Mapping the Path

Walking the Labyrinth—July 10, 2009. In Moscow today (and every July 10th), at Dormition Cathedral, an ancient relic (how ancient? ah, that’s the rub) is put on display for veneration. The cathedral, the mother church of Tsarist Russia, was completed in 1479 and stands in the center of Cathedral Square at the Kremlin. In 1625, representatives from the Persian Shah arrived in Moscow with a gift for the Tsar, Michael Feodorovich, and the Patriarch of Moscow, Philaret. The Shah’s emissaries claimed their gift was the same robe the Roman soldiers stripped from Jesus at the Crucifixion. If the Shah’s story is to be believed, this relic is the seamless robe of Christ, woven of a single piece of cloth. In ancient Christian writing, Christ’s seamless robe was taken as a powerful symbol of the unity of the Church. As such, if this was indeed that garment, its value would be inestimable. Oddly enough, though, the Cathedral of the Dormition isn’t the only church in Russia with Christ’s one garment. Or at least, part of it. Pieces of it are enshrined at the cathedral in St Petersburg, the church attached to the Tsar’s Winter Palace, at Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, at the monastery in Ipatiev, and several other prominent Russian churches. If you happen to be at Dormition Cathedral on July 10 on any given year, you won’t see the seamless robe displayed, but only a venerable piece of it. Whatever the original garment was the Shah sent to the Tsar, it was promptly cut to pieces and parceled out! On the night of July 10, 1212, the newly-completed London Bridge fell down. The south part of the bridge caught fire and a bunch of people who ran onto it to put out the fire got trapped as the flames spread quickly around them(the bridge was lined with shops and residences). Happily most were rescued when the city’s boatmen clustered underneath the bridge and helped people into their boats and barges. Medieval Londoners turned near-tragedy on its head though; they rebuilt the bridge and made a children’s rhyme out of the night’s events. In 1509, the humorless John Calvin was born. Trained as a lawyer, he first published his massive work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, in 1536. It irrefutably proves that 25 year olds should not write theology books. In 1692, some of Calvin’s disciples, having come to the New World to escape religious persecution, hung Brigit Bishop from an oak tree outside Salem, Massachusetts, for being a witch. She was the first of 19 to die from July till September of that year in the famous Witch Trials. Her main offense seems to have been that she liked to wear bright-colored clothes and flirt with men. Today she’d have a television show or be a Senator’s “other woman”—and then have a television show. On July 10, 1884, the man who many regard as the world’s greatest chess player, Paul Morphy, died in his bathtub. Morphy came from a distinguished New Orleans family and as a young child he learned how to play chess by watching his elders play the game on Sunday evenings. One of those evenings, when he was four years old, he told his uncle he should have won the game he just lost. He proceeded to demonstrate this by resetting the board and going over the game move by move, then showing the opportunities his uncle had missed. By the time he was nine years old, he was regarded as the best chess player in New Orleans. He toured the world when he was 20, winning international acclaim. Morphy, weighed down with laurels from the Queen of England and proclaimed “Chess Champion of the World" by the President of the United States, returned to New Orleans in 1859 to open a law practice. It never prospered, he told friends, because almost everyone who came to his office wanted to talk about chess, not the law. After a long afternoon walk in the New Orleans heat, Morphy insisted on getting into a bathtub filled with cold water. His body went into shock and he died while still in the tub. His home, at 417 Royale Street in the French Quarter, is today the site of Brennan’s Restaurant, where “Bananas Foster” was created and continues to be served. In 1923, the city of Rostov in Russia was pounded by a hailstorm. The average weigh of the hailstones that pummeled the town was 2 pounds. According to the city archives, “23 people were killed and a very great number of cattle.” Two years later, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” (one of several “Trials of the Century” held in the 20th century) began in Dayton, Tennessee. John Scopes was convicted, but he later told reporters he couldn’t remember whether he’d taught evolution in his class or not. The whole thing, he said, had been staged to win publicity for both sides. The first full moon in July is called the Buck Moon or the Honey Moon; today is the 191st day of the year; 174 days remain in 2009.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON once wrote, “Every boy loves maps.” It’s certainly true in my case, but Stevenson would undoubtedly be accused of sexism if he penned those words today. Perhaps justly. A lot of us, male and female, love maps and the hidden promises they enfold. There was an old map shop I used to frequent in New Orleans, closed by the hurricane, which was one big open room laden with maps: maps on counters, maps in big, wide drawers, maps on the wall, maps in cases, no inch of the place—except the floor—but was covered with a map. There were gigantic maps on the ceiling and I got more than one crick in my neck looking up when in that store. My great prize from there was a reproduction of a map of the plantations of Louisiana along the Mississippi, originally done about 1855. It’s 7 feet tall and 32 inches wide, and gives the names and owners of each plantation from Belle Chasse to La Barre. There are maps like this I cherish, but I’ll confess something here. I can’t bring myself to throw maps away. Outdated road maps, tattered maps, AAA maps I’ve got three duplicates of, I always stop and think “What if somebody needs this someday?” I know what Stevenson was talking about. I doubt he could bring himself to toss out a map either.

Labyrinths are ancient, much older than Christianity. The first labyrinth to be dated was built 1,000 years before Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt. They’ve always been seen as sacred pathways, but with the coming of Christianity, they disappeared from the Mediterranean world. No doubt, they were seen as holdovers from the Old Ways. Then, about 1200 or so, give or take a century, labyrinths began to re-appear. On the floors of large parish churches and the pavements of the new Gothic cathedrals, these ancient patterns found a new meaning. They were seen and used as paths of pilgrimage. After the Muslims closed off Christian holy places to pilgrims and the wars we now call the Crusades were being waged, people began walking (often on their knees) these labyrinths as a way of making a pilgrimage. Often the central core, the heart of the labyrinth, was inscribed “Jerusalem” or had a picture of the holy city painted there. The labyrinth, with all its twists and turns, is both a journey and a map.

About half-a-dozen of those medieval labyrinths still survive in European cathedrals. Some new ones have been built. But even those of us who can’t walk the labyrinths 0f Chartres or Amiens can still benefit from them. Their very existence can teach us about our own lives and pilgrimages. Most obviously, they teach us we need maps. We need a guide to help us get to where we want to go. How much gasoline, do you think, have GPS systems saved? How many arguments have been averted when men, on whose stubborn ears the phrase “why don’t you stop and ask someone where we are?” once fell as on barren ground, now simply punch the family’s destination into the car’s GPS device? In the labyrinth of our lives each of us needs guidance, help along the way. We each have to walk the path God has set us on, but we can walk well or poorly, we can succeed or fail. Even though the path you're walking is yours alone, others have been walking paths like yours for countless years, stumbling where you've stumbled, dancing where you've danced, crying tears like yours, delighting in the same silvered moons you've wondered at. You've got to walk your labyrinth yourself, but you don't have to walk it alone. There are great men and women who've gone before you. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest their stories of spiritual struggle and failure and growth. Find a friend to talk to about the deep things of your life, the things that make you who you are. The early Christians in Ireland and Wales called someone like this a "soul friend." Not necessarily a spiritual director, but a companion along the way. Your spiritual life isn't merely your "church life" or the stuff you do people might call "religious." It's who you are when you're measured at your deepest point; the part of yourself you meet the most rarely, the you you know the least.It's the you God put in the labyrinth and said "Get on with it. Start walking." So what map will you use as you travel? That depends on where you decide you want to walk. From one pilgrim to another I simply say: choose that map wisely.

FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, a pleasant surprise, Journey Back to Eden, by Mark Gruber, OSB. Fr Gruber is a Benedictine monk who spent a year in Egypt living among the Copts. He went to do a sociological study of them to complete his field work for his doctorate in anthropology. My good friend, Col. P J Hickey (ret), sent it to me as an Easter gift. I just read it this week, which shows you behind I am in my reading. But I’m glad I kept it on the bookstack. Fr Gruber went to Egypt "to study this ancient and indigenous people." The book tells the story of how he came to analyze their culture and ended up embracing their ways. Fr Gruber didn’t abandon his American Catholicism and become a pseudo-Egyptian; he did something much more profound. He eventually came to see himself, and his faith, through their eyes. Through the rich experiences he recounts in the book, he discovered the common, core faith he shared with his hosts. He lived in the desert monasteries of Egypt for a year and came to understand the fiery discipline of the ancient monks was not a throwback to times past, but a true way forward for people of faith. He contrasts the life of Christians in Egypt, where the Copts are a persecuted minority, to the life of Christians here in America, where even the monastic life is rich and fat by comparison. Here, we have evangelists who preach the good news that God wants us to be wealthy; there, the Coptic monks tell the people their persecuted status is God’s plan for the redemption of Egypt, Coptic and Muslim. This is the moving story of a man who went to Egypt to study anthropology and discovered his life as a Christian. I wasn’t expecting much from this book but in reading it made some happy discoveries of my own. Journey Back to Eden was published by Orbis Books in 2002.

Quotes from today’s principals:

“I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.”—John Calvin (this is as funny as Calvin gets)

“Scare. Terrify. Petrify your opponent."—Paul Morphy

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."--Clarence Darrow, Attorney for John Scopes