Labyrinth

At the start of this new year, I walked an outdoor labyrinth as a way of focusing on the path set before me – whatever it is – in the days of 2012. It was a cold day but not bitterly so, warmed some by the thin winter sunshine. The trees were all bare and I could see the wounds from the damaging October snowstorm. As I turned the circle around and around, I was sometimes facing forest and sometimes glimpsing a row of houses through a bare thicket.

The path of the labyrinth was edged by stone blocks and covered in pea gravel. I could see the footprints of others who had walked the same way, and I knew I was joined with and to them in prayer. Among those footprints were the tracks of a large dog and a small one, sometimes on the path and sometimes not. Did the dogs walk with their owner or did they come on their own? I also saw the prints of deer in several places, and some small tracks that I could not identify – maybe a raccoon.

I loved the act of walking the labyrinth with the wild things. It was as the psalmist said: “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord!” (Psalm 150:6) There we were, all of us creatures made by the breath of God, walking and praising in our own God-given way – me and the dogs and the deer and the others.

At the Mall

I usually try to avoid going to the mall to shop during the days before Christmas. This year, I needed one thing that I could only buy there so off I went. After about 20 minutes or so, I found a parking spot and entered the fray. The mall was full of folks, some old men sitting on the communal couches, waiting with packages piled around them, teenagers roving in groups, some smiling and laughing but most wandering around with blank stares. As I joined the crowd, I had the unbidden thought: “What in the world would Jesus think of all this – all this consumerism and stress and lost expressions?” And then almost immediately, I heard in my heart these words of scripture: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9.36). And it was all right, there in the mall, in the midst of the mess of Christmas. God was with us: Emmanuel.

Where Love Lives

The twelfth floor is where love lives. I walk down the corridor, and most rooms have open doors. Very few people are alone here. A middle-aged man is feeding a small woman with thin white hair. Another person missing a leg is gently supported as she makes her way slowly down the hall. A young mother has her almost-new baby with her as she sits with her father, the generations keeping vigil. The man’s wife comes with food made at home in the kitchen where he has cooked for her for years. Machines beep and whir and drip and count. Those who were once full of vitality have their vital signs carefully monitored. The staff is quiet, polite, efficient, responsive.

When I leave, the middle-aged man is sitting by the bed just holding the old woman's (his mother?) hand. She is quiet and so is he. The next day, the room is empty, and I think to myself that she has gone home – whatever that means. I wonder how long he stayed there with her, and I know that his love somehow lingers.

This is what love is: watching and feeding and touching and talking when there is nothing else left to do. It is not moonlight and candlelight and wine and roses. It is biopsies and bedpans, tears mixed with laughter, sadness and pain and memories and prayers. And it is all there, on the twelfth floor.

Paradise with People?

My book group is reading "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. The premise of the book is summed up in the title: what would happen to the earth if people suddenly disappeared. The author describes, in sometimes excruciating detail, the way human-made structures would quickly fail. He also tells of the effects of humans on the air, soil, and water of the planet. And he explains how the earth would begin to revert, heal, restore -- you pick the word -- if we were no longer here.

I've known in a small way what the book proposes all my life. On our farm, cleared land left for only a season or two quickly begins to sprout up with all kinds of things. The blueberry farm where I worked all through high school, acres and acres of cultivated bushes yielding a good crop and employing the neighborhood for three or four weeks each spring, is now all grown up in pines. The barn where we packed the berries is probably fallen down but it is hard to know since the road through what was once field is now completely gone. Places on the farm where timber was cut only fifteen years ago are again forest. For the farmer, maintaining the human enterprise is constant work, so it is not surprising to me to read how quickly nature, of a non-human nature, rushes in.

In November, I traveled in New Zealand. This is one of the places the book discusses. Because it is a remote set of islands, New Zealand existed without humans for a very long time and it is relatively easy to figure out what life was like there before "we" came. One thing that happened with the coming of humans was the introduction of other animals. Stoats, rats, and possums found easy pickings in a place where the only native mammal was a small bat. Centuries of evolution had produced flightless birds, some of which became easy targets for predators, both animals and people. The signature kiwi was almost eradicated; the giant moa was.

There are some small islands just off the large South Island that are being restored to their prehuman state. The rats and possums have been trapped, and naturalists keep constant vigil to see that no new predators are reintroduced. We visited one of those islands, and it was incredible. The whole island is a rain forest, lush and green, with giant ferns reaching up to the sunlight. The most amazing thing was the birds. They are almost tame. I sat for a while beside the path, and all kinds of wild birds came and gathered around, seemingly curious but also astonishingly unafraid. It was a powerful experience to see them up close that way, looking at me with interest, just as I was looking at them.

Many of those on the trip talked about these places as paradise; we observed that walking through these primeval forests must be what it was like to walk in the Garden of Eden. Of course, in Genesis story, paradise is lost soon after the humans arrive. But I want to believe that paradise with people is still possible. Maybe one of the unanticipated effects of all this financial woe will be to turn us away from the kind of mindless overconsumption that has destroyed so much of the earth, attacking like a predator introduced into a trusting, unsuspecting ecosystem.

New Zealand and its birds are very beautiful. So are the doves and juncos and cardinals and sparrows cavorting in the snow under the feeders in my back yard. And I do believe that paradise is possible.

The Frozen Labyrinth

No one shoveled the snow from the labyrinth but it has melted here and there, so that part of it is exposed and part is visible under the thin crust of snow. Most of it is hidden and the path is hard to find. But I walk it anyway. Others have done that, too, and there are footprints frozen in the snow. Leaves have fallen and there are little melted impressions where they lie, as though there is some of the warmth of summer still in them somehow. I cannot see the turnings and so I make up my own way around. I follow the bricks and stones where I see them and then I go on my own over the snow and ice that covers the rest. I cannot see the path but it is there nonetheless. And I remember these words from somewhere: “Traveler, there is no road. The way is made by walking.” And so I walk, making a way, following a path that I cannot see. And I realize that the place where the path is hidden is the place of shadow. The trees have kept the labyrinth out of the sun. And that must be part of what the holy mystics mean when they speak of the dark night of the soul. It must be that the darkness of the shadows hides the path, makes it impossible to know where the way is. But the absence of knowledge, the absence of vision, is not the absence of the path. The way is there all the time. And if I wait until the snow melts, I will miss this walk of peace. The snow will be gone in a matter of months but I am here now. And so I walk, making my way, trusting that the path is unfolding under my feet whether I can see it or not. I am walking in faith.

The Turtle's Eye

The world is full of vast and strange beauty and most of it I never notice. To see the eye of this ancient-looking turtle makes me think that God must have greatly enjoyed creating the world. There are lots of exotic animals at this zoo. And mixed in are the squirrels and the chipmunks and the sparrows. In reality, they are no less exotic, no less beautiful. And I don't much notice them, either. So this wide-open eye is an eye-opener for me, too. It demands: Look! Watch! See!
Or as the Bible might say it: Behold!

Holy places

I have been to Arizona for the first time in my life. It is almost impossible to believe that it is the same earth as the place where I live. For one thing, there is more sky than one can take in. The first time my brother visited, he described it as feeling naked, and I know what he meant. There is something about it that strips you down, makes you feel bare and small, exposed. But exposed to what?

We went to Sedona, a place of red rocks and light so lovely it is almost tangible. There are locations there that people call vortexes, and we bought a little booklet that described them. They are energy fields, spiritual places where one can tap into some kind of inner wisdom or special revelation. It is the kind of thing that New Age spirituality embraces – and so to be pooh-poohed by traditional faith, I suppose.

But it seemed to me to be a lot like the same kind of thing I heard described when I visited Wales, only there it was not vortexes but rather thin places. In Sedona, it is buttes carved from red rock; in Wales, it is holy wells.

And the question that I debate with myself is whether one has to go somewhere special to find the Holy. Do you have to meditate on a mountain in Arizona, or wash in the icy water of a Welsh spring? Do you have to be in a sanctuary on Sunday? Does God live in a particular kind of place? I want to say no, but at the same time, I cannot discount the stories of connection to the Other in these thin places. And I have to say that something about the air and the light and the rocks in Sedona – and being on holiday with people that I love – did seem somehow sacred. I know that God is everywhere, and I also know that a lot of the time I do not pay attention. But there are places and times where the barrier between me and my Maker is thin, almost transparent, and I see with clearer vision.

I brought home a little bottle of water from Holywell in Wales, and I brought home a vial of red sand from Sedona. God is not in the water and God is not in the sand. But the Holy is in the memory of those places where people have prayed and worshiped and had the eyes of their hearts enlightened over the eons. And the water and the dirt remind me of my own exposure to the Spirit.