The narrow gate

A Road Less Traveled By - Blackstrap Lake

“Enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and there are few who find it!” (Matthew 7:13 & 14. NET)



This brief admonition was recorded by the writer(s) of Matthew as a stand-alone piece of advice, attributed to Christ as a small part of the Sermon on the Mount. We have a similar bit of philosophy from poet Robert Frost in The Road not Taken: “Two roads diverged in a wood and I / I took the one less traveled by /and that has made all the difference.”

“The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right,” Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen said cynically. It's a reminder that a proof based on the number of people that believe a thing . . . turns out to be a very shallow proof.

And whose mother hasn't said at one time or another in answer to—But Mom! Everybody's doing it—“So if everyone was jumping off a cliff, would you beg to jump too?”

To be an independent thinker, an uncompromiser of truth, to be willing to suffer discomfort in order to pursue what's right is not given to everyone. It's a narrow gate found by the few, after all. I guess we need more guides. Grownups showing young ones where the gate is and why they should consider such an in-obvious choice.

Because the wide road with all its creature comforts and entertaining variety beckons tantalizingly, but we all need to know that its never wide enough, that the leisure and comfort it promises can come to resemble aimlessness and tedium.

Destruction, Christ called the end-point of that road. Ennui, boredom, might do as well.


But you'd be right to protest that this would be taking the metaphor too far, too literally. In reality, many doors present themselves, each one representing a choice, an opportunity. Some days I choose comfort and isolation to give body and mind a Sabbath; there's no good reason to feel guilty on those “broad road” days by reminding myself that I could have been out there doing “good deeds.”


Scripture is full of such metaphors that modern-day readers, unfortunately, routinely misread with disappointing results. Humanity is divided into “sheep” and “goats,” for example, and particularly evangelical Christians have clear definitions of what makes you a sheep or a goat, the sheep all marching in unison through the narrow gate, the goats cavorting down the broad road.


Nevertheless, a “rebirth” is nothing if not the gaining of courage to step outside of self-interest, self-preservation into a place where people of good will are making a better world in the best ways they can think of.


“And few there be that find it.”


“I took the road less traveled by/and that's made all the difference.”