The Song of Tracks that Wind back
by Cavan Brown
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

Part 2

And so she sits up all night to protect the children from a snake that has slithered under the house. She has for company her own thoughts. In her sewing basket is a copy of a Young Ladies Journal, her only link left with the dreams of a young girl. She built her castles in the air-in her dream was a loyal and loving husband, a family of pretty children, a house on the beach and travel. A wry smile comes to her lips as she looks at the slim beauty of the magazine girls and thinks of her own figure.
Yet, what would these beautiful girls know about fighting a fire while your husband is away or seeing a dam, dug out by months of back-breaking work, ruined in a day. What would the pretty girls know about delivering your own child with only the help of an old native woman because the local doctor was drunk? What would they know of carrying a dead child 19 miles to the undertaker?

A world of beauty and nice things is now so distant, but the magazine reminds her of the time when she dreamt. Now, she knows that her world is so different and she could no longer fit into the ways of the Young Ladies Journal.

But there is one tradition, linked with her dream, that she has maintained; one ritual that she does not miss. Every Sunday afternoon she dresses herself and the children (amid protests from the boys) in their best. She takes as much care as a Carlton woman preparing her family for a Sunday afternoon stroll down Swanston Street in spring. Yet, unlike Carlton, her scenery is flat. "You might walk for 20 miles along this track without being able to fix a point in your mind. This is because of the everlasting sameness of the stunted trees . . ."
In this ordinary landscape and on this common track, she yearns for some dimension of the extraordinary. Yet she feels that this land has a strong sense of mystery, of spirituality, but it is difficult for her to describe.

What she may or may not know is that God seems to have a preference for revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary.

There's a track winding back,
To some old fashioned shack,
along the road to Gundagai

So Jack O'Hagan's song goes. Most of us have tracks that wind back-tracks that we have a "yearning just to be returning", because they lead to places of formative memories and stories that have shaped our lives. I have one such track which leads to a farm east of Katanning in Western Australia where I spent many a holiday. The North West Coastal Highway is another.

The Torah records the first track as that made by Adam and Eve, and God, "walking in the garden in the cool of the day" (Genesis 3:8). This track led nowhere in particular, but it was made as God walked in fellowship with humans. The second track was made as Adam and Eve left the garden. The footsteps, now human footsteps only, led away from Eden and from this path every other human track was formed. Which means, in a strange sort of a way, that all tracks, eventually, wind back to Eden.

Since that time, the offspring of Adam and Eve have made their own tracks. Some have found the tracks of the yearning heart that wind back to God; others have found the tracks of the restless wanderer. Abraham, the father of faith, learnt about God while following the pastoral tracks of the nomads from Haran to Bethel. Moses, while wandering in the pastoral tracks of the Middle East, was called by God to return to Egypt and lead the people of Israel to freedom. The nomadic shepherd, David, wrote psalms filled with images from life on the track, which gave him a far wider horizon than his mere palace walls: "He brought me out into a spacious place" (Psalm 18:19); "He enables me to stand on the heights" (verse 33); "You broaden the path beneath me" (verse 36). David, like Clancy of the Overflow, saw the "vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended".

Cavan Brown Cavan Brown is the minister of Geraldton Baptist Church, WA, and is the author of Pilgrim