed an approach to life which looks at the world as filled with the presence of God. In his parable-stories, he brought deep significance out of the most common, everyday elements and activities, like mustard seeds, bread, shepherding and meals.

          I believe the challenge (really, an invitation) to us from these two unlikely sources is to learn to look each day for the presence of “the holy” in our everyday lives and experiences—in nature, in people, in work, in eating, in struggle, in music, in laughing and crying, in boredom and adventure. Kerouac and Jesus might both say that if we don’t experience life this way, it is because we haven’t opened our minds to it.

          Our culture, for the most part, has stopped looking at life this way. But we can.

The road is holy.

Peace,
Rod