labyrinths vs. mazes

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As I blogged elsewhere a couple of days ago, I’ve recently purchased the most recent (and maybe last?) album from the folk rock Québécois band Les cowboys fringants, whose music I’ve been listening to since 2011. Their lead singer, Karl Tremblay, passed away far too young from cancer last November, which made this album a bit of a surprise, but Tremblay had managed to contribute to some of the songs before his death, and the rest of the band managed to put the rest of the album together in their grief.

I don’t know if Pub royal is my favorite of their albums, but some of the songs on it are definitely now among my favorite of their songs. In La fin du show (The End of the Show) Tremblay sings lyrics that call attention to his then-inevitable death. He doesn’t have songwriting credit on the track, but I imagine that he must have helped, and I’d love to hear the story of that song’s composition. The way that Tremblay he faces down his inevitable end (especially given the song’s insistence that there’s nothing on the other side) is impressive and moving.

Tremblay doesn’t appear on Merci ben (Thanks So Much), the second to last song on the album, but the band’s remaining vocalists who perform it thank their audience and fans for everything that they’ve experienced over the past two-plus decades. They sing about the great things that they’ve experienced as a band, but they sound just as grateful for the weirdos in the audience, the crappy sound systems, the spaghetti-scented cafeterias, and all of the other low points of their time together.

There are some other songs I like on the album, but these are the two that have touched me the most. As I noted in my other post, this album happened to come out the same week that my colleague and friend Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye passed away—also to cancer and also at too young of an age. That confluence has made this an existentially tricky week! And yet, it’s also been productive for getting me to think about how I want to live my life.

With context out of the way, let’s get to the title of this post. One of my favorite spiritual practices is walking a labyrinth, like this one at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco:

Labyrinth on floor of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco by Marlith is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

I’ve never been to Grace Cathedral, but in 2023, I got to walk two labyrinths in a pretty short timespan. While attending Community of Christ’s 2023 World Conference, I skipped one event on my last day to walk the labyrinth at the Independence Temple. A couple of months later, I arrived at our local church campground to see that someone had mowed a labyrinth into an area just above the cabins, and I took some time to walk that labyrinth, too.

While walking both labyrinths, I spent some time thinking about the difference between a labyrinth (at least as it is understood in terms of spiritual practice) and a maze. A maze gives you lots of choices, and it’s on you to make the right choices and achieve victory. A labyrinth gives you no choices but to follow the single path, and it’s on you to make the most of following that path, even though you don’t have a lot of control over it.

I prefer mazes, frankly. I like feeling like I have control over my life, and for most of my life, I’ve felt a great desire to make some kind of impact on the world—to make some right choices and achieve some kind of victory. Yet, I’m starting to see the value in making the most of a labyrinth. For all the choices that I do have in my life, there are so many more things that are out of my control. The point of a labyrinth in terms of spiritual practice is to practice being mindful and present—to let go of thinking and choosing for a bit and just to appreciate where one is. I’m not particularly good at being mindful or being present, but I can see more and more that choosing to appreciate where I am in my life (rather than striving to make my life into something worthy or grand) is key to my mental and spiritual health.

Karl Tremblay and Melissa Inouye have different feelings about the inevitable. For Tremblay, there is no god and no afterlife waiting for him—just cancer that came at him “like an 18-wheeler” and a defiant report on a good life lived before being “swallowed up by the universe.” Life is life, death’s going to come when it’s going to come, and you need to make the most of it. Melissa’s views are different, in that there’s a loving god somewhere out there who will one day, somehow, make sense of this all. God is in control, even if God doesn’t take away the devastating cancers and the too-early deaths.

I’m somewhere between Tremblay and Melissa on this issue, but that’s fitting for a post about labyrinths: Like many of the spiritual practices I’ve learned in the past few years, I first learned about labyrinth walking from a secular mental health professional, and I find just as much value in it that way. However I feel on a particular day, I think thinking about life like a labyrinth might be healthy for me. Its end is already traced out for me, whether by a loving God or an indifferent universe, and for all the important choices that are before me, maybe the best thing I can do is make the most of the path that I’m on rather than try to turn this into a maze where I have more control over what’s going on.

At the risk of sounding crass, I hope I live longer than Karl Tremblay did; frankly, my admiration for his defiant final performances doesn’t outweigh the existential despair lodged deep within my mind and soul. Yet, whenever my end comes, I hope I’ll be able to accept it like he seems to in La fin du show. Along the way, I hope I can say Merci ben to everything that comes along the way. I want to treat my life as a labyrinth—worrying less about making sure it follows a specific path and that I do it the right way and spending more time making the most of the only path that is available to me in the moment.

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