part one

Before the Beginning

On Ash Wednesday, in the year of our Lord 2011, I began walking the labyrinth.

I have been walking it ever since.

I came upon the labyrinth by accident. In 2008, my wife and I moved into our home in St. Louis, Missouri, returning to our hometown after living in Connecticut for a while. Getting to know the neighborhood, I was walking past a church near our house, First Presbyterian Church, which sits at the dead-end of Midland into Delmar Avenue. Glancing at the churchyard, I discerned thin circles of cobblestone brick enmeshed in the grass.

I walked closer and recognized its circular pattern. I had heard and read about labyrinths before. And ever since college, I had read and reread the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), the writer whose paradoxical fictions are labyrinths, like M. C. Escher sketching with words. Now I stood at the literal foot of its infinite path. Its open entrance invited me.

I began to walk.

After that first discovery, I would walk its path occasionally, as the mood struck. For all I know, I am this labyrinth’s only pilgrim. I have never noticed anyone else walking it.

The labyrinth first intrigued me as a leisurely curiosity. But then came the questions: Why walk a labyrinth anyway? What am I supposed to do as I walk it?

Walking the labyrinth—any labyrinth—is a curious thing. The labyrinth is a distinctive kind of maze. Its purpose is singular, as is its path. Thus it isn’t the kind of game we typically think of when envisioning a maze, hoping we make the right choices to reach the end.

As a matter of fact, a labyrinth does not have an end per se. It has a center. And as long as you follow the path, you will reach the center. Every time. So there is a kind of mindlessness to the labyrinth.

But I soon discovered a purpose in the mindlessness. The labyrinth, paradoxically, stirs up a new kind of mindfulness, an awareness of the path that opens its pilgrims into a deeper sense of their surroundings, the lifeworlds—home, neighborhood, work, family, friendships, ad infinitum—in which they find themselves.

In short, the path of the labyrinth is the process of discovery. Its path is process itself. I walk the labyrinth to discover anew the worlds I inhabit. I walk it to discover what I thought was previously undiscoverable, what I didn’t even know was there. Which is why I can walk the same labyrinth—time and again—and still find the path new.

What started as leisure was now turning to discipline. And the path is always new, because, as a spiritual discipline, the labyrinth is a path of contemplation, reflection, prayer.

On the surface of it, it is a place for silence and for speaking into silence, for speaking to One unseen. But beneath the surface, walking the labyrinth is a profound discipline in listening, in active silence, in finding movement and rhythm in the stillnesses underneath and in between every day’s noise. Walking the labyrinth is an exercise in finding the voice speaking in whispers underneath the whirlwind of sound.

And yet beneath the silence, the labyrinth tells a story, a history.

Here is its beginning: Daedalus, the ancient Greek father of architects, built the mythical first labyrinth, step by treacherous step. At its center sat confined the grotesque half-man, half-bull named Minotaur, for whom it was built as a prison. As the story is told, Daedalus built the prison-maze with such intricate cunning that he nearly trapped himself within its circuits.

It would be awhile later, as Ovid tells it in his Metamorphoses, that the warrior Theseus would be forced to brave the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur. To keep from losing his own way, Theseus held in his hand a clue of thread, its thin, lustrous strand falling behind him to mark the path. The end of the thread was held in the hand of a companion waiting at the entrance.

The clue of thread was held in the hand of the smitten Ariadne, her gift to Theseus. Upon slaying the monster, Theseus followed the thread back out of the maze—his way of entering also his way of ­exiting—to take Ariadne’s hand in his and sweep her away to the island of Naxos.

Thus the beginning of the labyrinth, its mythology. From the Greek island of Crete, extending south and east into India, north into Europe, west into North America, it took a winding, worldwide path, ever bending, never a straight line, always in circles. As it moved into Christian Europe—particularly northern France: the medieval cathedral at Chartres still houses a labyrinthine masterpiece—it became a path of pilgrimage and prayer, a living symbol of the journey of faith in a sinful, broken world. The journey in the wilderness. To reach its center is to enter the holy city Jerusalem and the mystery of the Christ who is the center of faith.

Long forgotten, labyrinths have been rediscovered in recent decades. Partly spiritual discipline, partly mystical fascination, partly cultural zeitgeist, labyrinths have spiraled again around the globe. They have become their own cottage industry. You can search online locaters to find one near you. You can walk miles in gigantic labyrinths set in stone. You can draw them on paper. You can trace a labyrinth path in miniature with your finger in a plate of sand.

There are infinite ways to walk the labyrinth.

Such is the ancient, worldwide story of the labyrinth.

But how does the labyrinth become a personal story? How did it become my story?

The story of the labyrinth became my story by way of pilgrimage and prayer. Or, perhaps, I became part of its story. I pray its path. Its path makes of me a prayer.

When we think of prayer, we think of words, of a conversation. Indeed prayer is this. But the labyrinth, as a discipline of prayer, is an act of prayer. In the labyrinth I pray by taking each next step, one foot in front of the other. The labyrinth makes of prayer an act, and it makes of action a prayer. In it, word and act are united, made one.

When I was little, this is how I was taught to pray: to close my eyes, bow my head, fold my hands. Then to speak into thin air. This is true. This is a way to pray. And yet the labyrinth is a physical reminder, a sign, that prayer is also a place, a space in which life—new life—is lived.

Prayer is not the thin air of a void.

Prayer is the world made out of the void, in word and action.

And isn’t that what prayer is, after all, the making one of time and space, speaking and action, walk and talk, in the life of faith? After all is said and done, isn’t prayer the uniting of one’s life by listening to the voice of the One unseen, the One who kills and makes alive by one spoken word?

Oddly enough, this makes the labyrinth—the place of solitude—a place of encounter.

I walk the labyrinth in solitude but never alone.

This is the mystery of the presence of Christ in the world. Christ sits at the right hand of God, to recall Martin Luther, because the right hand of God is the whole cosmos, this earth, everything within it.

The One unseen becomes the One seen in all creation.

This becomes its next paradox: the path of the labyrinth is a process of encounter. This is paradox, because it is a solitary journey. Nevertheless, it is a journey to the center of things, of life, of my own identity, perhaps even into all reality.

It is a journey into an encounter with God in Jesus Christ.

And if the right hand of God is the whole cosmos, then all of life can be a labyrinth.

And in that singular encounter with the One who sits at the center of all life and all reality, I walk into ever new discoveries of who I am and how I am to live in the worlds in which God has set me—home, neighborhood, work, family, ad infinitum. And I am transformed by the encounter.

But how does the labyrinth—these thin circles of brick in grass—do all these things?

More to the point: How can I walk the labyrinth as a path to all these discoveries? I know of only one way to answer the question. And the answer is even easier than it sounds.

By taking the first step.

And then taking it one step at a time.

The labyrinth is a symbol of the living of life, one step at a time, one day at a time. The path of the labyrinth is the passage of life.

Life is a labyrinth. The labyrinth is life.

There is this incredible clarity to walking the labyrinth. It does not require some secret knowledge, some skeleton key, some solution to a riddle. It requires only the willingness and the honesty to put one step in front of the other and to follow the course it takes.

And yet it is filled with secrets, unfolding like the passing of time.

Of course, I write in hindsight. None of this occurred to me that first day, taking those first steps. It started with curiosity. It continued in discovery. It ended in encounter.

But to reach this particular center, it took another particular discipline, one that was spiritual, personal, daily. I really don’t recall exactly how I decided to use the labyrinth for this particular discipline, other than the fact that I live and move and have being in one of the particular strands of Christianity that has this yearly liturgical habit, starting in late winter or early spring, of calling its disciples to a peculiar discipline. And so...