Experiment 13: Walk a labyrinth.

Photo Credit: Ashyley Batz on Unsplash

This piece was originally published on the When blog here.

Grabbing my running shoes, I sneak out the back door to hide my tear-swollen face. “Take a break, love,” my husband said after I told him it was alltoomuchalltoomuch. Divinely nudged, my heart knows just where to go. Neighborhood sidewalks lead to a path dappled in light and leaves, then blacktop merges into sun-bright field, and at last I enter an earthen trail hewn in the grass. It’s just wide enough for my own two feet. 

The labyrinth.

Labyrinths, a kind of prayer walk in the form of a condensed maze, aren’t part of my church’s tradition. But a couple of years ago at a silent retreat, my spiritual director encouraged me to walk one on the wooded property. “Take something that represents your burden,” she said, her face framed in a fringe of white hair. “And once you reach the center, lay it down.” At the center, I set down a stone embodying my desire to publish a book, which up til then had only garnered a stack of rejections. Leaving the labyrinth, I felt lightened. It was as if I’d been keeping that stone on my sternum, and that in setting it down, my heart could again beat freely. Afterwards when I felt tempted to worry about the book, I reminded myself I’d already given that burden to God. 

On this sunny Saturday dark with my own inner clouds, I start the meandering path.

Its narrowness forces me to walk with slow care. Without careful attention to each turn and bend, I could easily stray. In pursuing speed (getting to the center as efficiently as possible), I’d miss the whole aim of the journey.

Yet, the labyrinth’s designers must have known the human hunger for progress, for visible results. Right at the beginning, a few quick turns take me so close to the center I can almost touch it. Fresh hope arises fast. But as I continue, the way forward seems to lead farther and farther from my destination. 

My husband and I thought we’d have arrived by now: to a second child, a business so fruitful he could quit his day job. But as time has passed, unexpected bends in the path—like a miscarriage last year—have seemed to lead us farther away from our goals.

The human soul often craves the tidy comfort of closure. We want the diploma nailed to the wall. The marriage certificate dated and signed. The keys to our own home bright in our hands. We often want to skip the uncomfortable, nonlinear steps of transformation, and jump straight to the center.

But many of us are like my husband and me—in the messiness of process. Awake in the dark, head bent over a textbook. Puzzling over a tense conversation with the one we hope to weave a future with. We try and try and fail and see some glimmering lights—but the journey ahead seems long. 

And slow.

In the midst of the bends and curves, the whole maze seems inconceivably complex and mysterious. Trying to figure out the path while walking it only unleashes a headache. Rather than try to make sense of the whole journey, I can only focus on the next step.

From experience, I know that being on the path is enough (Pro. 3:5-6). I’ll reach the center if I only keep walking.

But perhaps I’ve been pursuing the wrong center. Out of mourning, woundedness, and oppression, the sons of Korah sing,

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
    and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
    my salvation and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

The psalm calls us not to hope in a new house or a successful career (though those desires can be good things)—but in God himself. And the Universe Maker will never disappoint. God is always faithful (Deut. 7:9). 

And God is right here with us, in the midst of the maze that seems to have no center. 

God is right here with us, in the middle of the inexplicable journey.

God is right here with us, in the mess of process. 

God is right here with us. 

Now. 

After about 15 minutes of walking, I find myself on the maze’s edge. I’m so far from the center, my arms brush the honeysuckle bushes at the labyrinth’s hem. At this point, the tight, exciting turns of the journey’s beginning have shifted into long lines whose gentle change I’d likely miss, were it not for my attention to the path. I feel like a planet orbiting the sun but not getting any closer, my path running endless, pointless loops whose subtle shifts my body cannot register. This is the marathon portion of the labyrinth when the unfiltered sun feels hottest, the path longest.

This is definitely not the fastest way to the center. 

But efficiency isn’t the labyrinth’s aim. Neither, it seems, is reaching the center at all. Perhaps the real heart of the practice is attuning ourselves to God in the midst of the journey, rather than trying to figure out the quickest way to its end. Finding—amidst the mess of process—a center in God himself.

Sweaty and thirsty, when I’m the furthest away from the center I could possibly be, the path makes an unexpected turn. And suddenly, I find myself dazzled and dazed. At the center.

I name my burden and lay it down. 

And I take the path, all bends and angles, back to where I began.

*If you’d like to find a labyrinth near you, you can check out this labyrinth locator.

This blog is part of the “Experiments in Inefficiency” series, which explores what it means to resist unbiblical cultural and personal pressures to produce in favor of Jesus’ easy yoke.