Leaving the Labyrinth
by Lory Widmer Hess
“You walk, always walk, following the path. You can stop in the middle, but not for too long. Then straight out — forward, into the light.”
I frowned at the guide, perplexed. This was not what I had anticipated.
“You mean, I can’t retrace the way out from the center?”
“No, no. In a cathedral, we always go from darkness to light. Into the light!” She made a sweeping gesture with her hands, like a farmer shooing chickens. Mary glowed at the center of the faraway apse, holding her child in eternity. “Going backward would undo the light. We mustn’t do that!”
It was impossible to argue with her, but as I stepped into the labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral, disagreement churned in my mind. I want to integrate darkness with light, not deny it by turning my back on it. The way out is not the same as the way in; I’d assumed I’d get to experience both, but it was not to be.
I saw a sequence of dark triangular shapes inserted between the pathway’s curves, like stepping stones in a flowing river. It wasn’t the way I’d expected to leave the labyrinth, but it would do. I’d carry my questions with me, and move on.
Once I’d stepped into the labyrinth I was stuck with whatever I’d brought in with me. Anger and disappointment weighed me down, tensing my shoulders, bowing my head, as I followed the winding path. I couldn’t tell how far I was from my goal, nor predict where I would go next. Doubling and diverting, the path took me all the way to the edge of the circle before winding inward again. Other walkers appeared, sometimes opposing me, sometimes moving parallel. Among them were my husband and my son, but we passed each other like strangers, eyes lowered.
A short, straight segment headed toward the center again, then doubled back and forth, suggesting another long journey. But it was just a tease. One more straight way, and I was in the center. There I stood for my allotted few moments of quiet, wishing I could let go of all the restless thoughts I still carried. I couldn’t take time to unravel them now; the pilgrims were piling up at my back.
Looking ahead, I saw a sequence of dark triangular shapes inserted between the pathway’s curves, like stepping stones in a flowing river. It wasn’t the way I’d expected to leave the labyrinth, but it would do. I’d carry my questions with me, and move on.
***
A few weeks earlier, my husband and son had been preparing to journey from our home in Switzerland to France. The plan was for them to take the train to Mont St. Michel and hike for ten days, and then I’d drive to meet them in Chartres. I’d been wanting to visit the cathedral ever since we’d moved to Europe five years earlier; now we were finally going to do it.
As their departure approached, my anxiety began to rise. I fussed over how the two of them would travel, where they would stay, whether their Interrail app would function, what they would eat. Did they have water bottles? Warm hats? Rain gear?
Absurd disaster scenarios ran through my mind: they’d rack up insane roaming charges. Collapse from dehydration. Be attacked by heroin addicts as they sought a place to camp.
My son, annoyed by these irrational fears, started ignoring my questions, fending off my worries by keeping his plans to himself. Of course, that only ramped up my anxiety even more. I was tortured by it, unable to to let go, thoughts racing through the night.
“Just don’t die!” I called out as our apartment door closed behind the two of them. I knew it was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help myself.
Of course, everything was fine. They made it to Mont St. Michel, found safe campgrounds and sufficient food, navigated the trail. They didn’t get lost. It didn’t rain. My son wanted to quit after one day of hiking with a heavy pack, but he carried on and was glad he had. Soon we’d be together again, their calls and texts assured me.
For a week I went to work, cleaned our silent apartment, and reflected on the way my concern for my loved ones’ well-being had spiraled out of control. Where did this worry-disease come from? How could I escape it?
I’d been shocked into awareness of the hidden emptiness in my core. My life seemed to be bleeding out, leaving me empty and limp.
During my own adolescence, I’d evaded the worries of my elders through silence. Though no one had ever told me to keep my troubles to myself, some wordless compulsion had tangled me up inside, leading me into a dead end. A habit of not telling anyone what was going on with me — from a lost lunch ticket to a bout of major depression — reinforced my inner numbness, locking me in a kind of living death. Nobody noticed, as I kept doing the things I thought normal people should do: going to school, getting a job, starting a family.
Faced with a newborn’s demands, I’d been shocked into awareness of the hidden emptiness in my core. My life seemed to be bleeding out, leaving me empty and limp. Love had become a fearful thing overpowering my individual consciousness, motherhood a heavy burden that threatened to wipe my fragile self out of existence. I turned away from the heralds who wanted me to open up to joy, overwhelmed by emptiness, hiding from the truth. Yet still, on the outside, I pretended nothing was wrong.
Unbeknownst to me, my husband was doing the same, concealing his own hurt and shame. When our son was twelve, our marriage went through a crisis as that hidden darkness exploded. It was painful, but led to necessary change; for me, this mainly involved learning not to ignore the messages in my soul and body that told me something was wrong, and to find people I could trust to help me interpret them. My husband, meanwhile, found his own supports. We were able to rebuild our relationship on a stronger basis, making a decisive break with old habits as we moved to Switzerland.
Here, most of the time, I was not excessively bothered by the worry-disease. I knew our family of three had come through a time of trial into a better place. But under stress, the anxiety flared up again. I hated how I sought to control it by controlling others, in the guise of “helping” them, the useless way I fretted about minor, unimportant things, while dodging the real issue, which was something I could not control at all.
This wasn’t really about hats or water bottles, or finding a place to sleep for a few nights. My greater worry was about my son finding his way in life. He was so spacey and scattered, always forgetting assignments, missing appointments. How would he manage without someone guiding his steps?
***
The last few months had been chaotic. In February, he’d dropped out of an academic high school that wasn’t meeting his needs, but then had trouble deciding what to do instead. He’d wanted to take off on his own, to walk for weeks across France till he reached the sea. We said no to that, at least until he came up with some kind of plan for the fall. Switzerland has an excellent system of apprenticeships in various fields, but students still have to decide on a direction and stick with it for several years.
At Chartres, I would enter the labyrinth, the fractured heart of wholeness, seeking a new direction.
Weeks went by as he tried out one idea after another. Cooking? Woodworking? Caregiving? The things he enjoyed doing — improvising on the piano, reading Asterix comics — did not lend themselves to career opportunities. We all seemed to be floundering in an empty space where the way forward was not yet apparent.
His notion of walking in France was whittled down to a couple of weeks, and he agreed to let a parent come along. He himself realized that he had no idea how to begin planning and executing his grand visions on his own. We truly did not want to be controlling helicopter parents, but we feared if we let go too soon, he’d end up going nowhere.
As June approached, he still hadn’t settled on what to do after the trip. At last he found a six-month paid internship on a farm, far enough away that he’d have to stay there, but close enough to come home on the weekends. It seemed like a good first step, a chance for him to grow in responsibility away from home, guided by other adults, surrounded by nature. My worry should have been relieved, and yet as the time for him to leave for France came near, some fracture in my own being was still being triggered.
Was this about my mistakes of the past that I could never erase? I know it affected my child to come into life and meet a mother who was unprepared for him. It filled him with insecurity, slowing his progress in many areas, derailing him from the expected track of development. It was hard not to fear that though I had finally sought help, and we had both grown and changed, it would never be enough. As though it was all still my fault, and I was the one who would be judged and cast out for any kind of failure.
But this attitude wasn’t helping anybody. I had to change my ways. At Chartres, I would enter the labyrinth, the fractured heart of wholeness, seeking a new direction.
Maybe there I could be reborn.
***
When the time came, I packed up our car with a small bag of clothes and a large one of reading material and headed out. The landscape along the road was mainly agricultural, with huge, empty fields and small, unremarkable settlements. I slowed down through towns and sped up again. Pouring rain washed over the road from time to time.
I passed a sign marking the watershed between north and south: from here, on one side water flowed to the Mediterranean, on the other, to the English Channel. After I crossed that line the rain abated, as if it too obeyed the division of waters.
I arrived in Chartres under cloudy skies to find my husband and son already there. I unloaded in our rental apartment and we headed out to the cathedral before it closed for the night.
I felt cheated of my perfect cathedral experience, as if my own arm had been broken and immobilized.
Here I encountered my first disappointment of the trip. I’d been reading about the mystic darkness of the cathedral interior, the way red and blue light from the windows mingled in a purple haze conducive to meditation, bringing some visitors to tears. But any such mystic atmosphere was now dispelled by bright white electric bulbs that lit up the whole interior. Were they ever turned off, we asked a guide? “No, too dangerous,” he said. It seemed to me they could be pointed toward the floor, or dimmed, without causing fatal accidents. But some power from above had chosen General Electric over a mystical atmosphere.
As we walked up the nave, another disappointment: one entire transept, the right arm of the cross-shaped building, was blocked off by scaffolding, part of a restoration project that would extend over more than two years. I felt cheated of my perfect cathedral experience, as if my own arm had been broken and immobilized.
The cathedral was closing; we’d come back tomorrow. We ate dinner, chatting about our adventures so far. We went to bed.
In the morning, I got up while the others were still sleeping. I shut myself in the bathroom of our tiny studio, sat on the floor and turned on my meditation timer.
I’d started this practice around six years earlier, during our marital crisis. During a weekend workshop at a spiritual retreat center in Maine, I started to become aware of issues in my marriage, unresolved trauma from childhood, patterns that had to be worked through in order to undo them, so my family could move forward in a new and better way.
During that weekend in Maine, I had my first experience of walking a labyrinth. A small, outdoor circle made of beaten earth, stones, and sticks in the woods, it had nothing like the cathedral’s grandly sculpted surroundings, but also drew me into a winding path, unveiling the disorder in my mind. Walking the spiral inward and then retracing it outward had been a healing experience, a double opportunity to fully accept all that I had within me and commit to bringing it out — yes, into the light, but not in negation of darkness. In a humble clearing in the forest I’d walked a way of integration, praying with my body, even as my mind still resisted change.
A small space emerged, free of the surrounding chaos, a space where I could stand and look around and wonder.
That weekend was mainly devoted to practicing silence, letting it work in me as a healing power. I had never been able to maintain a consistent meditation or prayer practice before, but this one finally stuck, mainly because I could palpably experience how it helped me find peace amid the storm of my life. Not necessarily during the time of meditation, when thoughts and feelings would batter me like the sheets of rain I’d passed through on the way to Chartres, but in the other hours of the day. As I kept practicing over the course of the following months and years, I found myself marginally more able to resist an impulsive act, a tiny bit freer from waves of anxiety. For moments at a time I could observe my adverse emotions, rather than suppressing or freezing them. Step by step, something was changing.
A small space emerged, free of the surrounding chaos, a space where I could stand and look around and wonder. And when I kept up the practice, day by day, bit by bit, this space grew — not larger, but clearer, more available when I needed it. Even when I could not actually feel it, I trusted it was there.
My practice went through several phases over the years, as I tried out various ways of releasing thoughts and refocusing my attention. Eventually I settled on centering prayer, a contemplative orientation toward consenting to the activity of God within. A word is chosen to return to as a gentle reminder of that intention, each time distracting thoughts and sensations pull one out of deep listening.
The word I most often chose was Amen, “so be it.” May it be unto me according to your word, as Mary said to the Angel.
I found it deeply consoling that my goal in this practice was not perfection, but the constant admission of imperfection combined with trust in the Center. I wasn’t trying to eliminate thoughts, to arrive at a mind that was blank or filled only with a mantra. However many times I found myself diverted, I could simply recall my intention to connect again.
After my frustrating walk through the Chartres labyrinth, I knew I was being challenged to practice centering. Could I disentangle my disappointed desires and seek the open space of a centered heart, trusting it to lead me where I needed to go?
The labyrinth would open again for walkers at the end of our week in Chartres. I resolved to use the time to learn as much as I could about what it meant to enter a holy place.
***
The three of us returned to the cathedral day after day, spending hours exploring its riches. The rooftop tour led us up to admire the cathedral’s nineteenth-century metal framework — a fire had gutted the old wooden beams, but miraculously, not destroyed the ceiling below. Now that eternal danger, fire, was less of a threat.
It shouldn’t be a disappointment, after all, to find the cathedral under reconstruction. So was I. Both of us were works in progress, in constant need of cleansing and repair.
A vast inward space opens up, resonating with the space inside each individual who enters it, seeking illumination.
We toured the crypt, the foundational space left from another devastating fire; the current building rose like a phoenix upon this remnant of its earlier incarnation. We entered at the northwest side, away from the sun, and walked eastward, stopping at the point under the apse to reflect and pray, before continuing on to the southern exit.
This buried space is not a place for the dead. No one is buried in this cathedral, I learned, and the relic it was built to house is, most unusually, not a memorial of death, but a chemise believed to have been worn by the Virgin Mary during the birth of Jesus. Not desiccated bones or a fragment of flesh, but something more like a woven sheet of light, meant to shelter and protect the mother of a newborn. In earlier times when it was kept in the crypt, pilgrims would visit it on their journey through the dark, enclosed passageway. Then, they would emerge into the soaring space and radiant color above. Compared to the cramped, sooty spaces of their medieval lives, it must have felt as though they had truly been reborn into Paradise.
It awed me, too. The experience of a space illumined by richly glowing jeweled colors is not something one can capture in a photograph; it activates more than just the visual sense. A vast inward space opens up, resonating with the space inside each individual who enters it, seeking illumination.
The sacred scrap of cloth is no longer kept underground, but in the ambulatory, behind the altar. As I came up again into the shadowed space of light and continued exploring — back and forth, in and out, around and around — something started to relax in me, something that had been held tight since the birth of my own child. Everywhere around me, in colored glass and sculpted stone, carved in wood and painted on walls, I beheld the birth of the New Human Being. He was carried in his mother’s arms, or lying beside her as she rested, or held on her lap, totally enclosed in her enveloping robes. He was secure in that embrace, even as he walked toward the cross of his inexorable death. He knew the difference between true life and mere survival, and he knew that the difference is love.
I was so afraid of doing something wrong, being cast out of paradise forever, but that was not Love’s way. I must remember that in spite of my mistakes as a mother I was still a beloved child. I, too, had come into incarnation through the “So be it” of a human body, and been clothed in a radiant garment, invisible but real. I didn’t have to worry about how to control my path, nor that of my child, but simply to trust the power that had brought us together, and kept us together in spite of many challenges. Then our next steps would come to light.
***
When Friday came around again, a former classmate of our son’s had joined us for a visit. The two of them would take the train back to Switzerland, while my husband and I drove the car full of luggage and camping gear.
We just had time to walk the labyrinth once more before leaving. I sat and looked on while the two teenagers stood in line, waiting for their turn to enter. Many walkers had gathered this morning, and I watched them step one by one into the winding path.
Penance and play are held within the labyrinth’s bounds. We can experience the winding path as a place of suffering, or of delight. Or, more likely, both.
Each person’s steps were different: tentative, determined, wondering, burdened. A woman stopped each time she came to a turning, taking a breath with a visible release of her shoulders. Another wobbled as she walked, kicking her feet out a few times as if it helped her find balance before relaxing into a more ordinary stride. Among the meditative throng, one couple strode as briskly as New York commuters, aiming to get to the center as fast as possible and move on.
Hands were held out in prayer or folded in reverence. Eyes lifted up or turned inward. Each person was on an individual journey while walking together.
The origins of the labyrinth are lost to history. No one knows what the builders intended, or how it was used. After a few centuries, even the clergy turned against it, considering it a senseless game. Miraculously the labyrinth at Chartres was preserved, while others were destroyed.
There is some evidence that pilgrims journeyed through it on their knees, a penitential test of endurance. Another story holds that the cathedral clergy danced there at Easter time, playfully throwing a big golden ball, representing the Christ-sun, from center to periphery and back again.
Penance and play are held within the labyrinth’s bounds. We can experience the winding path as a place of suffering, or of delight. Or, more likely, both.
One woman walked twice as slowly as anyone else, skirt brushing the floor, holding something clutched to her chest. Her eyes were lowered. Were they full of tears? Her mouth moved slightly, as if in prayer. Later, I saw her sitting across from me among the spectators, eyes open, face relaxed. She’d put down whatever her burden was. The labyrinth seemed to have helped her come through to the other side of something.
My son’s turn had come, and he stepped into the winding path. I watched him go his silent way. Whatever experiences he might have as he twisted through life, I would trust that the center was there to ground his journey. I could only encourage him to keep going, knowing I would always be there, too, on the periphery. Waiting, hoping, loving.
When he and his friend were done, we took them to the train station. I held back my worries — it didn’t hurt to know that they’d be together to meet the challenge of changing stations in Paris. My husband and I waved as the train pulled out of the station, and then we went back for our own labyrinth walk.
After a week in the cathedral, my discomfort about the guide’s commandment to “walk straight out” had dissipated. It doesn’t matter how you leave the labyrinth, I decided, whether by retracing its convoluted path, by walking straight ahead, or even by bouncing out like a big golden ball. What matters is that you carry the center with you. By making the journey inward, consciously following its twists and turns without letting fear of the unknown throw you off the track, you have turned the confused, chaotic way into a centered way. That is what you can bring back into a confused, chaotic world.
I’d been lost for a long time, unsure which way to turn, but now I’d gotten myself pointed in the right direction. I didn’t need to make the worry-disease into one more thing to worry about. It would decrease, as joy and gratitude increased.
When I reached the center of the labyrinth, I prayed that the spirit of this place would enter into me, would quicken within me, guiding me into new life. I didn’t need to know exactly how that would happen, only keep going in the way I’d learned to trust.
I stepped forward.
Lory Widmer Hess grew up near Seattle and now lives in Switzerland, where she works with adults with developmental challenges. Trained as a spiritual director, she companions individuals in their spiritual journey and leads online groups in the practice of Sacred Reading. Her writing has been published in magazines and journals including Parabola, Amethyst Review, Handwoven, Pensive, and Motherwell, and she is the author of When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey Through Healing Stories in the Bible (Floris Books, 2024). Find her online at enterenchanted.com.
