On The Road To Salvation

Someone I know has been using a quote on his Facebook page – at least I think it’s his Facebook page – I’m not on Facebook, so I didn’t see it there, I saw it on another website where he’d signed in from Facebook, and that’s where I saw the quote. It’s part of the wallpaper for his sign-in photo, and I’m a literature buff, so anything to do with reading and writing is kind of my thing. When I saw the quote, it was along with a picture of Jim Morrison, but I knew it was coming from somewhere else. It just sounded like someone else, though I didn’t know who, so I looked it up and found out it was Jack Kerouac.

I’ve never read On The Road, though I think I may have tried once and couldn’t get through it. But as I started to search for the quote I started to find other quotes from the book, and I was surprised to see all the spiritual references in it. Even the quote that I originally looked up talks about salvation, and that’s what started me thinking that God was talking to me about something more than just a random quote that I read and wanted to find out who the real author was. At one point I found a Wikiquotes page that led  me to another page on a website called Shmoop, a test prep, cliff notes type of website for everything school and college based for literature and other educational areas with teacher and student prep and quizzes and other tools, http://www.shmoop.com/on-the-road/sal-paradise.html. Under a section analyzing the main character Sal’s name, I read, “Salvatore Paradise. Given that Kerouac was a Catholic, it’s hard to ignore the religious implications of such a name. Paradise makes sense, right? Paradise = heaven, heaven = religion. What’s so paradise-like about Sal? Not much, although he spends a good deal of time seeking paradise.” In the next paragraph I read, “Then there’s his first name: Salvatore. But if you were feeling artsy, which we often do, you could say . . . Sal = Salvation. Then, you might look up salvation and see that it says, ‘deliverance from sin and its consequences.’ It continues with a mention of what that possible sin might be, but that wasn’t the point of what the Lord wanted me to see. God will talk to us through anything He can, and to discover that He was talking to me through Jack Kerouac and On The Road helped me know that He’s been talking to other people that way too.

And it also helped me know that He was talking to Jack Kerouac the whole time He was talking through him. People very often think of a book like On The Road as being somehow degenerate and morally lacking – let’s face it, it’s full of talk of “loose living” to put it mildly. It was beautiful and loving for God to speak to Jack Kerouac, a man who was seeking Him whether or not he knew it. We all are seeking God – it is part of our make-up as humans. I’ve heard it said that there is a hole in our souls that is made in the shape of Jesus, and it’s true. We will seek and search until we find the One who can fit that space, the one who can make us whole.

If God was speaking to Jack Kerouac, then He’s speaking to you and to me too. He’s talking to everyone all the time, in ways that only we can hear Him. He knows each of us and how to reach us, He knows what interests us and how we think. He was talking to me through my own writing years before I was born again, sometimes with scripture that I didn’t even know how I knew it. It’s an amazing and wonderful thing to know that the Lord of all the universe cares enough to talk to us, day by day, week by week, moment by moment, hour by hour, and that He’ll keep talking until we finally start to really listen.

Jesus says many times, “Those who have ears to hear let them listen!” I thank God that I’ve finally started to hear Him. A friend sent me a quote yesterday that I read while I was reading about Jack Kerouac, my favorite passage of scripture from the time that I was born again straight through until now, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.” I thank God because without His grace, I would not have been able to hear Him.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan