Third Sunday After Pentecost

The Courtyard and the Ark

In church this Sunday, we heard the story of Noah's ark, and then Jesus' parable of two house-builders: the one who built on rock, and the one who built on sand, and which house stood after the big storm. All during the readings and Elizabeth's sermon, I was transported back to the process of the building of our courtyard labyrinth.

First off, check out the clear and explicit description of the ark that God gave to Noah: “Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks.”

Wow. I don’t remember getting such clear instructions on the design of the courtyard. Or, at least, not all in one gulp like that. It took a while to work things out. We didn’t all see it the same way from the beginning.

A number of parishioners wanted the area filled with a grass lawn for children to play on—a perfectly reasonable desire. (I don’t think any of us anticipated just how much fun children would have playing in the paths of the labyrinth.)

Others were concerned that a thirty-foot labyrinth—the smallest walkable size, really, for the 11-circuit Chartres design—was simply too big for the area, and would look crowded and crammed in that space. I took those concerns seriously, because I myself had a hard time picturing the finished courtyard before it was there. I spent hours just sitting on the parish hall steps, looking at the area, struggling to form a picture in my mind's eye of how the space would look and feel with the courtyard in place.

In the end I just had to have faith that it would work, resting that faith on two rocks. First, other people could see it, and I had confidence in their vision. Second, from my experience with other labyrinths, I had a great deal of faith in the beauty and unifying force of the 11-circuit Chartres design. Once that pattern was laid down, I knew it would dominate the space. Finally, I just had to let go and trust that the labyrinth itself would pull everything else together.

As it turned out, I was flabbergasted at the beauty of the courtyard when it was finally finished.

We planned and built St. Paul’s Courtyard of All Souls during a time of great internal strife in the parish. To paraphrase a few lines from this Sunday's psalm, the waters of our community raged and foamed, and the mountains trembled. For me, the process of making something beautiful and useful for ourselves and generations to come turned out to be a way of weathering the storm.

The courtyard project was not the only ark to carry folks through those troubled times. Others also launched their boats, big and small, across the stormy seas. That time and place was more like Dunkirk in 1940, maybe, than Mount Ararat in Biblical times. The courtyard was one of the boats.
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Margaret D. McGee
Author, Sacred Attention: A Spiritual Practice for Finding God in the Moment.SkyLight Paths featured book