By Robert A. Rees
On 3 April 2016, my wife Maya and I celebrated Easter at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, California. It was a lovely, moving choral Eucharist service, beginning with a processional hymn familiar to Latter-day Saints, “From All Who Dwell Below the Skies.” Next was the usual Episcopal Eucharistic celebration: the “Collect of the Day” (a liturgical prayer), readings from the Psalms and the Gospels, the sermon, and the Affirmation of Faith. Then we engaged in the Prayers of the People and the Peace. I am always touched by this part of the service, not only because the members of the congregation greet one another by shaking hands and saying, “The peace of Christ” or “Peace be with you,” but because this expression of bonding with other believers prepares one to make a personal bond with the Prince of Peace through the emblems of the sacrament.1
At this point in the service—before the administration of Communion—the congregants were invited either to stay in the chapel for a continuing Easter service or to join another minister and walk the labyrinth in the church courtyard. Maya and I joined those walking the labyrinth. We were led there by Rev. Mark Asman, who was retiring from his ministry at Trinity the following week. Rev. Asman oriented us to what he called “the Mystery of the labyrinth” and invited us to enter and “walk in love as Christ walks with us.”
Labyrinths are either unicursal (single path) or multicursal (multiple paths). The one we were walking was multicursal, providing us the opportunity to encounter other Christians walking in a counter direction as we wound our way to the center of the labyrinth and out the other side. Meditating, I concentrated on the faces of the disciples I passed. They had a variety of expressions and demeanors, from quietude to joy to sorrow. Some fellow pilgrims made eye contact and some did not. Some—undoubtedly members of the congregation who had walked the labyrinth often—seemed wrapped in a deep meditative state. One woman, a tall brunette, seemed completely lost in reverie. The face of an older woman, who seemed almost to glide along the path, was the epitome of peacefulness. A middle-aged man, wending his way behind a woman I took to be his wife, walked as if carrying a dolorous burden. An Asian man, Korean I guessed, had a beatific smile on his face each time I encountered him. A teenage girl with blonde, short-cropped hair seemed not walking so much as distractedly shuffling.
All of us are to some extent lost in labyrinths—the labyrinth of the world with all of its unpredictable, at times even insane, twists and turns; the labyrinths of our extended families, sometimes inhabited by ancestors; the labyrinths of our churches and congregations, which at times cause us to get lost and at others to get found; and the labyrinths of our daily lives.
Greek mythology proposes ways of escaping labyrinths. We remember that, after slaying the Minotaur, in order to unwind his way back out of the labyrinth, Theseus followed a ball of golden thread given to him by Princess Ariadne, with whom he had fallen in love. Daedalus, who had built the labyrinth for King Minos of Crete but was later imprisoned in it, himself devised to escape the labyrinth with his son Icarus by fashioning wings out of feathers and dogwood branches, fastening them to their bodies with wax. But, as the story goes, Icarus flew too high and the sun melted the wax, sending him plummeting to his death. The first story emphasizes the power of love and the second the danger of pride.
In Christian iconography, the dogwood tree is a symbol of the crucifixion and resurrection. As Elaine Jordan explains,
At the time of Our Lord’s Crucifixion, the dogwood used to have the size of the oak and other forest trees. Because the wood was so firm and strong—and there were few trees in the Middle East that were very large—it was chosen to be the wood for the crosses used in crucifixions of criminals. Thus, the wood of the cross that would bear Our Lord and Savior was made from the dogwood tree. To be used thus for such a cruel purpose, however, greatly distressed the tree. Sensing this, the crucified Christ said to it: “Because of your compassion and pity for My suffering, never again shall the dogwood tree grow large enough to be used as a cross. Henceforth, you shall be slender and bent and twisted and your blossoms shall be in the form of a cross. On the outer edge of each petal there will be nail prints, and the center of the flower will resemble the cruel crown of thorns placed on My head, with bright red clusters once again recalling the blood I shed. Thus, all who see this will remember Me.”2
Sometimes—like Icarus—we, too, try to rise out of the labyrinth of mortality on our own. Easter reminds us that ultimately we rise with and through Christ. But how do we find him?
At a certain point in the labyrinth, I found myself looking intentionally at the faces of those I encountered as if they were Christ’s, seeing each face as his—or rather, seeing him in each face. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes that “Christ plays in ten thousand paces / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s [and women’s] faces.”3 That’s how I saw him that day as I wended my way in to and out of the labyrinth. In doing so, I felt my heart expand—with love for these strangers and love for him whose glorious rising we were celebrating that day. Encountering Christ embodied in others on Easter Sunday, I thought of the following poem by Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022):
We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).
I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? — Then
open your heart to Him
and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ’s body
where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,
and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.4
After walking the labyrinth at Trinity that Easter morning, we all returned to the chapel to join the others in preparing for Communion, which followed the Lord’s Prayer.
Taking the wafer in my hands, dipping it in the Communion wine, and putting it in my mouth, I thought of the faces I had seen in the labyrinth and I thought of the Lord in Gethsemane and on Calvary. During that last, fateful week, he courageously entered the labyrinth of Jerusalem (with all of its religious upheaval and political intrigue and turmoil). In the Garden and on the Cross, he slew the Minotaur of sin and death. And on Easter Sunday, he ascended triumphantly to the heavens on wings of glory.
NOTES
1. While some Latter-day Saints are uncomfortable taking the sacrament in other traditions, I never have been, because these symbols—no matter who uses them out of devotion to the Savior—are as meaningful as we choose to make them. Any sentiment about their being administered by a “false priesthood” would, I am confident, be highly offensive to the Lord.
2. “The Legend of the Dogwood,” Tradition in Action, http://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/h034rpLegendDogwood.htm (accessed 28 January 2025).
3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44389 (accessed 28 January 2025).
4. Symeon the New Theologian, “We Awaken in Christ’s Body,” The Enlightened Heart, edited by Stephen Mitchell (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 38.