The Gospel According to Robert Frost

I should tell you about Robert Frost, the great American poet I met in high school. Not literally, of course—he was long gone by the time I learned of him and began a relationship that continues to this day. There was so much in his poetry with which I could identify, explorations of loss, identity, relationships, philosophy, and so much else, all communicated in poetry that was at the same time deep and mystical and accessible and relevant.

As an adult, I can even see hints of the gospel hidden within so much of Frost’s poetry. The two roads diverging in a yellow wood that required the narrator to make a life-changing choice, for example, echo the wide and narrow paths, or gates, of Matthew 7:13. More emotionally resonant, The Death of the Hired Man tells the story of Silas, an undependable farmhand who returns to Warren and Mary’s farm with big promises of how much he is going to help them if they’ll just give him another chance. Told primarily through a conversation between soft-hearted Mary and the more cynical and fed-up Warren, Silas’s plight becomes our own. He, like a prodigal—like us—has no where else to turn, and so he has returned to the closest thing to a home he has.

Mary points this out to Warren when she tells him Silas has “come home to die”. The two of them then debate what constitutes “home”. He suggests home is, “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” His view of home is almost obligatory, a contractual arrangement where freedom isn’t even in play. Home is something owed. Mary counters by saying she sees home as some thing a person doesn’t have to do anything to deserve. She removes the obligation and turns home into a gift. At the end of the conversation, Warren, convinced that he should allow Silas to return, goes to see him, only to find that he had indeed come home to die.

It’s an emotional poem, and I cannot read it without seeing the great themes of the gospel all through it, especially the idea of coming home without any real claim or right to expect a welcome—and being welcomed anyway, because home is “something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” I don’t know that Frost intended that synchronicity, but that hardly matters. If the rocks can cry out and the heavens can testify to the goodness of God, surely we should not be surprised to find rumors of the gospel in otherwise secular works.

Keep your eyes open. See in what unusual and unlikely places you can find hints of God’s working in our world. Think of it as mining for precious stones, or playing a unique game of hide-and-seek. God is often hiding in plain sight, unseen simply because we weren’t looking for him. I think I saw him hiding once in that yellow wood, peeking out from behind a tree down the less traveled road. It was that glimpse that convinced me to choose that path, and I keep getting glimpses that reassure me I’m on the right road after all, and soon enough I’ll be home—a place I don’t have to deserve.