I only get wireless on weekends here, so I will update once a week. Here's a reflection (or a memo, as we call them) written for discussion group today:

Circles

           There was a labyrinth cut into the lawn of my childhood church. Open Circle Church, it was called, a loosely-affiliated Brethren congregation in Burnsville, Minnesota chock full of gays, lesbians, and the kind of people who have collections of gemstones dangling from their living room ceilings and rearview mirrors.

            I don’t recall ever walking that labyrinth. Maybe I was too young to have a real understanding of why it was there. None of my friends’ churches had labyrinths, and like so many other aspects of Open Circle, I eventually found it embarrassingly left-of-center and woo-woo.

            Outside of textbooks, I never saw another labyrinth until I came here and walked this one. I’m not trying to draw any sort of comparison between Open Circle Church and the Oregon Extension, but I’ve got to say that after spending the majority of my teen years running around with the Assemblies of God and then skipping off to a Baptist university, finding myself out here in the mountains, smack dab in the middle of a labyrinth, fumbling a piece of rose quartz in my hands, made me feel like I had come just a little bit full-circle.

            Arriving in the center of that labyrinth came as a bit of a shock. I had been meandering around that thing holding this chunk of rock, kind of praying, kind of daydreaming, kind of breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, when all the sudden it opened up into this perfect circle, this higher ground. It seemed to rise up like a wave and catch me. My heart skipped a few beats. I was in the Middle.

            The feeling of being there was like looking out over the ocean after years of being landlocked. A feeling, oddly enough, that I’ve been experiencing quite often lately. It’s the feeling of wandering around having no idea what you’re after, and then, without even trying, arriving. It’s the feeling of looking deep into your own eyes and seeing somebody familiar. 

            Our discussion of Memoirs of a Boy Soldier on Wednesday led to a wealth of interesting commentary about childhood. Ishmael Beah ends his book with an answer to an unanswerable riddle, an answer he held inside since he was only seven.

            Jesus says to be like the little children. Maybe, in their world of imagination, in their “blunt-as-hell” confrontation of reality, children set the best example of how to relate to the Divine.

            The Sunday after we all arrived, a few of us sat on the Franks’ porch, watching Simone spinning in circles. “I think that’s a highly meditative activity,” I said to those around me. “I remember doing that as a kid and feeling like I’d flown away.”

            Maybe I need to acknowledge that child that’s still inside of me: the little girl who spun in circles to center herself and knew no reason to be ashamed of things like labyrinths and gemstones.

            How beautifully ironic that coming out here to Lincoln, such a significant step in my independence and adulthood, has demanded of me a return to childhood.

            I don’t have to become a new woman. I don’t have to transcend. I just have to go sufficiently deep into that which I’ve been meddling around in all along. Maybe, as in the labyrinth, the center will rise up and take me by surprise.