Never the Same River – May 2023

Never the Same River –May 2023

Last month our book club discussed a favorite novel, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  Although I had read and enjoyed the book years ago, I was amazed at how impactful it was to me this time around.  It was as though Steinbeck’s perspective on good and evil was being written to a completely different person.

“You can never walk into the same river twice because it’s never the same river and you are never the same man.”  So said the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, in foreshadowing my encounter with East of Eden.  A different man read the same book.  A new impact was made.  And something special emerged from an experience that I had expected to be common.

How do you discern the sacred that is laced within your own routines?

I have often lived with an obsession for the new and unfamiliar.  Life is short and I have tried to honor this truth by jamming as many new things into it as humanly possible.   I am challenged to change my course and draw into an observance of what is sacred each day.

If your life is anything like mine, it involves ordinary encounters within a subset of the same people and places.  We are often lulled to complacency and miss the unfolding miracles.  We dream of exotic, faraway experiences as a requisite for true life to emerge when the opposite is likely true.  Wendell Berry writes: “Another place!  It’s enough to grieve me—that old dream of going, of becoming a better man just by getting up and going to a better place.”

Perhaps this makes sense because God’s business is to call out of us, what is amazing and divine.  Jesus is the one who took jugs of plain water and turned them into servings of beautiful wine.  He does the same for us through his daily touch.  When Jesus gave his disciples the beatitudes, they surely thought it was a new message to destroy what they had previously been taught.  Not so.  Jesus was adamant that he wasn’t here to destroy what was.  Rather to shed new perspective on the precious ancient truths of Scripture.  Doesn’t it follow that he would want to do the same for us?

Spring is when we see old things made new again. Even the spring snowstorms in the Rockies can’t diminish the wonder of this annual transfiguration.  Tomorrow, I will be walking in the Little Laramie River with a fly rod in my hand studying what is new about a river I know intimately.  This river is an unregulated flow of snowmelt that comes down from the Snowy Mountain Range and runs a circuitous 3-mile path through our ranch.   Unlike many of the western rivers with controlled flows from the upstream dam, this river has flows ranging from 10 to 2,000 cubic feet per second.  The difference can be shocking.  It is never the same.

The river will be changed but in what ways?  New willow branches extending on the banks to provide shade and bugs for the hungry trout?  Probably.  Violent flows in places where slow dribbles had existed last fall?  I’m banking on it. Logs will have fallen; new beaver dams will have been constructed, and surprises will await me around each bend.  Tomorrow, I will be a new, old man walking in an old, new river.

There are so many headlines that compete for our attention today.  Perhaps what is really new is the transformation we experience amidst the backdrop of our everyday lives.  “I make all things new,” said the One who sits on the throne.  Like reading the same novel with an old group of friends and experiencing them both as if it were the first time.