So Much Depends:
Reflections on a Labyrinth

Amelia Franz

It’s stretched across the fellowship hall this morning, a canvas labyrinth forty feet in diameter, modeled on the one laid into the floor at Chartres. In the middle ages, pilgrims too poor or frightened to brave the dangerous journey to Jerusalem made their way, instead, to Chartres or one of the many other European churches with labyrinths of colored brick or stone. Following the single path through a series of concentric circles—often on their knees in penance—they imagined the rosette-shaped space at the center as Jerusalem, and this symbolic pilgrimage a declaration of their willingness to walk their spiritual paths in submission to God’s authority. When priests and bishops eventually found their liturgies unable to compete for parishioners’ attentions during Mass, some of the labyrinths were ordered ripped from the floor, stone by stone, brick by brick.

A woman who’s traveled to Paris for training has brought the labyrinth to us today, the Episcopal Preschool Moms Group. We meet on Friday mornings for Bible study, needlework, scrapbooking. We make baby blankets for battered womens’ shelters and collect medicine for Russian orphans, listen to speakers on child development. This is the first time most of us have seen a labyrinth. There’s a wooden tabletop model displayed for sale, with fingertip-sized grooves carved into the surface, and books by Merton and St. Augustine on mystery and contemplation.

Which is what we’re supposed to be doing this morning, contemplating. Meditating. Listening to God for a change, instead of hogging the conversation. Julia, who was raised Catholic, asks if we’re supposed to pray any certain prayer while we walk. No, the woman tells her. Just listen.

Some of these women have sick children; one has a toddler scheduled for surgery, and another’s baby has begun having seizures. A few of them were raised, like me, to believe in divine healing: Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church. My father, an ordained pentecostal minister in the Church of God, kept the bottle of Pompeian olive oil shut in a small compartment on the back side of the pulpit. I remember the fat, sweet, holy smell of it, the warm thumbprint that lingered on my forehead, electric hands on my hair, shoulders, back.

But I don’t concern myself long with Rachel or Elise or anyone else here today, barely register their presence. I’ve come with a question. Two paths diverge in a wood; which one do I choose, Lord? In the beautiful Nepalese film Himalaya, a wise monk tells his young apprentice that when two paths open before you, you must always choose the harder one. On this advice, the young man, a gifted painter of frescoes, leaves the monastery to accompany his aging chieftain-father on one last salt caravan through the mountains to Tibet, a journey no one believes they’ll survive.

Many years ago, I chose to keep a particularly ugly family secret, and I’ve kept it well. I swallowed the truth and made it my own, and here it sits still, wedged somewhere in the vicinity of my heart. Since I found religion again in my thirties, the truth, and
the secret, seems harder to ignore. When you heart gets bigger, it hurts more.

Kafka said words should be axes for the frozen seas inside us all. If I decide to share the secret and unburden my conscience, if after all these years I lift the rusty axe above my head and swing, I fear I and my loved-ones will drown in a dark, estranging sea. Perhaps our bodies will never be recovered. Or perhaps they’ll wash up, changed and unrecognizable, on the distant shores of scattered islands. So much has depended on my silence, on the frozen sea.

Psalm twenty-seven has become my mantra. I whisper it to myself every night, until sleep comes: Though my father and my mother forsake me, I know the Lord will take me up.

When the leader decides we’re all ready, she releases us to the labyrinth, a few at a time. We cross the fellowship hall, remove our shoes, and step onto the canvas. Wearing a secretive smile, she pops in a cassette of new-agey music. Behind the music, we hear the sound of construction just outside as men work on the new additions to our church, and peer in at us through the windows with amused and curious faces. A year from now, the church will have not only a new sanctuary and classrooms, but a permanent labyrinth made from brick, inside a garden. “An oasis of peace in the heart of the city,” the announcements read.

Only a few minutes into the journey, a friend passes me carrying her whimpering six month-old in a sling. The child’s cry distracts me, and I can’t help resenting the intrusion. But to my surprise, I find my body actually beginning to relax, starting with my neck and shoulders. My feet move hypnotically, trancelike, with little conscious effort on my part. This is already a minor miracle, the knots in my back loosening, but it isn’t why I showed up this morning. I could have taken a hot bath at home, or a sauna at the Y. I came here for an answer. If not an answer, a hint, clue, inkling, anything. I don’t expect a burning bush, or a wet fleece on dry ground. I’m no leader of nations, no slayer of Midianites. Still, so much depends.

If I knew which path were harder, speech or silence, I would try to take it. Which is more disabling? Continuing to live inside the constricted, pseudo-relationships that secrecy demands, never risking intimacy lest the truth escape my lips at an unguarded moment? Or rolling the grenade into the tent of sleeping soldiers?

Where are you, Lord? I’m listening.
No reply, nothing.

By the time I’m midway along the path winding to the center, I feel acutely conscious of just how ridiculous we must look to the construction workers outside, guiding the beams into place and building our church.

Jesus on the main line, tell him what you want! Jesus on the main line, tell him what you want! As a girl, I spent a week every summer with my family at the Mississipppi Church of God state camp meeting in Jackson. Saints in need of healing or deliverance presented themselves at the front of the tabernacle to be anointed by a team of pastors and evangelists, including my father. Someone would grab a tambourine and shake it. On the piano, some sister or brother would pound out the rhythm with their left hand, fingers held stiff and straight like Little Richard, echoing it with the right. The drums and bass guitar kicked in, and in no time, hundreds were dancing, shouting, clapping, singing, claiming the victory: If you want your healing, tell him what you want! If you want your healing, tell him what you want! Tell him what you want right now!

Questioning my motives this morning, I wonder: Are my hopes really so different from theirs? By expecting an answer this morning, perhaps I’m trying to throw down those crutches at the altar and walk home with no limp, or feel the tumor spontaneously disintegrate in my chest. Labyrinth, altar call, what’s the difference? And had I done nothing more than sink my hopes in a flavor-of-the-month spiritual fad? Sure, it’s been around since medieval times, blah, blah, blah. What’ll I fall for next time? Self-flagellation reclaimed? Workshop fee fifty dollars, whips provided, reserve your spot today.

I don’t indulge this ugliness for long. I’m frustrated with my indecisiveness, but mostly grateful for everything this great refugee church—the Episcopal church in America—has given me and so many others who’ve found, after years of exile, not merely acceptance, but empathy and comfort under the shelter of her wings.

When I admit to myself, only two rows from the center, that there’ll be no Jesus on the main line today, I briefly consider walking off this silly thing, retrieving my child from the nursery and driving straight home. But I don’t. Instead, I pick up the pace and try to get it over with. Perhaps I have received a message today, after all. No one can, or will, make the decision for me, not even God. He’s punched out on heaven’s time clock, for the great cigarette break in the sky.

The instant I step into the center, though, resigned to leaving church no wiser than before I came, I begin to notice a physical sensation of elevation, of light and space. My brain recognizes something here, registers the words “summit” and “mountaintop,” though no images appear of any mountain I’ve ever climbed or driven. As strange as it sounds, I’m struck instantly with the knowledge that there’s no mistaking my location. Deaf and blind, you’d still know the thrust of a jet take-off, as I know without a doubt where I stand. Impossible as it sounds, this sheet of ordinary painted canvas is some kind of holy ground, the holy that made me tremble with awe the first time I attended a Jewish sabbath service and heard the cantor intone, Baruch Atah, Adonai. Blessed are you, God.

Not knowing what else to do, I sit cross-legged and bow my head, shut my eyes. Others are swaying, kneeling, some with babies, some without. Softly, from behind, I hear a woman’s barely audible weeping. It reminds me for the first time since I entered the labyrinth that something communal, as well as solitary, is at work here today. Listening to her, I see my mother’s face, and I’m transported back to the Mississippi delta church of my childhood.

Before the watch night service on New Year’s Eve, I helped Mama prepare the unleavened bread for the Lord’s Supper. It was a dinner plate-sized, stale-tasting cracker we baked on a cookie sheet, then broke into pieces and smoothed in a single layer on the shining silvertone communion tray, one of the few ritual objects used in pentecostal worship, and all the more precious for it. Earlier that afternoon, I’d walked to Pang’s grocery on the courthouse square for the largest bottle of Welch’s grape juice they carried, to be poured into tiny glass cups not much bigger than thimbles, resting in a circle around the unleavened bread.

This is my blood of the new testament, shed for many, Daddy read after the sermon and altar call. We were assembled in a semi-circle at the front of the sanctuary. Off to the left stood the piano Mama played, and hanging on the wall behind the pulpit and choir loft, the ubiquitous Last Supper by DaVinci. The women wept softly, whispered adorations, and then the silence descended.

The men moved into one Sunday school room while the women took the other. I was sent next door to the parsonage to bring warm water in a pail. I poured it into the white enamel basin on the floor, then moved off to the side and drew figures on a green and white tithing envelope. The womens’ shoes and hose were tucked like small, shy animals beneath the metal folding chairs, and Mama knelt on the floor before them. Without her hose, the varicose veins she’d earned from her years of field work showed badly. She read from the Book of John, If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.

I love you, Sister Betty. I love you, Sister Dot, she told them. She cupped her hands to catch the water, then let it stream through her fingers over their pinched, red feet. Her tears mingled with the water as they fell into the basin and over their ankles. I love you, Sister Pauline. As Mama passed down the row, they surrendered their burdens to Jesus and each other.

I must have imagined the aura of light emanating from Mama. It’s a scene I wish I could paint. I would capture, too, the detail of Sister Pauline’s face, and somehow convey the truth of that moment: that she didn’t actually come to the watch night service to save Brother L.E. from drinking up his paycheck at the juke joint, or even to save their marriage. She came to watch in the new year together, with shared tears and intercessions, surrounded by her sisters in the Lord.

I didn’t feel quite ready to leave the labyrinth, but I followed the straight path out and grabbed my Birkenstocks from the pile shoved up against the wall. Slump-shouldered and confused, I headed down to the nursery for my son, unsure exactly how my memories of Mississippi were helpful, or even relevant, to my dilemma. I knew I’d felt something, had been touched deeply. But if the message was simply that I needed to lean more on others for support, as those Mississippi women did, it was about as startling and profound as a dinner roll. I’d always been shy, anti-social, even. But was shyness and introversion a sin? If so, it was a sin for which I’d been hard-wired, certain as my eye color and shoe size.

On my way down the stairs, I passed Cara, who stopped to chat. She’d always been friendly to me. She asked how my four year-old’s dance recital had gone that weekend, and made me promise to bring pictures. I looked at the toddler holding her hand and the elementary-aged girl who dashed up the steps two at a time.

“How are your two?” I asked her. “Great, see y’all later!”

In case I’m not making myself clear, which is very possible, I couldn’t remember the names of her children, much less whether they danced ballet, played soccer, or sang in the children’s choir. When I reached the nursery, another mom asked about the recital, and about my husband. She called him by name, of course. All I could recall about hers was tall, big guy, loud voice. We’d only spoken a few times, after all. I hurried into the parking lot with my son.
Days, weeks, months passed. Slowly and gradually as clothes fading in the wash, the clarity for which I’d prayed and fasted was finally granted. I decided, as I’d probably always known I would, to share the burden I’d kept to myself with my parents, my brother, and my sister. I wasn’t at all sure I’d survive, in an emotional sense. When I pictured the words leaving my mouth, I envisioned myself taking a snapshot from my mother’s album—one taken in the seventies, all of us looking happy in our new Easter clothes—and cutting out each of our images, releasing us separately into the wind.

I prayed the Psalms and the Book of Common Prayer with an urgency and discipline I’d never known. I sat in the tiny meditation garden I’d made in the back yard beneath our huge elm, reciting the Prayer for Quiet Confidence: O God of peace, who hast taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength: By the might of thy Spirit lift us, we pray thee, to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou art God.

On several occasions, I reflected on my labyrinth walk and the vision I’d been offered that day, the one I’d tossed out like food scraps. As I pleaded for strength and guidance, I began to comprehend that the vision I’d received pointed not to a need, but to a prerequisite, a requirement, for spiritual growth: I needed to ask support from my sisters in the Lord, and to learn how to trust them. Through much prayer and journaling, I discerned the essential image, the power and truth of it. For most of my adult life, I’d remained that six year-old girl sitting alone in church, doodling on a tithing envelope or daydreaming out the window. In exchange for divine guidance and growth in Christ, I needed not only to accept the image as valid, but also to act on this new awareness. I’d always behaved as if my spiritual journey through life were a solitary thing, and rarely acknowledged my fellow pilgrims along the way. My task now was to find a way out of this pattern of spiritual aloofness masquerading as timidity, and create a new, grace-inspired pattern.

I sought guidance from a mature and sympathetic spiritual counselor-therapist, and forged a deeper friendship with my sister-in-law, who became a trusted confidante. By sheer serendipity or divine intervention, or some combination of the two, a kind an amazingly compassionate priest invited me to participate with her in spiritual direction, exactly when I most needed it. It would be false to say that my pain was lessened by the prayers and encouragement of these women. My health, though, was preserved, and I never fell into despair so deep I couldn’t find my way back to the surface. The hours I spent with them were harbor lights for me, guiding my little boat into rest and calm on days when the chop was too fierce and the marker buoys hidden by fog and rain. I have no doubt their companionship sustained me in ways I will never completely understand.

My family was devastated by my revelation. For a while, I felt like Annie Dillard’s narrator in Holy the Firm. Gazing out over a metaphorical sea, maps and charts at hand, she notes a new land mass before the horizon, a new island in her personal archipelago of pain, and realizes that the sea-charts must be redrawn to accommodate this new and different hurt. Each day, I discovered a new island, just when I thought my map was finally complete.

But in the middle of the shouting, the accusations, the ugly moments of silence and withdrawal, we gave each other honest words, and the frozen sea began to thaw, a little. I screamed my truth at my white-haired, sixty-two year-old mother in the counselor’s office, then punished myself by not looking away when her expression changed, by vowing to remember the way her mouth dropped and stretched out, and her eyes went flat. I insulted her faith. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to save her. For the first time in my life, I asked her to pray with me.

A year later, she, the lifetime pentecostal tee-totaller, knelt beside me at my church’s altar to take communion with me, my son, and my husband, to drink wine for the first time, from a cup shared by at least a hundred strangers. She’d once lectured me on why plastic Solo cups shouldn’t be washed and re-used: you could never be absolutely sure you’d cleaned all the saliva from the tiny crimp at the lip of the cup. When I rose from the kneeler to return to our pew, she stayed a few extra seconds, her lips moving in silent prayer.

The permanent labyrinth was completed a few months ago, sandwiched between our church and the parking garage. Occasionally, after picking up my son from the church preschool, we open the gate and follow the steps down to the labyrinth.

“Hey! You’re supposed to be praying when you walk the labyrinth!” I called out to him and a couple of his classmates.

“We are praying!” he shouted joyously, his face radiant as they flew faster and faster, round and round the labyrinth, then spun in place until they lost their balance and fell in a squirming mess of giggles and squeals. And I knew, instantly, that he was right. They weren’t here asking God for anything. They were rejoicing, like the angels rejoice.

I thanked God for the Spirit at work in my boy’s heart, teaching him in ways neither he nor I could know or fathom. I thanked God for bringing me to this church, and to this day. I thanked Him for this small, perfect revelation—this latest love letter—from the lips of my child. And I asked God to please, please, help me always to pay attention.

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Amelia Franz lives with her husband, Matthew, and their son, Nikolas, in the beautiful,
writer-friendly city of Austin, Texas. She has published short stories in The Texas Review, Oyster Boy Review, Blue Penny Quarterly, and essays on teaching in several education journals. She was raised as a third-generation pentecostal in Mississippi, and grappling with this heritage is a persistent theme in her writing. After leaving her parents' denomination, and years of spiritual searching, she has found a home in the Episcopal church.