Source: Psychologytoday
The Road Less Traveled may well have been a life-changing work and one of the best-selling books of all time.
Most people struggle with issues of spirituality in one form or another. Sometimes they arrive at a place of peace, and sometimes they don’t. Must we go through this struggle, or can you point us to a shortcut?
I do not think that everybody has to struggle. But to probably at least half of the people, it never seems to enter their minds that they might be engaged in a struggle or that there might be something to struggle with.
In the 1970s, when you wrote The Road Less Traveled, where were you at spiritually?
Although I was raised in a profoundly secular home, I had a belief, an awareness of God, from as far back as I can remember. In poetic form, there is a footnote in The Road Less Traveled about my earliest memory: “In the autumn, when I was three, my mother woke me from dark sleep to see the northern lights dancing in the cold. In her warm night arms, I danced all the way to China before she carried me in. I still dance, and I do not know if I can ever forgive her for such love.” That is quite a first memory. I credit my mother with that, rather than credit God.
The other major thing was reading the Gospels at the age of 40. I lay in bed at night reading the New Testament. And just as I had felt with Jesus Christ Superstar, I was blown away. Now I think a small part of the Gospels is made up. But I found this incredibly real person. Jesus was lonely and sorrowful and scared—an unbelievably real person. And it was at that point that I began to take becoming a Christian seriously. Some people who arrive at Christianity start with Jesus’ divinity, and some with his humanity. With me, it was his humanity. And only later did I begin to get in touch with his divinity, which was initially difficult for me to swallow.
Read more | This is an excerpt from an article by Robert Epstein Ph.D.
