Amazing Grace

 

A sentence catches my eye from Margaret Visser’s book The Geometry of Love. She is speaking of the unicursal labyrinths that grace Medieval churches; the kind that have no wrong turns, and only require patience to walk through. “The road symbolizes a human life with all its difficulties and failures, and the common feeling of being lost; the message is that mental agility is not the most important gift for the spiritual life.”

I believe being lost is indeed a common feeling. It is the true essence of what psychiatrists call “depression.” Not sorrow, not anxiety, but a sense of not knowing which way to turn, how to proceed. This is the worst of all feelings.

And I think this is an important message: “mental agility is not the most important gift for the spiritual life.” That is, for life itself. 

I long ago noticed, in my studies of legends and fairy tales, that this message is conveyed not only by unicursal labyrinths. Whenever a tale does involve a maze or labyrinth of the kind with wrong turns and dead ends, the hero does not escape by their own cleverness. Theseus escapes the Minoan labyrinth not through his own quick wit, as Oedipus escapes the Sphinx, but rather anticlimactically because Ariadne gives him a cheat sheet: the thread, and advice to always take the left (or was it right?) turn. In the Grimm tale, Hansel cleverly lays a path of white stones when his parents seem to abandon him and his sister in the forest. But his parents discover the trick, and try again, after preventing him from collecting stones a second time. So, still ingenious, he resorts to dropping breadcrumbs. And this does not work—the birds eat the breadcrumbs, and he and Gretel are truly lost. Having worked it all out brilliantly, it is still of no use. In the end, it is Gretel, not Hansel, who saves the day. 

And so forth, for every example I can find.

There is a consistent message being whispered in our ear. Ultimately, for our direction and our salvation, we must not rely on our own cleverness. We cannot pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. It must be faith, and love.

It must be so: some people are much smarter than others. Yet God made us all, and made us as we are. A good God would not give advantage to the most intelligent, and condemn others simply for stupidity.

As Aquinas said, all his subtle philosophy was, in the end, a sideshow. If we rely on our own intelligence, we are doomed.

The answers are written in our heart.