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

Part 3

When Christ came, his short ministry occurred on the tracks of Judea, living as a nomad, "the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head". He told those who followed him that he was "the way" or the odos, the track. One of the first names given to the Christian faith was "the Way", a people, if not physically then at least spiritually, unsettled, nomadic, searching for new pastures.

To be on the move is healthy for the body. "Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death", said Pascal. "Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being. Solvitur ambulando!, said Søren Kierkegaard. "It is solved by walking".

Being on the move is healthy for the spirit. Movement through natural landscape helps us to appreciate that harmony between humanity, God and creation. Without tracks we become blind to the artistry of God in nature and deaf to the songs of creation.

Another track was walked by two people long ago, in a landscape similar to that which the Drover's Wife had come to know. It was also on a Sunday afternoon.

This landscape was flat and so was their world. A man they had met had shown them a new way of following God. He spoke about the end of death but suddenly he was dead, and the extraordinary evaporated. As they walked on the track that led from Jerusalem to Emmaus, they wondered over what might have been. But as they talked, a stranger joined them. His pace slowed to their pace, his conversation to their conversation and his journey to their journey. In the course of that walk he shared a meal with them and the ordinary was again taken over by the extraordinary. "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road?" they asked each other after recognising that it was the risen Christ who had joined them on the track.
And from that day, as people journey through life, whether it be the ordinary track from the lonely drover's hut, the "track winding back" to Gundagai, a track somewhere out the back of Bourke or along St. Georges Terrace or King's Cross, there is always the possibility of a flat land turning into a land marked by the quality of freshness, of an extraordinary presence breaking into what seems to be persistently ordinary.

To: Perspectives Issue 63

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