In an earlier piece, I described how a four-mile stretch of a wooded mountain trail invites me to settle into a labyrinth prayer walk experience. As with most of the spiritual practices that I engage in often, it’s not so much about the destination but the journey itself. The most essential element to start the labyrinth walk is to slow down, to really slow down, to slow down to the point where if you went any slower, you would be standing still. And it’s here, when I have slowed my pace down to almost imperceptible, that my mind, my thoughts, my breathing, my whole being speaks to slowing down.
At St Andrew’s Abbey, there is no formal labyrinth structure. That hasn’t stopped me yet from walking one.
In less than a half mile from the main area of the Abbey grounds, I can reach the hill that will take me to the cemetery at the top. It’s still in the middle of the desert so it’s sandstone, gravel and earth beneath me with desert shrubs scattered along the trail leading upward. If it’s dry, my feet skid a tiny bit on the dry, miniscule bits of gravel as I engage the steep uphill grade. I can taste the terracotta shaded dust, the air is heavy with it as I breathe harder to get up that hill.
As I make progress, I can see a concrete structure at the top of the hill. It’s a rectangle with a flattened spherical hole in the middle. The hole is flattened at the ends and wider in the middle. The sculpture is named “The Eye Of The Needle” referring to this passage from the Bible:
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Part way up the hill, a miniature version of The Eye Of The Needle sits by the side of the road and as I look through this lower eye I can see the sculpture at the top of the hill. Every climb up this hill I have this question to which I have no answer: why do these concrete needle eyes feature prominently in a graveyard for monks and oblates?
At the top, there are evenly spaced rows of graves marked with concrete crosses. On one side are the graves for monks only and on the other, for oblates. An oblate is one who follows the rules of the order, in this case Benedictine, but remains a lay person, one who is not ordained into monastic life but is part of the spiritual community. Oblates are very important to the monastery community as liaisons between the religious and secular worlds.
I breathe deeply, holding, releasing, repeating. I’ve slowed my heartbeat down, my breathing down, my internal voice is quieting to very few thoughts. I’m holding on to one word, “Look.” At the statue of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus, someone has scattered about 100 clear aquamarine glass stones along the base. Others have helped themselves to the two-inch long stones and scattered them on the closest gravesites to the statue. The gravesites are evenly spaced so there is a thin path forming the rows between sites. I walk this path as I would a labyrinth, stopping at each marker, noticing names and dates, calculating lifespans. Almost all of the crosses have sandstone cairns built on the verticals or horizontals or both cross beams. Do the dead need a cairn to show them the way back to this life or do the living need a guide to the next life?
I subtract the years - the majority of these people lived into their 70s and beyond. At some sites there are remnants of long dead flowers or plants, others have everlasting plastic. There’s an artificial Christmas wreath hanging on one cross. There are multicolored stones painted with fine details placed at the head of nearly all of the sites. Landscape scenes with sunny blue skies with puffy white clouds adorn some of the rocks. Pine trees, streams and forest scenes are finely detailed on flat stones. There are fishing rods, boats, bicycles, BBQ grills, flags of different countries, gardens, flowers of all types and colors, anything that tells the living that the dead are still here. As I read the painted heartfelt messages to the departed, I can’t help but feel the desolation here. There are plaster castings of child-sized hand prints and of pet paws, arranged with care next to the painted stones. The painted messages have a common theme: We miss you Grandma, we miss you Grandpa, we miss you Mom, we miss you Dad. At one site, there are two names on one marker. Grandpa was in his late 70s when he died and his grandson, buried with him, was two weeks old. There are sites with husband and wife, father and son, even one where multiple family members are buried next to each other.
And then, the consolation comes.
Father Francis has talked all weekend long about the Ignatian spirituality concept of consolation and desolation being inextricably conjoined. His illustrations have brought us with him to the heights of consolation and the despair of desolation. Twisting, turning, change of events, change of mind, change of heart, all to bring us to pausing, meditating, conjecturing, affirming our silent, solitude of labyrinth walking to a point of wisdom. Jesus gave loving nicknames to his closest followers. Following divine lead, I dubbed Father Francis, Father Labyrinth. He laughed with approval, responding, “Call me, Labby for short.”
Julian of Norwich believed in the oneness of everything: the divine to us, to creation, and to each other. When encountering the treasures in the Egyptian pyramids, archaeologists deduced that the articles buried with the mummified royalty were to help them in their journey in the next life. Perhaps they had a sense of oneness also and those articles of life connected the living with the departed.
I grabbed some of the blue stones from the base of the Mary and Jesus statue. Feeling their smoothness, lifting them to the light, I let the sun shine through one creating a refracted blue haze casting a blue peace and serenity to everything touched by the light beam. The painted stone scenes told me the story of the departed around me. Dad loved to fish, Mom was a gardener, Uncle loved to barbecue and enjoy a cold one, Brother rode his bike endlessly through the forest, and so on. The modern hieroglyphics promise I love you, I miss you, I will see you again.
Father Labyrinth proposed to us the ultimate consolation. We all seek to be known, to be acknowledged, to be seen. We form attachments because that is who we are, we are all seeking the same thing. Because when we see someone, truly see them and somehow, someway they see us, we acknowledge our shared quest, our shared journey, our oneness.
This is love
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Thank you for the restack, @Paul Wittenberger !
Memories of the past serve as mile markers for our future while at the same time predictive of our future.