Finding A Way In….Two Years Later

This week I’m doing something unusual – posting an essay I wrote two years ago.  As I watched my husband pack up his things to begin his new position in New Hampshire, I realized that there was at least one thing he wouldn’t be able to bring with him:  the labyrinth that lies quietly in our back woods.  What follows is my account of the time when he made it.  This is considerably longer than my other blog posts, and some of you may have already read it, but it is – I hope you’ll agree—faithful to my overall theme of side-by-side contrasts, the kind I just can’t help seeing all the time, because I’m living smack in some of them.

It wasn’t unusual for us to get mail from the church where my husband serves as rector, but this particular April letter was out of the ordinary.  “The garden tour subcommittee met last week.  We have made a number of decisions and have left some up to you….We hope that you will be willing to sell tickets at your garden on the day of the tour.”

With a full-time job, three children and a big dog, I still hadn’t cleaned out my perennial beds, much less invited anyone over to see them.  So I looked at my husband with suspicion; he mumbled something like “Oh that – don’t worry about it; I’ve got it covered.”  He always did keep much of his church business to himself, as befitted his profession, but this time I really wondered what he was up to because it apparently involved our home.  Our son was graduating from high school in early June, I was teaching an hour away, we were hosting something the next weekend – how on earth (or maybe “in earth”) would we be readying our place for streams of people looking to admire flowers?

The fact that I am not a traditional clergy wife should probably be mentioned here.  I married my handsome Episcopal priest husband — he was actually still in seminary then — knowing next to nothing about religion. My parents had each come from lapsed Methodist families and hadn’t raised me and my four older brothers as church-goers.  Occasionally I would enjoy going to Quaker meetings with my grandmother, but that was about it.  I wasn’t comfortable converting, so when we got married we both began an adventure in mutual understanding.  Essentially, he tried to be patient with my many quizzical looks about the elements of his faith; I went to church with our kids, enjoyed hearing his sermons and getting to know lots of nice people, but I didn’t fully “get” what had become second nature to my spouse.

I honestly don’t think my husband told me anything about the labyrinth before he started making it.  He just disappeared into our back woods every evening with the tractor to clear brush and then haul rocks.  And were there ever rocks!  It was a little like the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, with enough food appearing to feed all the masses:  he kept finding just the rocks he needed, in a variety of piles that seemed to appear by magic, to make the 12 very large concentric circles.   I happened to see a page he’d printed out from a “Chartres Cathedral” website that must have given him the overall design:  it wasn’t the usual picture of the famous soaring structure but rather something looking more like coiled up intestines; almost circular – with a distinct center. I began to feel prideful:  The innards of Chartres out my kitchen window!  I hadn’t made it there when I’d been in France years ago; now I was getting another chance.  He didn’t ask me to lift a finger, preferring to do the whole thing himself.  As the days went by, I could see that the project was giving him a new zest for life.  It combined some of his favorite activities:  being alone in the woods (well, with the dog, aptly named “Rocky”), doing something at once physical, spiritual and artistic.

He did have some help:  he hired a teenager (our older son was occupied) for a few days of rock hauling and a friend from church came to put in the final turns with him.  On the evening before the garden tour, he was out there still moving stones.  Meanwhile, I fretted about having a visitor book and maybe a vase of flowers in place for the people who were about to come, wanting us to be presentable for guests.  That was who I was – caring most about being hospitable.  My husband, on the other hand, told me it didn’t even matter to him whether there were any visitors at all:  the deadline of the tour really just gave him a reason to complete his chef d’oeuvre.  Since he had an all-day meeting on that Saturday, he had arranged for someone else to be an official greeter in the morning.  As usual, I needed to drive our daughter to a lacrosse field an hour away for a summer team practice.  By that afternoon,  our way of life — one big part religion, another considerable chunk in sports — was highlighted again.  While I was back home welcoming walkers,  my mind was partly on the logistics of getting to the state championship baseball game that our high school team was playing that evening — in a different direction from the lacrosse field of the morning.   I had no time to go in circles, pondering things, that was for sure.

Once the garden tour day was over, I got to thinking about the different kinds of trips people take and what they are seeking.  Our new labyrinth provided an obvious metaphor:  those who walk it are travelling spiritually, hoping for some kind of renewal without going geographically far at all.  It provides an opportunity for an inward journey, for reaching a kind of center of the soul.  When I went to the library to do some research,  I found that anybody writing about labyrinths first establishes how they are different from mazes:  while a maze confounds you with different choices, some of which will lead to dead ends, a labyrinth takes you gently around a middle space that you always keep In sight as a goal.  And the going back out is just as important as the going in. Depending on the walker’s state of mind, a maze can be exciting and challenging (or just claustrophobic); a labyrinth can be soothing and transforming (or just monotonous).  Although it is often said that the Greek hero Theseus entered a labyrinth to go find and kill the Minotaur, it really must have been a maze – otherwise he wouldn’t have needed Araidne’s magic spool of thread to get out.

Our own son had not been around to help during construction because of  a good old-fashioned road trip.  He and a friend headed south all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, taking our van, and were gone for two weeks.  Their trip was perfect for two guys who had just collected their high school diplomas:  they left with a sense of adventure and only some idea where they were going and who would take them in along the way.   In one sense they were doing the opposite of walking through a series of rings – going, as they were, from Point A to Point B every day – but their easy self-confidence when they pulled in the driveway left no doubt that the journey had lifted them up spiritually.   They had done it all themselves.  Instead of going in and then coming out again like labyrinth walkers, they had gone out and come back in.  Our son’s going off to college in the fall would just be a larger version of this, I realized, still not really wanting to confront his imminent departure.

And then there is the kind of travelling that young dogs like to do.  Around the time that my husband was making the labyrinth,  our Rocky had discovered the thrill of fetching a tennis ball.  Over and over and over again.  When I looked out the window during construction, I saw the clergyman involved in a new ritual:  place a rock, throw the ball; place a rock, throw the ball.  If the labyrinth-maker was driven to create a spiritual oasis, the labyrinth-maker’s dog was just as obsessed with his version of back-and-forth.  What works for him is a frantic “Got to get there!” dash; let others have their meditative one-foot-in-front-of-the-other walks.

As for me, I took my time approaching the labyrinth, as if it were a stranger I wasn’t sure how to meet.   I walked by it every day with Rocky and appreciated the serenity of the place, but I didn’t see a pressing need to follow the path all the way in.  Not being one accustomed to religious experience, I was nervous that I wouldn’t know how to feel when I reached the center bench.  Was I supposed to pray there?  What if I felt nothing?  Would there be something wrong with me?

Finally, on one mid-summer Sunday morning, I decided it was time to plunge in.  Before he went off to church, my husband left me a Book of Common Prayer, with a bookmark at Psalm 139.  So now I at least had something to read when I stopped walking.  I thought of my Amherst neighbor, Emily Dickinson, who proclaimed “Some keep the Sabbath going to church/ I keep it staying at home/With a bobolink for a chorister/And an orchard for a dome.”   The path in was very welcoming, and how lovely to find only one way to go!  Having many choices can be wonderful, but too often aren’t we daunted by them?  Just a walk down the cereal aisle in the grocery store can leave me flummoxed, and I am often my own worst enemy when I have the rare gift of free time at home – I start doing one thing and then immediately think of something else that I’m neglecting.  So following a route laid out for me to follow felt like being on vacation.  (I thought of my own mother, now gone, who loved following someone else’s plan:  “I’m just on a conveyer belt!”).  Finally, when I walked the labyrinth, I could fully appreciate what my husband had done – it was intricate and huge at the same time.  How he managed to make the whole thing flow in every which way, I’ll never know.  I did see why the older people from church had been concerned about the roots underfoot,  but to me they added to the natural beauty.  I liked having nothing else to do but look at where to put my feet….and enjoy the cool woods.

When I reached the bench and read the Psalm, about the constancy of God’s presence, I tried not to judge myself as a labyrinth-walker too much.  This time, it was enough just to have made it into the center to join the part of my husband that he had left for me there.