Walking the Labyrinth E-Book

Travis Scholl

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 330

Beschreibung

One day Travis Scholl discovered a labyrinth in his neighborhood. As he began to walk it, he found this ancient practice offered a much-needed path away from life's demands, allowing him to encounter God in quiet solitude.In this meditative guide, Travis Scholl takes readers on a journey:"The path is always new, because, as a spiritual discipline, the labyrinth is a tool for contemplation, for reflection, for prayer. Underneath the surface, walking the labyrinth is a profound exercise 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."With no end, but only a center, labyrinths become a physical symbol of prayer and our journey with God. Each step unites faith and action as travelers take one step at a time, living each moment in trust and willingness to follow the course set before them.Providing a historical and modern context for this unique spiritual discipline, Scholl weaves his own journey through a labyrinth with the Gospel of Mark's telling of the twists and turns of Jesus' life, providing 40 reflections ideal for daily reading during Lent or any time of the year.

Leseprobe

www.IVPress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com Email: [email protected]

©2014 by Travis Scholl

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, visit intervarsity.org.

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Labyrinth photo on p. 16: Dan Gill

Cover design: Cindy Kiple

Images: maze landscape: © James Thew/Fotolia.com

old paper background: © Kontrec/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-9593-9 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3583-6 (print)

For Jenny

If the labyrinth is life, we walk it together.

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

JORGE LUIS BORGES “THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS”

He was in the wilderness forty days.

MARK 1:13

Contents

Foreword

Part 1: Before the Beginning

1 Entrance

2 In the Middle of Things

3 Wilderness

4 Work

Part 2: Christ, the Path

5Threshold

6 Worship

7 Liminality

8 A Game

9 Rain

10 The Signs

Part 3: The Way of Love

11 Tree of Life

12 Seed

13 Children

14 In Peace

15 Passage

16 As Yet Untrodden

Part 4: Calling, by Name

17 Petals

18 The Sea

19 The Number Eleven

20 Between the Lines

21 Secret

22 Cross

Part 5: Practicing the Everyday

23 Transfigured

24 Facing Failure

25 Safe at Home

26 In Bloom

27 Child’s Play

28 Marathon

Part 6: The Things We Keep and Leave Behind

29 Labor

30 The Path

31 Running Late

32 But Now I See

33 Heartbeat

34 Near and Not Far

Part 7: The Way of the Cross

35 Around and Around

36 To the West

37 A Memory

38 Anonymous

39 Silence

40 Exit

Part 8: After the End

Acknowledgments

Ways to Walk a Labyrinth

Notes

Further Reading

Daily Scripture Readings Index

Praise for Walking the Labyrinth

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Foreword

TRAVIS SCHOLL WINDS HIS WALK through the one labyrinth and all the labyrinths in the company of St. Mark. I can’t think of a better companion—except that you come too—nor a wiser choice.

We end in the infinities. We end where we began.

This is the pattern of Mark’s Gospel. Let me explain. In the smack beginning of his ministry, “Jesus came to Galilee.” I don’t believe this is merely a historical choice. In fact I think Mark knew already that he would end the story with much the same words. The white-robed man sitting in the empty tomb tells the women: “He has been raised; he is not here. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

Mark does not end, as do all the other Gospels, with a sense of completion: a final commission in Matthew, an ascension in Luke and John. In fact, given that promise that the disciples will meet him in Galilee (if we accept the scholars’ conviction that the Gospel cuts off at 16:8), Mark seems to have no ending at all. We end where we began, in Galilee! Why? Because Mark does not believe the story has an end. Having finished one reading, he wants us to read the whole story again—but this time in the light of the resurrection! And again, Jesus will “walk ahead of them” to Jerusalem. Over and over and over.

Travis Scholl’s labyrinth is exactly like that! A walk with Jesus to be taken over and over and over.

But each new walk changes his labyrinth a little from the last because he uses personal experience throughout. Scholl’s varying moods, his fears, his sorrows, his delights, constantly make each round new.

And so it should be for you who will read his book.

Once you have finished reading of labyrinths heaped on labyrinths, read it again, only this time read it seeking your own experiences!

This is the way of all personal devotions.

Walt Wangerin Jr.

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.

Figure 1

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 it wasn’t long after my first discovery of the labyrinth in my neighborhood that I decided to use it as a spiritual practice for this special time of spiritual discipline.

The time was Lent. The forty days from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday. Every single day of the forty days of Lent, I walked the labyrinth.

Lent itself is a process of discovery. Forty days into the wilderness of faith, to every day walk a path of pilgrimage and prayer. At the center of the pilgrimage would lie the holy city of Jerusalem and the mystery of the events that would lead an itinerant preacher from a town at the edge of the outskirts of civilization to be raised upon a tree of pain, a ransom for many.

And just as the labyrinth is a place of prayer, Lent is a time for prayer, for contemplation, repentance, renewal. During my Lent, I exercised this discipline every time I reached the center of the labyrinth by praying the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray. The Lord’s Prayer. The Our Father.

In the process, the labyrinth taught me the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray.

Only one question remained: What would be my clue of thread from Ariadne? What could trace the path so that my ways of entering and exiting would not leave me lost?

The idea of the labyrinth is eminently more than just a physical structure, brick laid out in sod, mosaic tiles set in stone. It is a profound idea of art, the way M. C. Escher draws an idea that turns and turns again upon itself, the way da Vinci or Picasso draws us ever deeper into an image. It is an undercurrent of literature, the way a story by Jorge Luis Borges or Flannery O’Connor leaves us transfixed, the way a poem startles us breathless.

The idea of the labyrinth is all these things and more. It is the sign and signature of the undercurrent surging underneath life, underneath the ground we tread, the unknown life coursing within life, under its skin.

The labyrinth signals the unknowable center of life, its mystery, unseen and unheard in the babble and hustle of our everyday existence. In this sense, we need the labyrinth. We need it to remind us of the sheer mystery of life, the profound exhilaration of a breath when we stop to breathe it, the miracle of being still enough to hear the beating of our own heart in the midst of a noise that borders on chaos.

If for no other reason, we need it because it reminds us of the emptiness that lies at the center of our being. Such a stark-naked self-portrait might be too hard to bear if not for the fact that we spend too much of our lives tangling our days into snarled knots that clot the life that would otherwise flow freely. And whether we feel the knot in the physical pang of pain in our chest or in the sleepless worry of our nights, what we are feeling is our innumerable denials, our rugged defiance, inevitably our self-deception, about what it means to live and move and have our being in this particular world and at this particular time and place.

We need the labyrinth to remind us that there is a path that untangles the knots, a way that threads through our snarled deceptions, a pilgrimage into the life within life, the life transcending life.

I believe this same life within life drove a disciple whom the Christian church has historically identified as a man named Mark to sit down and write the story of one life that coursed through life so freely as to astound us all. By doing so, he set into swirling motion the sacred story of a labyrinth beyond labyrinths. He disclosed the mystery within mysteries, that one life could be lived for all life, one death could die for all deaths, and one rising would shine eternity into the babble and hustle of our everyday existence.

There is much to captivate us in the Gospel According to Mark’s telling of the story. Its stark perspective. Its breathless pace. Its peerless eye for the telling gesture and the minute detail. And on a day in late winter (or was it early spring?), in a holy accident almost as surprising as that first day in the Presbyterian churchyard, I slid a hymnal off my bookshelf and counted up the number of readings from Mark in its lectionary. Exactly forty. With one more reading left over for the day after Lent is done.

This was the gift from Ariadne’s hand. And I was smitten. The Gospel of Mark would be the Lenten thread to guide my way in and out of this, my labyrinth. The Gospel of Mark would be my daily guide on the path to an encounter with God in Jesus of Nazareth.

To walk this path with Mark’s Gospel shows us that the act of reading can itself be a walk into a labyrinth. Our eye follows the lines of text, one line twisting into the next, follows the twisting path of words, their logic and image, in the hope that we will reach a certain center, a destination planned, or unplanned, by its origin. Our reading is all the more labyrinthine when the text we are reading is held sacred, when it is Scripture.

And just as there are many different ways to walk the labyrinth, there are many ways to read a book. All in one sitting. All in a week. A page at a time. A chapter at a time. On a beach. Under the light of a nightstand. . . . There are any number of ways to read the labyrinth of a book, even this book. But you may want to read this book in this way, namely in the way I wrote it. You can read each day’s reflections—both on the labyrinth walk and the reading from Mark—as part of a forty-day discipline. The short chapters are numbered with that intention. The numbered chapters are grouped into sections that correspond to the weeks of Lent. And each section begins with its own introduction, a kind of interlude to bring things back around to a new beginning.

Of course, if you’re reading this as part of a Lenten discipline, it is helpful to remember that Lent begins on a Wednesday and does not include Sundays. The daily Scripture reading index in the back provides the readings that accompanied my journey, should you wish to follow the lectionary I followed. But this is only a suggestion. As I said, there are many ways to read a book.

As you read you will notice certain ways that I use language. Repetitions of words and phrases are intentional and will, I hope, help the language resonate in your heart and mind. I return to certain ideas again and again, not to restate the obvious but to swim deeper into their significance. This makes a certain kind of rhythm central to how the sentences and paragraphs weave together, to how the strands of the various stories weave together. Pay attention to these things, to the ways my story, the labyrinth’s story and Mark’s story are interposed upon one another. I tried to write every word in a way that would give voice to the deep mystery at the center of life, the labyrinth of our existence.

Imagine the movement of this book as that of a spiral, like the double helix of DNA. The structure of sections—each with its own introduction, each intertwining these various stories—itself suggests a kind of double helix. In a sense, with each successive walk of the labyrinth, I felt as if I were telling the same story forty different ways. And yet each way was different, and each turn around and around invariably pushed me forward. I was moving in a spiral.

I have structured and written the book in these ways because the overarching goal was to echo the act of walking the labyrinth. And just as the labyrinth never moves in a straight line, I ask you to suspend your belief in the need for a straight-line, linear direction through this book to reach a certain destination.

Because I pray you can trust me when I tell you that we will reach a destination. And it will be worth reaching. Perhaps, in a sense, that is the whole point of the labyrinth, to walk it in the hope that it will lead us to the center of our life even when we think we’ve lost it, or, worse, it seems there is no center at all. We seek it to lead us to a center that is, in so many ways, unknown and unknowable. This is its paradox and its mystery.

Which leads me to the question that begs to be asked. What is the center of your life? Have you found it? If you think you have, do you think that you’ve plumbed its depth, that it has taken root in the core of your being?

If I could provide you with an itinerary for the journey that is this book, if I could say in no uncertain terms what this book is about, this is it: to find the center of life. My life. Your life. Our life together. And the purpose of the labyrinth is to show us that even when we think we’ve found it, its meaning is immeasurably deep, inexhaustible.

What is the center of your life?

Of course, I can’t answer that for you. Nor would I want to. But what I hope I can do is to provide you a way to, both metaphorically and literally, walk a way to an answer. That’s exactly what I did, walking forty days in a labyrinth in a churchyard three blocks from my home. What I found was that the answers the labyrinth gives are never the be-all, end-all answers we might want. They are always an invitation to fathom ever further into life’s center, immeasurably deep and inexhaustible, ever winding in and around itself, in repetitions and reverberations, to a rhythm all its own.

As the apostle Paul would write in his letter to the Philippians, perhaps this is what it means to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

This is the itinerary for the journey that is this book, as best as I can write it, right here, right now. I write it for a destination that I know is there even as I cannot say where it might lead. I write it exactly because I cannot say, right here, right now, where it might lead.

And that is exactly the point.

This book does not require you to go out in search of your own neighborhood labyrinth, although that would not be a bad thing to do. It does not require you to spend forty days in discipline, nor to read Mark along with it, although those wouldn’t be bad things either.

Here is the clarity of the life in a labyrinth. It requires only a willingness and an honesty to put one foot in front of the other, and to be open to the convergence of your story with the story of another, One who already walked this path long before either of us took the first step.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the Ariadne’s thread for any journey of faith is the story of the Scriptures. But the convergence of these two particular stories is particularly fitting, because if there is any sacred book that reads as a labyrinth might read, I am convinced it is the Gospel of Mark. Why else would Borges, the writer of labyrinths, title a short story after it (“The Gospel According to Mark,” first published in English in the New Yorker in 1971)?

Jesus, in Mark, walks a serpentine path and speaks in twisting parables, always winding in circles, never a straight line. At the heart of his message lies a secret center—Mark’s so-called messianic secret of the kingdom of God—shrouded in the smoke of mystery. And in Mark’s way of telling the story, the gospel is filled with paradoxes and reversals, just as a labyrinth’s path leads to the center by ever leading its pilgrims around and away from it.

Stylistically, one of the ways Mark does this is through a technique scholars call “intercalation.” More affectionately, it is known as “the Markan sandwich.” It is the way Mark interrupts the telling of one story by splicing within it a second story. In Hollywood they might call it a “flashback,” but in Mark these intercalated stories do not simply reflect back to the past. They push the story forward into the future. This feature, unique to Mark, thus produces poignant and sometimes mystifying interruptions in the narrative. Some readers cite these interruptions as signs of an inferior artist. But these interruptions—these ruptures—between the narratives tell their own story. Their fault lines shiver with meaning. This is part of Mark’s genius: in the fractures of the story—in the absences they create—new meanings, new presence, can emerge.

Just as they do in the empty center of a labyrinth.

I have stolen Mark’s technique. By splicing together the tellings of two stories—my forty-day pilgrimage in a neighborhood churchyard, the pilgrimage of a preacher from Nazareth winding his way to his final destiny—I hope new meaning can emerge in the ruptures in between the stories, in the white space between the winding lines on the page, in the story of your life, even as it is completely unknown to me.

Because I am convinced that to walk this path is to walk the path of life itself, the labyrinth of labyrinths spiraling from past to present to future, encompassing the stars. This is the path of curiosity. This is the path to discovery. This is the path into encounter. We read it one word at a time. We take it one step at a time.

I invite you to walk it with me.

Walk the labyrinth.

1

Entrance

ISTAND AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE LABYRINTH. The ground before me mixes with sky, gray within gray. A day of dust and ash. I have no mirror to see it, but I know my brow still shows a swipe of ashen gray above my eyes. If I furrow my brow, I can feel it crusting my forehead.

I stand at the entrance. I am thinking about death in dust. Create in me a clean heart.

I take the first step in between the parallel lines of brick.

One step. This is the first step.

Renew a right spirit within me.

I crouch down low, one hand on my knee. The other hand touches earth. The ground is thawing, waterlogged, but still cold. Late winter. Early spring. The lawn is matted a dormant flax blond, spotted with patches of enduring green. The bricks, ruddy red and brown, marking the boundaries of the maze, are slicked wet. The day started with a warming sun, but the March wind—floored by low-lying clouds—has now sped the air with a chilling bite.

I stand.

Before me, the gray and pink stones of a sanctuary wall. Slender charcoal windows, no light from within. Behind me, the rhythmic zoom of a busy street. The trees are bare. I hear one bird singing—perhaps a robin—but I cannot spot it.

The story of the labyrinth begins with its geometry. At the heart of its ancient design, the seven-circuit Cretan labyrinth, is this simple aesthetic paradox: the labyrinth creates a circle out of a square. By connecting four equidistant dots at right angles to each other with intervals of circling lines, it transforms the square into a circle. Or rather, it integrates the geometries of the circle and the square—line and arc, angle and circumference—into a single compass of movement and direction.

These geometries have a mythic history. The circle signifies the heavens, the square, the earth. Their integration in the labyrinth opens our sight to an ancient vision of reality: flat land within the arcing heavens. Ground mixes with sky, gray upon gray.

The labyrinth is a globe of the cosmos, square in circle. To walk it is to tread the universe underfoot.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters . . . and let the dry land appear.” The geometry of square and circle, the act of creation: the labyrinth is their story.

I take now one step, the first step, the beginning of heaven and earth.

The first step into the Gospel According to Mark begins in much the same way (Mk 1:1-8). The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The first sentence of the first words of the Gospel of Mark—believed to be the first Gospel written—begins famously as a fragment of a sentence, all subject and no verb. The sentence is incomplete. And its incompleteness paradoxically throws us forward.

In a sense, Mark begins by trying to make a circle out of a square.

We look for the verb, the arc of the story. I look for the verb that begins the arc of my life.

It takes us to the wilderness, beyond the borders of what we know: our knowledge, our comfort, our expectations. When we go there, we go to the place of our own unknowing, to what we don’t know and to what will be undone of the knowledge we think we know.

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The story has begun, and we are in the crowd gathering to hear.

If we listen close enough, we hear the story for the first time, again.

This is the paradox of the story, after all. We have heard the story before. But we are hearing it as if for the first time. No, this is the first time. It must be. Because we never know for sure if it will end the same way again.

These are the first words of the first story ever told. The beginning of the good news. We are hearing it again for the first time.

This is why, long ago, I was the child who would ask his mother for the same story—again and again and again—to drift me off to sleep. This is why my own son will ask me this night for the same story—again—before bed. This is the story’s mystery, and we are entering it again. This is its hope.

This is the first step.

I take one step. I kneel. I stand.

I stop after one step, the long-winding journey of the labyrinth still before me. The wilderness still stands before me.

For reasons I cannot explain and dare not understand, I turn. I exit. This first step, this first day, this will be all.

For all I think I know, this is only the beginning.

Where does my story begin? My first step into the labyrinth? This morning when I first stepped out the door of my home? The day I tunneled my mother’s womb to the light of my first day? The first moment I was conceived in that same womb? The first day God first spoke creation into being?

The answer to all these questions: yes. This first day is the day I take the first step into the labyrinth of all these beginnings. The labyrinth joins all these beginnings together. This is the mystery of the labyrinth of life—its story—circling round its source. Every step a first step. Every day a first day.

Where does this story—my story, your story, our story—begin?

2

In the Middle of Things

THIS SECOND DAY, I FIT MY LABYRINTH WALK into my day after work, on my way home. Driving there, I turn right, toward my house, before arriving at the church on the left. I am driving on autopilot. I have to turn around to retrace the route to where I should have gone, back to the churchyard.

I arrive in medias res, “in the middle of things,” in an in-between moment of the day, in between work and home. I walk the labyrinth with some speed but not carelessly. The day has been cloudy and cold. I move a pile of thin branches that blocks my way. Near the end, along an outer circuit, but before it turns to move me to the center, the path turns me to the west. And I see, beyond the outline of houses and trees, in a break of open space, the pale orange of sunlight near dusk. But the sun—in medias res, hanging in the moment between day and night—still hides. Above me the speeding clouds are breaking late the blue of sky.

With swift step, I take all the steps I did not take yesterday. I am drawn inexorably to the center, the vortex of the whirling maze. Nonetheless, the path weaves in and out, toward and away from its end. It is as if to get to the center one must weave in and out within a rushing crowd.

I wonder.

Who has walked this way before? Who has trod this path? Whose footsteps am I tracing? In the pale orange of dusk, I glimpse a glimmer of a story that has been ongoing, for a long time.

I enter, in medias res, a journey much longer than my own.

Time moves us so fast. But if prayer transcends time, their prayers still echo here, in medias res. I walk in their shadow. I breathe their words. Their exhaling breath mixes midair with mine.

I enter, in medias res, a journey much longer than my own.

To enter into the story Mark tells is to enter it in medias res (Mk 1:4-11). Beginning to read the Gospel of Mark is like stepping into a revolving door spinning fast. Everything is action, speed and urgency. We start, it seems, in medias res, in the middle of the story. It is already spinning and being spun.

Time moves us so fast.

In the middle of our medias res, the Nazarene comes. He arises from within the crowd. No angels to herald him. No gold or frankincense or myrrh at his calloused feet. He arises from within, as if he had been standing here—among us—this whole time. Jesus of Nazareth rises from among us, drawn like us to the vortex of the whirlwind.

In medias res. This medias res. My medias res.

Just as the rush of water overflows the dust of his brow, catching in glimmers the pale orange half-light of descending day, we see the beginning take shape, his body lit with water afire. He is the center. He is the vortex, labyrinthine water swirling round him.

As we lean in, we hear the voice. The voice is not for all to hear. The voice is conversation: parent to child. You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. Said in the second person. The voice does not address John, nor the crowd. No one else hears it.

Except us. We alone overhear the conversation. We breathe its words mixing midair with our breath. We alone hear the secret whisper echo in our ear.

We are eavesdropping, listening in on intimacy, the indwelling of One in the Other. The exchange is so filled with power it breaks open the sky. It tears the cosmos apart. The power is the potency of love, taking wing in the Spirit. Three-in-One has touched down to earth, and the earth can barely contain the encounter.

As water soaks the linen of his garment, the love of One permeates the Other. The words are not directed to us, but we hear the voice. The secret blessing of it overflows me, permeates me, as water soaks linen.

The blessing of it—this journey much larger than my own—enters into me in medias res.

As I retrace my way home, I listen for the voice, here, now. I am encircled by its silence, the story of it, its secret blessing.

3

Wilderness

THE MORNING IS CLEAR when I enter the labyrinth. But the sun has not yet warmed the day. I see the vapor of my breath billowing before my face. The ground is covered in frost. It chills my feet. In the places where the slanting light touches the surface of earth, the frost sparkles, then melts. The circle of the labyrinth is cut jagged by shadow, the outline of the church.

Walking, I cross into shadow, then back into light. Along the line where shadow meets light, the border glitters, a halo inscribing the sanctuary’s reflection on the ground.

The church is being made holy by light.