The Labyrinth of San Tomas

I wish you could have known Dan. You’d have liked him. At least, I think you would. He had a sweet soul, if you know what I mean. Something trusting and open, ready to make friends with anybody. Kathy used to chide him for that.

“You’re too trusting, Dan. People take advantage of you!”

“I know,” he’d laugh. “I guess I must like it.”

And he did like it. Give you the shirt off his back, if you needed it. His eyes would light up at the chance.

That’s what made it so hard when Kathy died. The light went out. I never saw a man change so. He still was friendly inside, but many people didn’t know that. He sort of caved in, and you hated to disturb him. Not that he cried all the time, or anything like that. He wasn’t gloomy exactly. Absent-minded might be more like it. He was there, but he wasn’t there. He was almost a ghost or a zombie or something.

Well, now, haven’t I done a poor job of describing my best friend! Shame on me. I tell you about a really great guy, wish you could have known him as I did, and then make him sound like a walking corpse. Actually, Dan was very much alive and very caring and very in touch with the world around him. But he was preoccupied. He couldn’t get used to his wife being gone. He went through the motions. He stayed busy. But he was “on hold”. It was like he was determined to reassure us he was all right when it didn’t really matter to him any more whether he was or not.

Until he started that business with the labyrinths.

Maybe you haven’t heard of labyrinths? The kind people walk in for a spiritual exercise, I mean? They’re kind of popular these days. I’ve seen them alongside modern churches and everything. Most of them are based on the one that’s in the floor of the Chartres cathedral in France.

It’s not a maze you can get lost in. It’s a pattern on the ground, or the floor of a large cathedral, which twists and winds back and forth on itself, wide enough that you can walk between the lines. You go round and round and just when you think you’re at the end, it turns you back in the other direction and you go back to where you started, only it turns again and so it goes on and on, and when you least expect it, you’re in the center. People say it helps them empty their minds of useless thoughts, just walking around and around like that. At least that’s what Dan said.

“I’m not sure what I expected the first time,” he told me, “I was just curious. I always did like messing around with mazes to see if I could find my way through. Only these aren’t mazes. A maze has blind alleys and dead ends and you have to keep making choices which way to go. There’s only one direction in a labyrinth - forward. If you keep going you reach the end. There’s no tricks to them.”

So what’s the point, I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t. I was reluctant to interrupt the flow of his story. It was good to hear him talking again. There was some life in him as he talked. The sparkle had returned in his eyes. I wasn’t about to risk snuffing that out. So I said, “Tell me more.”

“It was really a surprise,” Dan went on. “I didn’t expect anything much, and I was right. I was busier trying to keep inside the lines than anything else, and frankly it was kind of annoying running into all those switchbacks. I guess it was getting to the center so unexpectedly that surprised me. It was the first time since I lost Kathy that I actually reached the end of something. I felt satisfied.”

“Satisfied?”

“Yes. Sounds silly I guess. What a thing to be satisfied about. But everything else was sort of, oh, I don’t know, sort of pointless. It didn’t make any difference. And here I was, in the center of a pattern on the floor, and I was saying ‘I made it. I actually made it to the end.’ I could imagine Kathy laughing at me, but not in a mean way, or anything. It was more like she was happy for me. For me. Not worried, or sad, or even disappointed - which was what I was afraid she’d be.

“I’d been such a mess, you know. All that talk about how I mustn’t grieve, that I should be glad for her, that she was with God, you know, and we’d be together again some day - I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe anything. What was the point trying to do anything? Who would notice? Who would care? Because I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. If you’d offered to push me off a building to end it all, I’d have blessed you.”

“Good Lord, Dan, surely you weren’t thinking like that.” I protested.

He looked blankly at me for a moment, as if he didn’t even know I was there, and then he shook his head as if he were trying to get rid of a bad dream.

“Yes, I’m afraid I was like that. Not for a long time, you understand, and not that I’d ever have, you know, done something foolish to myself. But when I stood in the center of that labyrinth, It was as if something inside of me started to live again. It was the strangest thing. I stood there looking around and wondering what had happened. Nothing had changed really. I was just as lonely and lost as I’d ever been. But it felt different. I looked at the pattern on the ground and saw all those circles of lines and I thought, ‘All I have to do is put one step in front of the other and no matter how many times it switches and turns, it will keep taking me forward, and somewhere I will come to the end of it just like I got to the end of it here, only this time I’ll be on the outside. I’ll be free.’”

He became silent for a moment, looking inside himself somewhere, as if the memory of that first moment was still fresh and green and capable of showing him some secret only he could understand.

“And ...?” I prompted him.

“And I felt ... better ... alive, I guess. Yes, I was alive, and the surprising thing was I didn’t know I hadn’t been in months.”

He chuckled at the memory and gazed off into the distance, smiling. Then he turned to me and added, “Not that I started really living it up or anything!”

I grinned. The image of Dan “living it up” amused me. It was not his style, by any means.

“But ...” again I prompted him.

He remained still, contemplating what he wanted to say. Then he shrugged and said, “Who knows? I guess I was tired of being on hold.”

“Ah, come on Dan, there’s got to be more to it than that.”

“To the labyrinth, you mean? You might not think so, but I do.

“You see,” he went on, “at first it didn’t really mean anything. It was just following a pattern on the ground, and the security of knowing there was an entrance and a center, and if you followed it you would come to one end of it or the other. And that was sort of relaxing, or something. I can understand why priests like to say their prayers with those beads, and at the same times of the day. It’s a pattern, you see. You know what’s expected of you. You know where you fit in. No matter what happens in life, that pattern is always there. And somehow, God is a part of that pattern, you know? God starts it and ends it and is the way in and the center of it all. I liked that thought. I didn’t have to think anything or believe anything, I could just let myself go and be in it. From beginning to end I was in it. I know it sounds crazy to you, but I found peace there, a peace that told me I belonged.”

The earnestness in his voice, and the sincerity I could read in his eyes was enough to win me over.

“I’m glad Dan, I really am ... for you.”

Somehow I had to add that qualifier. Dan might have a mystical streak in him but I didn’t, I never did. As much as I wanted to share his enthusiasm, I had my limits. I could not pretend the beginnings of a faith I didn’t believe in. But I didn’t have to. Dan was quite satisfied simply telling me his discovery. He didn’t need me to follow him.

“I know, Buddy, this isn’t your ‘thing’. It doesn’t need to be. But I wish you could feel what I felt. It would be ...” and he grew silent.

I almost said, “Be what?” but I kept still.

He remained silent for a moment, as if pondering what to say next, or even whether to speak at all. Then he looked at me and I was struck by the earnestness in his eyes. He was about to tell me something important and I had to pay attention.

“The thing is, I’ve always been a believer, you know, but I never really fit in anywhere with my beliefs. Before Kathy died that didn’t matter, but when she died, I needed something more and I didn’t know where to look for it. You know the things I tried.”

I did know, from Catholic masses to evangelical tent meetings, he sampled them all.

“Kathy was my religion. When we were together, I didn’t need anything else. I guess I figured any God that could create a Kathy and give her to me had to be all right in my books. But any God that would turn around and take her away like that, for no earthly reason, well that I couldn’t accept.

“I was pretty P.O’d at him, if you want to know the truth. And that was hard to bear. Not only did I miss Kathy, I didn’t have anybody to comfort me in her absence. God and I weren’t on speaking terms any more.

“But after that moment in that labyrinth, it was like, no, God wasn’t the enemy. It was that idiot that almost slammed into her car. And it wasn’t his fault either. How was he to know we were coming around that curve? He had the sun in his eyes and didn’t even know we had lost control and went off that embankment.

“You see, it was that unexpected turn, that switchback, that moment when you think you know where you’re going, only you don’t. You think you’re at the end, but you’re not. Only suddenly, when you’ve given up ever getting there, you’re there.

“It was like I’d been a blind man and now I was seeing an entirely new world. I saw colors I didn’t know I’d been missing. I felt energy that I hadn’t felt in ... oh, I don’t know, forever I guess. I started to laugh, me, laughing, when I wasn’t sure I could even smile again. And I didn’t know why. It just seemed right somehow. And most amazing, it was as if I knew Kathy would understand.

“Imagine, dear Kathy, dead in her grave. Only now, just for that one amazing moment, she was alive and smiling and laughing with me.”

Dan looked at me with a kind of eagerness in his face as if he were searching my face to see if I could possibly believe what he was saying. I must have looked blank, because there was disappointment in his eyes, but I tried to smile encouragement and urge him to continue.

He looked down for a moment and then raised his eyes to mine again.

“Well, it’s hard to explain. I guess you think I’m crazy or something.”

“No Dan, of course I don’t think you’re crazy. My God, I’ve watched you this last year and a half, listened to you, and this is the first time you seem really alive. I may not understand, but I’m glad to see the old you back again.”

He smiled and said, “Thanks. That’s good to know. The thing is, grief is so damn lonely. There are times when I can’t tell whether Kathy’s the one who died, or me.”

“No, my friend, you’re very much alive. Of that I’m quite, quite sure. And you think that walking in that labyrinth somehow ... did something to you?” I didn’t know how to phrase the question, but he didn’t need me to ask again.

“No. Not the labyrinth, it was just the walking in it that got me in touch with another dimension to reality. I thought at first it was that particular labyrinth, but I found out that it didn’t make any difference. Wherever I found a labyrinth, I’d walk it, and the same sense of peace, of assurance, of being at home would come over me.

“I’d start walking in the labyrinth and after I got used to the twists and turns of the lines, I began paying attention to the scenery around me. It was disorienting at first. Just as I would get used to the sights before me, the labyrinth would jerk me away from the familiar and I would be looking at a different scene. The more I walked, the more the scenery changed. It almost made me dizzy.

“But then... I don’t know how to explain it exactly ... I started to let go of what I was seeing and just let it happen. Colors and shapes melted into one another and I was in the center of it. My busy brain stopped trying to understand. Little by little my obsessive thoughts relaxed and I started to trust just being there.

“That’s when something unusual started to happen.”

“Unusual? How? What do you mean?” I asked.

“I got this odd notion that ... please don’t laugh ... that I was not alone any more. Someone was with me.”

“Someone? Who?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t ask. For some reason I didn’t need to know.”

He gave me a searching look and said, “Have you ever had a time when you and Clare were walking side by side, not talking, not saying anything at all, but you would be thinking the same thing and not know it?”

Clare is my wife.

“You mean like ESP?”

“Crap no. How childish. No, it’s some inner bond that grows without you knowing it, but which is just there. I mean, you’re one, but you’re not really, because you are so completely and totally just yourself. You don’t need words. You don’t need explanations. You don’t even need to be together - although it helps of course!

“Well, that’s what it was like there in that labyrinth. We were one again. Only it wasn’t just being at one with my memory of her. No, it was right then, right there. God, it gives me the shivers just remembering that moment. It was the most incredible thing.”

“That was when you went to Santa Fe, wasn’t it? I remember how different you looked afterward. I knew something had happened.”

“Yes. Exactly. You can understand then, can’t you?”

I wanted to say yes, of course I understood. But how could I? Feeling close, feeling connected, feeling love that not even death can interrupt - yes, all that I could understand. But this transformation Dan was talking about. That was something so personal, so almost holy, that it felt like sacrilege to say I understood.

Besides, who was to say this wasn’t all nonsense, the consolations of a lonely mind compensating for its loss? Maybe what he needed was a good analyst and a dose of Prozac.

He searched my face once more and then turned away.

“You do think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No Dan, no. Don’t go there. Only, come on, give me a break. I’ve never heard you talk like this before. How am I supposed to understand? You don’t look crazy. You don’t act crazy. You never have. But what am I suppose to think?”

“Think? Think? Don’t think, for God’s sake. For once in your life, just try to listen, and forget about making any sense out of it, will you? That’s where we get screwed up. Our brains want to figure everything out. Well, guess what? Some things just don’t figure.”

“All right, all right, I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand that’s all.”

Dan nodded and said, “Yeh, I know what you mean. I tried to understand it too.”

He looked off into the distance and then said in a quiet, far away voice, “Kathy got mad at me for that once. When we were first dating. ‘Why do you have to analyze everything?’ she said. ‘Why can’t you just accept what’s happening and enjoy it?’ I didn’t have any answer right then, but I knew what she was talking about. How could I tell her I was standing on the brink of an abyss about to jump in and I was scared shitless. I’d never told anybody I loved them. What would happen if I ever admitted it? Said it out loud? I had to understand it all before I could take a chance like that.

“Kathy wasn’t that way. She gave with a simple trust that dumbfounded me. And finally, I learned to give back. She taught me that - not by words, just by being.”

He shrugged and went on, “So, of course, when I started to feel her back again...”

“Whoa. What did you say?”

“I guess I kind of dropped that on you, didn’t I?” Dan said, apologetically.

“You think? You surely don’t mean what I think you said.” I could understand a man’s grief raising all kinds of feelings, but that he would start believing his dead wife had come back from the dead ... That was too much for me to accept.

Dan shook his head as if to reassure me.

“No, don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like that. No ghost or goblins or things that go bump in the night. It was more like the spirit of her life, her gentleness, her optimism, her sense of, oh I don’t know, what would you call it? Adventure. Possibility. Wonder. Didn’t you feel that about her when she was alive?”

I had to agree. Kathy was all those things, and that was what I missed the most about her now. Maybe that’s what Dan was finding. It fit.

I nodded and assured him, yes, that was how I remembered Kathy too.

Dan looked off in the distance and I let him be. This was one conversation I could not help him with. He had to tell it his way.

After a while, he began talking again, but it didn’t seem like he was talking to me anymore. He was remembering and piecing together his thoughts, trying to make sense out of them

“Yes, her spirit was coming back to me. That precious gift of the way she had looked at life, I’d lost that when the accident happened. Now I realized not even death could kill that.”

Then he suddenly seemed to have come back to me. Smiling and reassuring me with a pat on my arm he said, “I guess she was giving me a kick in the butt to wake me up. It was bad enough that she’d died, no point in making it worse by making a zombie of myself!”

I laughed and he laughed too. We’d gotten passed an awkward subject neither of us was willing to discuss, and seemed to be back in the real world that I lived in.

“I was tempted to understand what had happened, like I always used to do. But part of me said, ‘Kathy wouldn’t like that. No analyzing this time.’ And there was the labyrinth.”

“The labyrinth? What did it have to do with it?”

“That’s the mystery. That’s what labyrinths do. Just when you start figuring them out, that’s where the labyrinth keeps interrupting you. Just when I’d get a decent theory worked out in my head, it would twist and send me reeling in the opposite direction. Back and forth, round and round, with only one constant I could rely on. Kathy. She was there. I swear to God, no matter what you think of me, she was there.”

He pounded his fist into his hand for emphasis and I hastily reassured him I agreed with what he was saying.

“So is that why we’re making this trip out to San Tomas? Is that where the labyrinth is?”

Dan nodded, then hastily added, “Not that it particularly matters. Like I told you, any labyrinth will do.”

“Then why did you insist on coming to this one?” I asked.

“No reason. It’s just a nice drive. Beautiful country. The scenery there is especially nice.”

His attempt at nonchalance was unconvincing and I wanted to press him a little, but there was something about his manner that made me keep still. This was his journey and I was only an observer.

“But this was the first one you came to? The one where you felt so close to Kathy?”

“Not really. It’s just got a special feel about it, that’s all.” And there the conversation ended.

* * *

San Tomas is a small adobe church, with a corrugated tin roof. Inside its dusty interior were a few statues around the walls and a bank of candles before a portrait of the apostle Thomas. Thomas Didymus, the Unbeliever. Legend has it he was the apostle who carried the gospel about Jesus to India.

I’ve always liked Thomas. His practical turn of mind and his willingness to insist on physical proof for his faith suited me. Not that I’d ever get so carried away by my religion I’d pack up and take off for foreign parts. But who knows, perhaps Dan had “taken off” to foreign parts in his journeys round those labyrinths.

The one at San Tomas was laid out in the dirt at the side of the church, its circular path marked by stones that had been painted white. The scenery beyond the church was spectacular. The red rocks contrasted with cliffs of sparkling white that were interrupted by gashes of gold where erosion had cut through the sandstone. The landscape between the church and the mesa behind it was barren with only a scattering of stunted trees to break up the empty space. The blue sky rested upon the rocks, almost like a benediction - no other word comes to mind. No wonder Dan found this spot a holy place.

Although he tried to act as if there was nothing special about it, striding across the ground as if he were going across the lawn at his home, there was something deferential about his posture that spoke volumes. He was walking on holy ground and he knew it.

He stopped at the entrance to the labyrinth and offered to let me go first, a generous gesture, no doubt, but he only succeeded in making me self-conscious. How was I supposed to act in this strange country?

“No, you go ahead Dan. I’ll just watch you.”

“I don’t think so, Buddy. You can walk it as well as I. It won’t hurt you. I’d like for you to at least see what I saw. You don’t have to pray, or do anything particularly ‘spiritual’, I promise.”

And after a moment of reluctance I finally agreed.

“All right. I’ll do it for you. It might be kind of interesting at that.”

I stepped into the circle and began inching my way along the path that went before me. It looked as if it would go directly to the center. That surprised me. I thought it was supposed to be more complicated than that. I moved forward, and just as I approached the boulder that rested in the center of the labyrinth, the path abruptly changed direction and I was going away from the center as fast as I’d approached.

“Oh! Tricky.” I said. “ I see what you mean.”

Once more the path swerved and there was the boulder in front of me, the path of the labyrinth twisting to one side as I neared it. Back and forth I went, my eyes peering anxiously at the twists and turns of the rock-lined path, Dan’s voice reassuring me as we walked.

“Don’t mind your wobbly ankles. I was a little unsteady on my feet the first time I tried it” he reassured me.

“It does take some getting used to, doesn’t it?” I replied.

Little by little I was surrendering myself to the discipline of the path. I was more curious now about the intricacy of the pattern and how circle after circle fitted carefully inside each other with the path always going forward, never stopping, never blocked. In fact I became so intrigued by the twists and turns, it came as a shock when suddenly I was in the center of the labyrinth, standing next to the boulder that had been placed there.

Dan laughed when he saw my face.

“Surprised you too, didn’t it?”

“As a matter of fact ...” I grudgingly admitted. “All of a sudden, here we are!”

“Exactly. No matter how many times I walk one of these, I have the same reaction. And don’t ask me what it’s supposed to mean!”

“I wasn’t going to say anything!” I protested.

“You were. Don’t bother denying it. It’s perfectly natural. Ask all you want, you won’t get an answer.”

“Well that’s a discouraging word.” I grumbled. “Now what are we supposed to do?”

“Turn around and go out again.”

And that’s what we did.

I wonder if the fascination of a Rubik’s cube pales the same way that labyrinth did, once I’d been to the center and back. When you know how to do it, why bother to doing it again

Although I had to admit (to myself, of course) that there was something intriguing about that constant shifting of the background. Still I frankly soon tired of it. I suppose it could appeal to some people. For me it was simply a curiosity, an interesting experiment. But not for Dan. It was clear, for him the fascination continued.

“Do you think Kathy would have ...?” I couldn’t quite finish the sentence.

“Walked the labyrinth? I have no idea. She does now, though!”

And with that enigmatic remark, we made our way to the car and drove back to the motel room we’d taken in Chama.

* * *

I don’t like to remember the rest of that trip. We didn’t talk about the labyrinth. We didn’t even talk about the little church. For some reason, Dan began to talk about childhood days and how our friendship had survived all the twists and turns the labyrinth of life had given us.

“Unforgettable!” he’d say and I’d agree. Happy, sad, good times, bad times, we made no distinction. We couldn’t seem to get enough of remembering. Then, just before we turned out the light to go to bed, he said,

“I think I’ll go back up to San Tomas.”

“Now?” I asked.

“No, no. In the morning. Couldn’t see anything there at night. There’s no moon even.”

“I thought we were going to take the narrow gauge train in the morning.”

“I know. But I want to go back to the church. Just for a little visit.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“No, you don’t have to. In fact, I think I’d rather go alone.”

“To be with Kathy.” I said.

He smiled and said, “Could be, could be.”

I started to say, “All the more reason I should go too,” but I didn’t.

However, I did get ready the next morning, just in case he might have changed his mind. And to my surprise he didn’t object.

We headed out to the church in the freshness of the dawn and drank in the clean air and bright sparkle of the morning sunshine.

“I would like to walk the labyrinth one more time,” he said, “by myself, if you don’t mind. You can wait for me in the church.”

I agreed, and when we reached the church I walked with him to the edge of the labyrinth and admired the vista beyond it.

“It is beautiful!” I said, “truly beautiful. I’m glad you brought me out here to see it.”

He smiled and nodded his head.

“It’s a special place, all right. No place like it.”

How do you describe that unspoken farewell that you know in your heart has just been spoken, a farewell you want to reject, that you wish with all your being you could take back, but know you can’t? How do you describe knowing you’ve said goodbye forever, and you want to reach out and grab and hold onto and never let go, and you just can’t? There is no way.

Dan smiled at me and turned to enter the labyrinth and I knew he knew just what I knew.

“Don’t ...” I started to say, but I couldn’t get the words to come out. Silently I said them in my head, “Don’t Dan, don’t go away!” but no sound came out of my mouth.

I watched him walk forward between the white rocks along the path, watched him reach the first turning and begin his march back toward me. He smiled at me and then his eyes sought some other point and the path turned his feet in another direction.

“This is ridiculous” I remember thinking. “He’s just walking in a labyrinth. He’s not going anywhere. Where could he go?” But as he continued his walk, I knew he had a destination I could not see or comprehend.

On around the circle he went, twisting and turning at a relaxed amble. His eyes no longer sought me out, he was looking for something, or someone else, and even before he reached the boulder at the center of the labyrinth, he was seeing something, someone and he was smiling with a joy that was unmistakable.

“Oh Dan,” I murmured to myself, “no, don’t do this.” But he went on, and before I knew it, he was heading down that last corridor to the center of the labyrinth. As he approached the boulder, there was some kind of flurry of wind or something that churned up dust into a golden cloud that shrouded him. Then the dust was gone, and Dan was too.

I started to dash forward, to see what had happened to him, to try and grasp his hand and pull him back from wherever he had gone, but my feet would not move. I thought “this is ridiculous” and I started to run toward the boulder, heedless of the outline of the path. I was surprised how difficult it was to move in a straight line when the path was directing me to go in circles. I soon gave up the effort and traced the path. “One way in, one way out” was the rule, and though it took longer, the way was clear.

When I reached the center there was no sign that Dan had ever been there. No foot prints, no dust disturbed on the rock. The center was empty and still.