Follow-up to WATERmeditation with Virginia Day
“And That Made All the Difference”
Monday April 6, 2025, 7:30 PM ET
Thanks to Virginia Day for offering an insightful start to our meditation: “And That Made All the Difference.” The phrase is drawn from the closing line of the well-known poem of Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken.”
The video can be found at: https://youtu.be/yOi-GnAEPKQ
Last month we broke with what has been our tradition of some input, meditation, and conversation to explore what meditation is, and how and why we do it. Thanks to Adrienne Corti, Brad Lutz, Cynthia Tootle, and Mary E. Hunt for their insights and information. It was a welcome chance to think about what we are doing, to learn how to do it in a wide variety of ways, and yet still want to come back tonight to try again. As Brad reminded us, in the Benedictine tradition, “we are all beginners.” https://www.waterwomensalliance.org/march-2025-watermeditation-mary-hunt-and-companions/ is the location for the program.
Introduction to Virginia Day:
Virginia Day’s last two themes with us were memorably “Persistence” (March 2024 https://www.waterwomensalliance.org/watermeditation-march-2024/ ) and “A Blessing for the New Year.” (January 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lmkN8AK994&ab_channel=WATERwomensalliance ) In both instances, she led us gently in a good direction.
Virginia is a nurse, a palliative care chaplain, and a spiritual director who brings a lot of experience to our midst. Her background, both in nursing and ministry, gives her a wholistic view of persons and situations. She is a careful thinker and a good judge of precisely what is needed when it is needed. Her guidance this hour will be fruitful.
Virginia’s Remarks:
Thank you, Mary. I greet each of you as I look out at you and with you this Monday evening in April. When Mary asked me to consider offering a reflection some months ago and, I imagine that this might be the experience of our good friends here who have said “Yes” to her, my pattern is that I usually walk around with possible words, themes, inspirational thoughts for weeks and days given this awesome responsibility to inspire and to possibly move hearts and minds.
I am fortunate to follow Mary Hunt, Cynthia Tootle, Brad Lutz, and Adrienne Corti who offered the unique March session with insights of a more practical nature on “how to meditate” and “how to just be.”
Since the March 10 monthly meditation seems ages away, at least to me in the present chaotic world, let me remind you of how Mary Hunt, with great honesty, expressed what we might also feel personally, “that we are amateurs at prayer” and the first steps are learning to leave aside even briefly the burdens of the day and give time, just time, to silence. We hope that you are able to do just that this evening.
Cynthia Tootle offered us a sample of chants and goddesses to journey with us, and Brad Lutz helped us to engage in practices of meditation and contemplation as aids also to discernment, suggesting websites to assist in our practice. Adrienne Corti encouraged us to enter the mystery of each new day with special attention to our senses.
This brief recap brings us to this evening’s opportunity to engage quietly, to give time, to be attentive to our senses, and to feel.
In selecting tonight’s title, “And That Made All the Difference,” I am referring to the final line of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” written in 1916, as a guide for our quiet time together. The poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963) is familiar to all of us, I am quite sure.
The poem evolved out of a time Robert Frost spent in England (1912-1925) with his friend Edward Thomas, a British writer, who may have been wrestling with his own questions, later enlisting in World War I, and was killed two years later.
I am quite sure you encountered the poem in high school English class and I won’t belabor the structure of the four, five-line stanzas, in iambic tetrameter – but “yellow woods” do suggest autumn and there are two roads going in different directions; there is undergrowth which is grassy and suggestive of the less traveled path.
Even the punctuation and placement of a Dash “and I – I took the one less traveled by” is noteworthy, intended to create a pronounced pause – suggesting to the reader that one lingers at the moment of decision, looking down the path as far as one can see.
Joan Chittister, amazingly today, published something in her weekly newsletter this morning about “Life is Not One Road” (https://joanchittister.org/word-from-joan/dawn-hope ). We are looking at roads, paths, alternatives, decisions, and consequences all our days.
Robert Frost didn’t have the language of today, but he was writing about those who, in my words, desire “to live consciously.”
There is something to be gained by visiting former treasures, as if for the first time and I suggest that this poem is just such a treasure.
HERE I WOULD LIKE TO OFFER THE SILENCE SO THAT YOU MIGHT ENJOY THE POEM. SILENT READING
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Tough as for that passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that made all the difference.
Great American Poets: Robert Frost. Edited and with an introduction by Geoffrey Moore. Clarkson N. Potter, Inc/Publishers, 1986.
“And That Made All the Difference”…………. a path you don’t fully choose until you are on it and you have no idea of the outcome
“And That Made All the Difference”…………… a walk in the woods, you take both figuratively and metaphorically
“And That Made All the Difference” …………. gratitude for the gift and freedom that is ours to even choose our path
During our reflection time… consider on a personal, communal, and/or global level—
–What road are you (we) on?
–What divergent road are you (we) facing?
–What are you (we) seeing or not seeing down the road?
–How have you (we) been changed on the road? By the road? Can roads be reversed?
–How have I allowed myself (ourselves) to be healed of regret or disappointment regarding past choices?
Keeping in mind as you select your question – “And What Made All the Difference”
Twenty minutes of shared silence followed.
The graphic above was offered for reflection.
Among the several comments following the silence were:
- Reflection on the work of Howard Thurman, especially Jesus and the Disinherited (Beacon Press, 1996) in light of the recent “Hands Off” rallies that were both hopeful and helpful
- Do not dwell on past decisions, be grateful and focus on the path that you have chosen.
- One person recalled reading this in high school in Germany.
- Another person acknowledged that we never can anticipate the consequences of our decisions. More important is to have agency about embracing the path that we choose.
- A woman described two very different career paths–engineering and ministry–which she followed seriatim. While one led in some ways to the other, both were leaps of faith, road choices that “made all the difference.”
- A sense that the world as we have known it is passing away and a new reality is being born sparked one woman to reflect on how Earth is a reliable foundation throughout.
- Virginia closed by saying wisely that the poem and the refrain might stay with us for a few days, hence the questions she offered can be used in further contemplation.
Conversation continued a bit after the formal closing. One person asked about resources in pastoral ministry for working with congregants who are rightly afraid as immigrants, even those with green cards or permanent status. WATER friend Cindy Lapp, pastor of Hyattsville Mennonite Church, was not present, but she subsequently suggested a good resource for pastoral care, the Congregation Action Network https://www.congregationactionnetwork.org/.
During these very challenging times, such times for meditation are welcome. We feel a sense of belonging and connection; we take and receive the insights of others. It all helps. Thanks to Virginia Day for this session that will continue to bear fruit.
