The Road to Hell ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 30, 2022
“If you come as softly as wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.
If you come as lightly as threading dew
I will take you gladly, nor ask more of you…” (Audre Lord)
The Reverend Nathan Price, in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible, did not come as softly as wind within the trees, as lightly as threading dew. No, the Reverend Price was a person of great conviction, with utter confidence that his way was the one right way. His mission was to go to the Congo to bring people to Christ, to save their souls. And that was it – the entirety of his mission.
The Poisonwood Bible is full of stories of Nathan Price’s unwillingness to tread softly or lightly; his inability to listen or to learn. Shortly after the family’s arrival in the Congo, he set out to plant a garden, just as they did in Georgia, with American seeds he had brought with him. The gardeners among us can just imagine how that went.
The African woman hired to help the family tried to tell Nathan Price that in that place, you needed to plant your seeds in hills, not flat in the ground in rows. He ignored her. And not long afterward, the rains came and washed the seeds right out of their little flat rows.
Nathan Price had an utter lack of regard for the climate, context, and culture of the people he had arrived to save. His definition of salvation was eternal, in the next life, and he took virtually no interest in the daily needs of the humans around him. The story of his focus on baptism was central to the narrative, as it was his only goal, and his intention, for his year in the Congo. His daughter noted at the picnic by the river that instead of mingling with his people, getting to know them and their concerns, enjoying the festive atmosphere, he gazed out at the river, angry and thwarted.
Months after the failed attempt to move Easter so that he could baptize the village right away, Nathan Price was still making no headway in his attempts to bring people to the river. At one point, to try to entice people to the river, he had a supply of dynamite flown in, and had the men of the village drop the dynamite in the river in order to easily harvest fish. Apparently they do that in Georgia. But the sudden supply of fish was so overwhelming that after everyone had eaten their fill, they had no means of preserving any, and the remaining fish rotted on the riverbank.
Finally, one Sunday after Price held forth yet again on the subject of baptism from his palm-front pulpit, the family’s servant stomped home and quit. She would have nothing more to do with them. And she angrily told him the truth: that a young child had been snatched by a crocodile in the river not long before his arrival in the village. The villagers were not going to be baptized in the river, that day or any other.
We grew up hearing that old expression: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I imagine we generally have a good sense of what is meant: that even when we mean well, our intentions, our attempts, can go terribly wrong.
When I was younger, I interpreted that saying in a particular way: that often we intend to do a task or a project – get our homework done, help with dinner, paint the garage – and very often we simply wouldn’t get around to achieving what we had intended to do. And so our laziness, our lack of commitment, would be seen as not the righteous path, the successful path, but the road to failure.
But as so often happens when we examine old thoughts in more depth, we can see that much more is meant by this old expression. The tasks that we may or may not accomplish in a given day are goals, really, not intentions. Intentions, though, are a way of orienting ourselves, a way of making our way through the world. Our intentions answer this question: How do we want to live?
“If you come as softly as wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.”
Now, Nathan Price certainly had intentions. His intention was to save the souls of the entire village where he was serving. And he would have argued that this would be the most important action he could ever take for the people in the village; to offer them eternal life, as he saw it. But his path was full of missteps at every juncture. He tried to demonstrate the safety and bounty of the river, so that people would embrace it, and ended up with piles of dead fish rotting in the African sun. Longtime Gloucesterites will remember what the impact of that intention would be like.
Unlike Reverend Price, we must always consider what the impact of our intentions are likely to be. This is always a challenge, because to do this well, we must always be aware of the needs of the people we might impact.
Our lives are full of instances when our best intentions fell short. I’m sure each and every one of us can think of several examples right now, and if you’re like me, you might feel like wincing. We make mistakes. We assume we know the best way to achieve a goal. We think we know the right thing to say in a tough situation. We try to offer our condolences, for example, and say things such as “God never gives anyone something they can’t handle.” (As an aside, promise me you’ll never say that. And if you want to find out some more helpful things to say, let me know.)
Often we intend to offer a compliment, but it can be taken as an insult. We might not know much about the person’s circumstances, so we assume our intended compliment will be appreciated. I remember the time when I was working as a church administrator, and happened to join that congregation one Sunday for a service. It was a suburban church, full of high academic achievers. At coffee hour, someone approached me and said, “Are you the one who edits the newsletter?” Hearing that I did, she remarked, “Well, I wondered – it’s always so grammatically correct.” She was intending to compliment me. I know that. But instead I heard, “Wow, who would have thought that someone in your position uses good grammar?”
This is an example of what is known as a microaggression. These happen all the time, although the term is most often used to describe the experiences of people of color. Basically, a microaggression is what we’ve always called a back-handed compliment. And while I have light skin and have never experienced the kinds of microaggressions that my siblings of color do, I do understand in my own limited way how it feels.
Imagine being told by a store clerk that you couldn’t afford what you were buying, as happened in Marshall’s here in Gloucester a couple of years ago. Perhaps the clerk thought they were being helpful. But how insulting!
As we end our month of focusing on Living with Intention, I’m calling on all of us to take a look at our intentions toward other people. We are being asked to consider our good intentions, and the impact they might have on other people. We can think of this as unintended consequences – such as dynamiting fish out of a river with no means to preserve them. Or the consequence – the impact – of planning to lead people into a river intending to save them, and risking their lives in doing so.
How do we bring our good intentions to our relationships with each other, and especially toward our siblings of color? Are there ways of orienting ourselves so that our intentions come from a place of understanding what is really needed, instead of from our assumptions? How does this impact our anti-racism work?
What I am really asking is how we can learn to intend the best for each other, without creating negative or hurtful impacts.
The clue can be found in our reading by Audre Lord:
“If you come as softly as wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.
If you come as lightly as threading dew
I will take you gladly, nor ask more of you…”
Come softly. Come lightly. In other words, enter peoples’ lives slowly and respectfully. Lead with empathy, and imagination for what their lives might be like. Give yourself the time and space to pause and imagine the other person’s life, and whether or not what you are about to say or do will be helpful. Do you remember the phrase I learned in my service work in Louisiana – What does help look like to you? Can you feel the sorrow of a village who has lost a child? Can you imagine how you would feel when someone thinks they are paying you a compliment but the impact is one of an insult?
How do we gain the empathy and understanding to be able to imagine what another’s life is like? It is lifelong work. We will always have good intentions, and we will always make mistakes. All of us. But if we embrace the intention of listening carefully, and learning as much as we can about the lives of others, we will find ourselves on a different path – a path toward connection, and understanding, and empathy.
“You may sit beside me, silent as a breath…
And if you come, I will be silent…
We shall sit here, softly….”
Let us not begin with intentions of doing good, or helping, or making friends.
Let us begin with intentions to listen more than we speak, to allow ourselves to be silent, to humbly assume we have much to learn, to be guided by our hearts.
May it be so,
Amen.
