Which prophet confronted David about his sin with Bathsheba?

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Progressive Christian

Last updated on: July 7, 2006 at 1:49 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2006-07-07T13:49:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

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GODSTUFF:

LABYRINTHINE PATH LEADS YOU WHERE YOU NEED TO GO

Maybe it was the pebble in my Mary Janes.
Or the distinctive fragrance of corn flowers in the hot sun.

Verdant. Earthy.
Familiar, like the way my mother smells — of Chanel No. 9 and translucent dusting powder — before she goes out for the evening with my father.

Whatever the catalyst was, Thursday afternoon while I walked the labyrinth at St. Scholastica Monastery (next to St. Scholastica Academy along Ridge Avenue in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood), I was transported in my mind to my grandmother’s yard in New Hampshire about 30 years ago.

It was a beautiful midsummer’s day. I was a wee girl. And I was happy, but I had a pebble in my Mary Janes.

Back then, I recall stopping immediately and whining until someone helped me remove the tiny offending rock.

But now . . . no.

I walked a long while with the pebble in my grown-up Mary Janes. It didn’t hurt, it was just a nuisance, like so many things in life can be, distracting us from the beauty of the moment. In fact, after a few minutes, as I shuffled alone through the labyrinth’s dusty, pebbly path, I began to enjoy the pebble as if it were a pause button in the time-space continuum.

As the labyrinth’s path doubled back on itself once, twice and again, I forgot about the pebble and noticed things I hadn’t on the first pass. Delicate lily pads in a small reflecting pool. A Japanese lantern tucked inconspicuously next to a low hedge. A red-winged blackbird watching me from a low tree branch.

Have you ever walked a labyrinth? Literally, I mean.

I hadn’t until Thursday. I’d often meant to, and I’m fairly sure I’ve seen a few over the years (the lovely one in the footprint of St. James Episcopal Cathedral downtown comes to mind) but I’d taken neither the time, nor the spiritual space, actually, to walk one.

A labyrinth is an ancient symbol — a spiral formed by a circuitous yet single path that leads to a center and back out again — dating, some historians say, to at least 2,000 B.C. The ancient Greeks, the Celts and the ancient Egyptians, among many other early cultures, incorporated the labyrinth into their mythologies.

Prehistoric labyrinths were considered, variously, traps for evil spirits and patterns for ritual dances. In the medieval era, the labyrinth acquired a new ecclesial meaning — the symbol of a difficult path to God where the entrance is the same as the exit.

The labyrinth at St. Scholastica follows a historic pattern perhaps best exemplified in the labyrinth elaborately inlaid on the floor of the nave of Chartres Cathedral in France. The Rogers Park version is far less sophisticated. And that is its charm.

Hidden behind a large garden of vegetables and flowers accessed through the monastery’s service entrance off Ridge Avenue, red bricks outline the labyrinth’s 40-foot-wide pattern. Its paths are filled with pebbly sand.

A vined trellis in full bloom invites walkers on one side, a few simple stones — one a rough-hewn rock inscribed with the name of a nun — mark the entrance/exit. There are benches and Adirondack chairs here and there along the perimeter and in the lawn surrounding the labyrinth.

There are no directions.

That’s because there’s no wrong way to walk a labyrinth.

I should explain what brought me to St. Scholastica in the first place. Earlier in the week, I was watching a short film sent by the kind folks at Spiritual Cinema Circle, who distribute groovy short films, documentaries and spiritually themed feature films that otherwise might never be seen by a wide audience.

The short, written, directed and starring the (apparently) exceptionally industrious Scott Cervine, is called “Closer Than Ever.” In it, Scott, playing a character named “Colin,” has run out of room for his spiritual life among the distracting effluvia of modern living.

He used to practice yoga with his sweetheart, they used to meditate, he used to have time to think, to be quiet, to just . . . be. But these days Colin is in overdrive; that is, until he has an encounter with a couple of cheekily meditative monks at a monastery.

When an orange-robed monk meditating blissfully on a cushion with his eyes closed motions for Colin to join him, he declines.

“You’re afraid,” the monk says.

“Excuse me? I’m afraid? I’m the one who’s afraid? Mr. sit-by-the-fountain-and-do-nothing-all-day . . . and I’m the one who’s afraid?” Colin says, incredulous.

“He just means running away is a symptom of fear,” a second monk tells Colin. “If you stay, you might find . . . what you’re looking for.”

After the first monk insults Colin — he calls him a “big fat noisy mama’s boy” who’s afraid to stay and face the unknown on his own — Colin takes it as a triple-dog-dare.

“Look, crazy monk people, I don’t know what’s going on here. Apparently there’s some lesson,” Colin snaps, sarcastically. “I got it. You wanna lesson? Let’s go baby,” he says and, after cracking his knuckles and stretching, plops down on a blanket next to the monk and begins to meditate.

The distractions come, as they do. He checks his watch, falls asleep, swallows a bug, all the while watching the monk out of the corner of his eye.

Colin is trying to compete. But meditation is not a competitive sport.

Neither is faith.

There isn’t one singular way to practice it. In the end, you have to walk the path to God or away from God on your own.

I am an ENFP. You know, on the Myers-Briggs personality test? Extroverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving — and fiercely competitive. I want to make sure I’m doing it right — whatever it is — all the time. And, most of the time, I want to make sure I’m doing it better than you are.

At the gym. In the yoga studio. At the office. In church.

Oh yes, my friend. In church.

As hard as I tried, when I was younger I would want to make sure I was singing the hymn’s contralto harmonies just right. If it was a praise song, I wanted to make sure my lifted hands (in praise to God, of course) were waiving as gracefully and expressively as possible. I’d want to be sure my prayers were beautiful, heartfelt and perfect.

But as my tenure in (spiritual and physical) adulthood wears on, I’ve discovered — thank God — that all of that is thoroughly wrongheaded and absolutely impossible.

There is no right way. There is no best. There is no perfect. It’s not a competition.

Not when it comes to faith. Not when we’re talking about one’s relationship with the divine.

All you can do is walk the path, wherever it takes you, into the future or into your past.

Remember, it’s not a maze. There are no dead ends. The way is always clear, if we open our eyes to see it.

Smell the flowers along the way, bask in the warmth of the sun, enjoy the silence, allow the peace to embrace you.

And rest a while at the center before making your way back out into the world.

To find a public labyrinth near you — there are more than a dozen in the Chicago area — click HERE

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