I have a love, and it's all that I have, right or wrong, what else can I do?

Chartres did not originally cross my mind as a possibility for this trip, but the moment it was suggested to me, I thought, "Of course." I knew of the cathedral at Chartres, from generally knowing about cathedrals, from reading Power of Myth, from a show I saw, mostly from being obsessed with labyrinths. Upon finding out Chartres was so close and so easily accessible, there was no question. I was going. You could call Chartres the climax of my trip. Which I knew it was going to be. I knew it was going to be significant, I just didn't know in what way. It could've been significant for its non-significance, but any time you have such a leading up to an event (as I'd been having for weeks with this mounting confusion), it's going to be significant, no matter what happens. So Friday morning, I went down to Gare Montparnasse and hopped on a train to Chartres (Lauryn did not accompany me on this particular trip).

Chartres itself is a small town, about an hour outside Paris via train. Charming, adorable, lovely town in its own right, a nice reprieve from how overwhelming Paris can be. Used to tourists and pilgrims, thanks to that cathedral, which Joseph Campbell points out is the tallest building in the town. ("It takes me back to a time when these spiritual principles informed the society. You can tell what's informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that's the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life. ... So when [I] go to Chartres, I'm back in the Middle Ages. I'm back in the world that I was brought up in as a child, the Roman Catholic spiritual-image world, and it is magnificent." --Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth) You reach the cathedral by exiting the train station, looking up to see it rising above everything else, and gravitating towards it.

Inevitably and unfortunately, they're in the process of doing major renovations on the cathedral, and while I was there, the renovations were happening on the west rose window right by the main entrance, so my first steps in were rather unceremonious, with scaffolding and wood. But once inside, I stopped, forgot how to breathe, and immediately started shaking.

There are many things I could say, but the problem that I'm facing in trying to describe Chartres is that all of those things sound like exaggerations. Ah, well, here goes:

Never before have I walked into a building and been empty of all desire except the desire to stay there. I hadn't eaten - I didn't need to. I was freezing - I didn't care. I would give up everything just to stay there and if any of you wanted to see me ever again, you'd have to come visit. I could curl up by a column in that cathedral and stave to death and it would be a beautiful end to my life. I was recently discussing with a friend here how I've realized how much of my happiness in any given place rests on my ability to leave. I'm rarely happy anywhere unless I have the option of leaving. (How very American of me.) Even New York. However, if you plopped me down in this small town in France with this cathedral and told me I could never leave, I would stay perfectly content.

There are, if we're lucky, encounters that reach beyond all boundaries of self. When you meet a piece of art, a place, a person, and instead of, or in addition to, the discovery of that which is new, there is an inevitable, inexplicable feeling of familiarity. Like you've met before. And between you and that other, an existential "we" is instantly created. The lives of the two of you are linked and always have been, you just haven't known that until this moment. Time flips from horizontal to vertical. The simple way to put it is that I walked into Notre Dame de Chartres and felt immediately more at home than anywhere I've ever been. The complex way to put is is that, as I walked around trying to wrap my head around it, the question I was asking was not "What is this place?" or even "What are you?", but rather, "What are we?" The pretentious way to put it is that if you decided to take my soul and make it into a building, it would be Notre Dame de Chartres.

I've been to a lot of churches in my time. Many cathedrals. No place compares. The only place that stands a chance is St. Catherine's Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai (one of my teachers went there last winter and was standing there and apparently thought, "Man, if Colleen was here, she'd never leave.") Hopefully someday I'll get there and see.

There were a good number of people there, but very few compared to, say, Notre Dame de Paris, and generally more respectful (it takes more effort to get to Chartres than Notre Dame, so I didn't experience the mobs of people that I found in Notre Dame the next day). Many pilgrims. Friday is the day of the week they generally uncover the labyrinth, so many people were there for that. Some cathedrals I've been are constantly playing sacred music (for atmosphere, but I'm sure mostly to encourage people to keep their voices down) - Chartres didn't. Chartres didn't need to.

I wandered around for a bit, awestruck, before heading back towards the West portal to join the handful of people waiting for a tour with Malcolm Miller. Another reason I came to Chartres; (fine, I'll go on record and say it) one of the greatest teachers I have ever known told me that Malcolm Miller was the best teacher he's ever known. Gave him the highest recommendation possible, so clearly, I was there. And every word of that recomendation was deserved. Malcolm Miller has been giving tours of that cathedral for as long as Ghana's been a country, and has lectured across the world (though, he told me, never in Africa). He's one of those people who knows so much about his subject that he treats his own knowledge extraordinarily casually. I think you're only able to do that when you know so much that you know what you don't know. (Keeping on our Joseph Campbell theme, Malcolm Miller is the Joseph Campbell of cathedrals, really.) After getting a basic history, we went to various windows and statues, learning how to read them, learning why the Good Samaritan and the creation story were presented together (I had never in my life put those two together), hearing hilarious anecdotes and observations, seeing things I never would have noticed (he said that was his job, to point out things that you probably wouldn't have noticed). And when I went into cathedrals later on in my trip, I noticed that I was looking at them differently because of this tour. The theological and spiritual sides of my brain (which, let's face it, are the majority) were reveling in all of this, and I was left with more questions and curiousities than answers, which, in my experience, is the sign of a good teacher.

After the tour, most people left for lunch. I was hungry and I guess I needed food but I didn't notice or care. I spent the time in the cathedral, nearly alone, walking the labyrinth.

Walking labyrinths is one of my most deeply treasured spiritual disciplines. I've written about them on this blog before. I first encountered a labyrinth when I was in sixth grade, right around the time when I was dealing with major depression caused by a teacher leaving, which caused major abandonment issues that have come up to bite me again and again since then (even this past school year, though I've learned ways to deal with them). (this was the cause of the "wearing all black for six years" thing.) That labyrinth helped me start to make sense of how to move forward. Since then, a labyrinth has always popped up in my life when I needed it. The next labyrinth I walked was a temporary labyrinth at Montreat the first time I was a conferee there. When I was in high school, they cut a labyrinth into the grass by the chapel at Lake Junaluska, and I would rise at 5:30am to walk (or dance) the labyrinth as the sun rose. For the past two summers, during Worship and Music conferences (aka: the only times I've had a car), I've woken up at 4am to drive out to Lake Junaluska and continue that tradition.

When we speak of labyrinths, in the "spiritual tradition" sense, we're not talking about mazes. We're talking about a path - a very specific path which is the same in every labyrinth you encounter. (Some are longer than others depending on how big it is, but they follow the same pattern.) There is one entrance - you follow the path until you reach the center - you stay in the center - and you leave by the same path. The path of the labyrinth represents the human spiritual path. Sometimes you are closer to the center, sometimes farther away. Sometimes you seem almost lost. Sometimes you turn again and again and again in a short amount of time, sometimes you walk straight on and on. Sometimes it seems like it will never end. And, something I love; the path takes you far away from the center just before it takes you to the center. There's no set "way to walk a labyrinth". It's a personal, physical meditation. The most common form you see is people walking slowly with their heads bowed. One woman who was walking the labyrinth at the same time as me would take one step back for every two steps forward. You could walk the labyrinth on your knees, as used to be done in penitence. You can dance the labyrinth, which was suggested to me by some dancers I'd grown close to that year at Montreat. If you meet other people you can choose to acknowledge each other, or not. It's also perfectly acceptable to pass people on the labyrinth, as it's accepted that everyone goes at their own pace. The center of the labyrinth is a place for prayer, still meditation, whatever you need it to be. Being at the center of the labyrinth is symbolizing being held in the palm of God's hand. Many labyrinths are found in stone, some are found in grass, like at Lake Junaluska, and a modern practice is to have a large cloth labyrinth make its way from church to church (the first labyrinth I came across was briefly installed in my church's gym).

Investigation into labyrinths is probably how I first found out about Chartres - if examples of labyrinths are ever given, the labyrinth at Chartres is always the first one.

This was definitely a moment in my life where I needed a labyrinth. God will provide, indeed.

The specifics of my experience in the labyrinth I'm not going to post here. If you want to know, ask, preferably in person, because I'd use different language to get it across to different people. I spent a lot of time shaking and crying in the center, inevitably, and I'll say that I'd never walked a labyrinth in a space like that before. I'd either walked cloth labyrinths set up in random rooms, or outdoor ones. Never in a cathedral with a high altar in front, surrounded by stone and stained glass, and if you really want to feel like you're in the palm of God's hand... well, that's it, right there.

Here's what I'll say:

I rarely admit this, but for most of my life, I've wanted people to tell me what to do. Not just anyone, I'm picky, but still. I've always wanted someone to emulate, at least. In high school, we gave each other nicknames based on what upperclassmen we were most like. "The next Katy," "The next Emily," "The next Kyle." I was dubbed, "The next Sam," but not really. I got the nickname because we had similarities in intensity and focus, but he was going off to NYU to perform musical theater and I was definitely not, so mostly, people just said, "You're not the next anyone, you're Colleen." Which I know is a compliment, and I know is a good thing, but it doesn't help my secret desire to mold my life on someone else's. (Interesting aside: Sam and I both ended up at PHTS, and now the girl who was called "The next Colleen" is at PHTS. Little did we know that the actual function of these nicknames were to predict college admissions.) We can analyze this little fact of my life, we can talk about fear of failure and fear of blame and self-hatred throughout adolesence and all of that, but whatever. This want has come up again and again and again at various stages of my life in various forms. I'm lucky enough that very few people will actually indulge me and tell me what I should do. They might offer their opinion (which is often quite useful), but generally they'll question me to death to help me make my own decision. And as far as the one-person-to-emulate, God's seen that, and chuckled, and sent me several people who all contradict each other so I can learn different things from each. The most recent version of that prayer has been basically for a guru, a person who I can be the complete disciple of. Here's how the conversation generally goes:

"If you want to be a disciple, be a disciple of Christ."

"... okay, yes, fine, I get it, but you let religious orders exist with masters. Sufis get it! Hafiz had a spiritual master!"

"Indeed."

"So why can't I?!"

"You're not Hafiz."

"But someone in the flesh--"

"Christ IS in the flesh. You have plenty of people in the flesh. There are so many people you've been sent to or vice versa. Find the Christ in them. Learn from the Christ in them to teach the Christ in you."

(this was my entire summer.)

What I've been wanting, embarrassingly, is for God to point to someone, say, I don't know, St. Teresa of Avila (we share a birthday, after all), and say, "Be that." Or to say, "Go, move here, live this way, marry me, wear these clothes, spend your life doing this this and that." Of course, this actually directly contradicts the New Testament when Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples to stop worrying about the future.

The information God does give, though, is desire.

It's not easy to figure out what you want. People think it is, but actually, it's not, we're used to being told what we want or should want by various figures. But if we can cut through all that and actually get to what we want, those are moments of great clarity. I have an enormous desire for God that would be dumb to ignore. It leads me places that are unknown, it leads me places that scare me, it leads me places I never thought I would end up, it leads me places that seem completely random but in the end make sense. Desire has gotten a bad rep in Christianity throughout the years, but it does seem important when our greatest commandment is to love.

And then, the phrase that stopped me in my tracks as I was walking out of the labyrinth was, "See, I am making all things new!"

Of course God can't point to some human and say, "Be like them." God is creating all things new. God is creating new kinds of people, for right now. God is creating new kinds of artists and new kinds of saints--and if you honestly follow your desire, you inevitably become something that has not been seen before, something that you cannot even predict. Everything else, all other people, all other things, all of the past, it's all there for you to learn from, steal from, yes. Integrate the lessons you learn from them into your very being, yes. But through all that, God is creating you, new.

All of this seems very elementary and very obvious, but then, all I really do is restate what's already been said, and there's value there.

I sat in the nave for a while, then wandered through the ambulatory (the aisle behind the choir area). I love ambulatories. They're filled with statues and little chapels and confessionals that you can't see from the rest of the cathedral. They're smaller, closer, the arches have more presence. I think my favorite thing to do in a cathedral is to sit in the nave and stare into those aisles. That's where I stared for a long time at Notre Dame de Paris.

Eventually I left, walked around the outside, warmed myself up a bit, wandered the town. Returned, to wander, to sit, to think, to pray, to marvel.

I met someone there, we didn't exchange names but I know he's Canadian. We were in the same car on the train, and then wandered the same way from the train station to the cathedral. He turned to me and asked if I was heading to the cathedral. Asked if I was walking the labyrinth. And we talked during our walk up about labyrinths, about the cathedral, about religion. When we saw the restoration happening on the west portal, he said, "Everything I want to see is under reconstruction," and I asked if he'd been to the Sainte-Chapelle. He chuckled and nodded. We also ran into each other when I went outside. He's in Europe on a pilgrimage, has been staying in monasteries throughout... but also seeing various European cities since he's already travelling. Said it's rather confusing spending two weeks in a monastery and then going to Paris. I could relate. He left Paris that Sunday to go to Taize, which is some place I am planning on spending a week sometime before I turn 30 (Taize has a lot of support for young people who want to come there). Chartres was the first labyrinth he's ever walked. It was a lovely encounter. I don't know if we'll ever meet again, but I also wouldn't be too surprised if we did.

I'm not sure how I returned to Paris, but I did. Warmed myself up underground for a bit, then went running to Notre Dame. For some reason, I was desperate to get to Notre Dame. I was nearly running along the river, singing John Ness Beck's "Every Valley", until I got to Notre Dame, sat on a bench and stared. Drinking in as much God as my body could hold. Which means, drinking in as much sensation as my body could hold. I stayed there for a very long time.

(This picture taken for my mother. The organ pipes hung off the side like a bat!)