The Road Not Taken
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
March 23, 2003

Reading: The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

	You all know the Yogi Berra line, “when you come to the fork in the road, take it.”  Frost’s poem is the most well-known expression of what we do at forks in the road.  On the surface, of course, the poem is about a simple walk in the woods, and the sort of choice we might have if we’re taking our morning constitutional in the Breakhart Reservation or the Middlesex Fells or the Audubon reservation.  Should I take the path to the left or the path to the right.  In mule terminology, should I gee or should I haw?
	But we know that the crossroads we come to in the morning walk is not likely in the usual course of things to make all that much difference. We’re going to get back to the parking lot either way, and the only difference the choice makes is which set of trees and ponds we want to pass on the way and how long we want to walk.  We know that this poem is describing this everyday experience as a metaphor fo something far deeper.  It is one of Frost’s great strengths as a poet, the suggestion of the profound in the prosaic.  The deeper layers are what make this poem so timely this morning as we are trying to sort out for ourselves our feelings and our reaction as our country has embarked on a military action with which many of us profoundly disagree.
	Before I get into that, let me say a few words about my role here.  This past week at the Interfaith Clergy meeting, my colleague Rich Weisenbach brought to us a reading on the very timely topic of how to preach on controversial social issues.  Though the author’s point of view was evangelical Christian, I had no difficulty translating his advice into UU terms, and it made a lot of sense.  He said there are basically three things a minister can do.  The minister can ignore the issue; this course is basically an affirming of the status quo, and misses the chance to bring religious values to bear on the questions of the day.  It leaves the church members either to make nonreligious judgments on those great questions or to try to figure out for themselves how their religious values impact on them.  The second approach is for the minister to take a stand on one side of the issue or the other and say that this is the only stand to take as a religious person, everyone who disagrees with me is a sinner.  This approach denigrates the religious values by putting them all on one side of the question.  The third approach is for the minister to try to identify the religious values which bear on the question, and how they might lead o one conclusion or might lead to another.  In other words, the minister is there to help the congregation se the religious values and apply them to the question, but not to foreordain the outcome.  The congregation may want to know where the minister stands, but that is only on the way to helping each of them make up their own minds.
	I find this to be a helpful framework.  I have the honor and privilege to have been called by this congregation as its spiritual leader, not its political director.  When I put on these robes, it behooves me to speak from our religious traditions and values, not from my own political stance.  In what follows here, I’m going to say where I stand, but try to do that as a way of illuminating the religious values underlying.
	Now back to out text.  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.  On a personal, individual level, this stands for all the times we have made choices in our lives.  Our religious traditions tell us to try to make our individual choices responsibly.  We are not Calvinists, we don’t believe that some predestination  is going to carry us to heaven or condemn us to hell regardless of what road we choose.  We are responsible for our choice.  So we stand at the point of decision and “look down one as far as [we] could” to where it bends in the undergrowth.  
	Here is a truth about choices – we can only guess at where they may lead.  You can only look so far up each road before you have to decide.  You can study all you want and make all the projections you want, but there is usually going to be some uncertainty about how it all will turn out.  Do you marry Bob or Bill?  Do you enlist in the army or go to college?  Do you take the high-paying job or the one that gives you personal satisfaction?  Do you stay in this relationship or call it off?  Do you stay in bed this morning or go to church?  You can’t really know until you put your foot on the road and start down it.
	The poet, however, does not stand there forever frozen in uncertainty.  He makes a choice, he decides on a road.   He likes the fact that it seems a little less traveled, that he is departing from the herd.  He is putting himself here in the minority and he is doing it gladly. Most of humanity is going by the other road, and that’s why it suits him to take this one. Though he confesses that in reality the two roads were worn about the same.
	OK, we have stood with the poet at the crossroads, we have made a decision.  But it doesn’t end there.  It would be nice if we could only look forward in life, if we never agonized over decisions after they were made.  But the poet says even after he had made his decision, after he had taken the second road he “kept the first for another day.”  We all keep our decisions long after they are made.  What if I had married Bill instead of Bob?  What if I had gone into the army?  
	Choices have consequences, and particularly when the consequences have turned out bad for us, we often hold onto the choices, replaying them over and over in our minds.  Last week, we tried an exercise in letting go, and one of the most liberating things to let go of is this agonizing over choices we’ve made. So we keep the other road in mind for another day, but we keep it for longer than that, the poet tells us.
	For in the final stanza, we jump forward ages and ages in time and look backward on the choice made in the yellow wood.  From this perspective, the choice appears truly momentous: “I took the one less traveled by/ and that has made all the difference.”  Not every choice will be this momentous.  Blessedly our memory does not hold all the choices we make in our lives; the vast majority of them pass into neural oblivion.   But some we hold onto, the ones that have made all the difference.  I quit practicing law in Charleston and moved to Boston, for instance. 
	So the poem speaks to all of us on a personal level, but the personal level is not at the forefront of our minds just now.  The poem also speaks to us on a collective level.  We have just, as a nation, made a monumental, momentous choice.   We have decided to invade another country, a country which has not threatened us directly.  We have taken a road that this country has not taken before.
	Though this doesn’t stop people from making parallels: either this is like Vietnam or this is like Munich in 1938 or this is like Sarajevo in 1914. Historical analogies are always hazardous, but I think this situation has some parallels to the Mexican war of1846, which also bitterly divided the country.  It was in that conflict that our Unitarian forebear James Russell Lowell wrote the lines which are in our hymnal at 119: “once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide/in the strife  of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.” 
	We come to the fork in the road, collectively as well as individually.  It is as if we are no longer on a solitary walk in the wood, but we are all aboard a bus.  The bus can take the right fork or the left fork, but the problem is there is no agreement on which for we should take.  The driver has announced for miles that he will take the right fork and many of us have been saying for miles that we shouldn’t go that way.  
	Now a decisive turn has been made.  The driver has taken the fork he said he would take all long.  What do those of us do who disagreed with him?  Jump off the bus?
	It may surprise you to know that there is a vocal minority of UU ministers who justify the invasion of Iraq. One of them said on the chat list this week that now all debate was over.  I vigorously disagreed with this; it seemed to me that to accept that the fact of the invasion ended all debate over its justness was close to embracing the fascist doctrine that n=might makes right.  Yet clearly in some way that I can’t fully articulate, I sense that we have passed a milestone with the advent of actual war.  The debate is not the same as it was last week.
	For one thing, there are now American service people in harms way.  Most of us will know people who are actually serving or their close relatives.  This was brought home to me a couple of weeks ago when I was guest preaching in another church, and at candles of joy and concern a young man got up and gave an impassioned speech about how the war was immoral, and went on at such length and heat that I was trying to find a gentle way to usher him out of the chancel.  The a young woman got up and quietly lit her candle for her husband, who had just been called up to active duty.
	I was struck by the contrast.  I know that there is not a contradiction.  To oppose the war, and to continue to oppose the war, is not to fail to support our troops.  Yet I wonder whether this woman felt unsupported in her grief and worry. 
	I was in the demonstration on Thursday at Government Center.  I had gone to buy a book at the UUA bookstore, and as I emerged from the Park Street subway station, walking up toward 25, Beacon Street was alive with marchers as far as the eye could see.  It did my soul good to know that there were others for whom the debate was not over.  Yet I also encountered a phalanx of counter-demonstrators with American flags and signs saying support our troops.   I wondered whether they were trying to make their point in that crowd, or were looking for a fight.  Unlike many of the demonstrators, I was glad for a substantial police presence.
	As I said, the Frost poem looks at a fork in the road from three perspectives: before the diverging point, just after the decision is made, and far into the future.  We are looking at this turn from the second of these three perspectives: we have just made the turn, but we keep the other road in mind for another day.  We who opposed the war have not ceased our efforts, but we keep trying to urge the driver of this bus to go back, to take the road of inspections and international diplomacy, even while we know that our voices will not be heard.
	And we feel like we are now being sealed off in a glass jar; our voices are no longer penetrating to the driver.  Worse yet, our fellow passengers are getting testy.  Some of us found this out on the common here in Wakefield yesterday, when the peace vigil drew a lot of angry words from those who felt that witnessing for peace was disloyal to the troops.
	Let me jump to a different way this poem intersects with our situation.  In many ways, the present invasion of Iraq is an attempt to travel the road not taken in 1991.  In that year, a coalition led by the US under the first President Bush, invaded Iraq to repel Iraq’s act of aggression in invading Kuwait.  You will remember that once allied ground troops entered the fray, the Iraqi army began abandoning their weapons and fleeing.  Shortly after the invasion, they were in a complete rout.  At that point, to press the war further became like shooting fish in a barrel, and that was when Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, recommended to the first President Bush that America declare a cease fire.  Bush agreed, because he did not want to prosecute the war beyond its stated objectives of repelling the Iraqi aggression.  There were several of his advisors who disagreed strongly, among them Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz, and they bided their time.  Now twelve years later, they are trying to go down the road that the elder Bush could not, and they have either converted or marginalized Powell in the process.
	Yet we all know that we can’t go down the roads not taken in the past.  We don’t get the chance to undo the decisions we’ve made, to go back to the way it was before, no matter how much we may regret it.  We can’t go back and marry Harry, he went on and married Sue.  Way leads on to way.  The road we took has led to other roads, and the stream of life has flowed on.  This is not a replay of 1991; we don’t have the UN behind us, or most of the industrialized West, or most of the Arab or Muslim states.  We may take out Saddam, but the consequences will be different than they would have been in 1991.
	How do our UU values speak to this?  We are used to being in a minority, to taking the road less traveled.   The Mexican war, against which Lowell wrote his great poem, also was the reason Henry David Thoreau wouldn’t pay his taxes.  Emerson visited him in jail, and said, what are you doing in there, to which Thoreau replied, what are you doing out there?
	In our principles and purposes, we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every human being.  To me this means that Iraqis are my family, and so are the American servicemen and women who are conducting the war.  And so is Saddam Hussein.  
	How do we respect the inherent worth and dignity of a ruthless butcher, a Stalin wannabe who has committed unspeakable atrocities on his own people?  This is where the values of compassion and acceptance get stretched to the max.  But I see Saddam as a world-class thug, and I am used to dealing with thugs.  I’ve represented plenty of them in my legal career.  To deal with thugs you need a good legal structure, reliable prosecutors, honest cops and strong jails.  And I wouldn’t kill him.  We have much to learn from people like him, about how violence begets violence.
	In our principles and purposes we also covenant to affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.  I would not have such a concern for the invasion of Iraqi sovereignty on such skimpy premises if there were an international criminal tribunal empowered to try him for crimes against his own people.  I would support the use of force to arrest him and get him to stand trial, if there were in place a system of neutral laws vindicating human rights.  To me the present administration went off the rails when it torpedoed the international criminal court at least as much as in the invasion of Iraq.
	But this is only my view, and I urge you to use your independent judgment to know how our fundamental values come to bear on this.  Here is what one of my colleagues said,
“unlike previous leaders and current leaders elsewhere who refuse to use power to end evil, especially where it is clear that failure to act will eventually create a much more dire world crisis, I credit this administration with the will to end a problem which has already killed hundreds of thousands and has occupied for far too long the energy of nations that have other important things to accomplish than playing games with despots.  At the end of the day and despite the setbacks, I believe that the "goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all" will be better served by this brief war than any other realistic option on the table.  As I watch the footage of bombs dropping on military targets, I feel great concern for the women, men & children who must be wondering if they will live to see the next day.  I cannot imagine that horror and have no illusions about the violence. But a much more disabling and insidious violence has been controlling their lives for a long time now, partly at our nation's behest.  The majority of Iraqis will greet American and British troops as liberators, and rightly so.   For the first time in a very long time, well before 1991, the average Iraqi parent can again have hope that their children may live to see a nation where food, medicine and education once again appear alongside the most sacred of all human ideals; freedom.”
	So you see, it is possible to apply our values and come up with a different analysis.  It is important to remember that truth and righteousness are not given exclusively to one side or the other.  We must all bear witness for our values, but we must never stop listening to one another.  What unites us is much greater than our differences.  We all hope for a speedy end to this war, and a minimum of bloodshed. We pray for our troops to come through, as we pray for the civilians and the country of Iraq. We can rejoice in the end of regime change even though we continue to believe it did not justify the means used to accomplish it.  And we can hope, sincerely, that our own worst predictions of the consequences of this action taken by our country do not come to pass.
	And if you feel, as I do, that the prosecution of this war does not end the argument, that its might does not make right, we clearly have work to do.  We have work to do to get our values out to the America people, to turn this bus around and get us back on the track.  Not to go back to the old days, but to try to fundamentally change the direction we are heading in, not to be the world’s bully but its conscience, not to throw our weight around but to strengthen the structure of international peace through law.
	We will be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence.  I hope the story we will be telling is of how a committed determined band of people from all over the country convinced the nation to turn back from empire and towards a true structure of international peace and justice.
Amen.