Anonymous woman grooms shaggy labyrinth
There’s a woman at the center of this story, though her name is not known to me.
What I do know is that she often strolls the outdoor labyrinth at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in River Hills. It’s a winding grassy walkway used by people in these hectic times to meditate or pray or just get lost in thought.
Over the years, she noticed that the paving bricks separating the green paths were becoming obscured by unruly grass. No one else was getting around to this maintenance, so the woman decided she would, as they say, be the change she wished to see.
Recently, she called the church rector, the Rev. Geoffrey Ward. He has led the congregation since February and had never met or spoken to her before.
She told him she had been using the labyrinth for 17 years, often riding there on her bicycle. She is not a member of St. Christopher’s and has no interest in joining. She pursues her spirituality outside the church walls.
She offered to edge the entire labyrinth, which measures out to 896 feet, along both sides of the brick strips. Ward’s answer to her was yes, thank you, and he offered to rent a power edger. Concerned this could damage the bricks, she said she preferred to do it manually.
“She took this machete-looking knife and she literally just went around and edged, edged, edged, edged, edged by hand. Over a five-day period of time, she carried off nine big 36-gallon black Hefty sack bags of sod that she trimmed off,” Ward said.
Many of us have trouble keeping up with our own gardens and lawns, but here she was working outside the church for hours. She also built a wooden prayers and reflections box, and she applied weed killer to the grass sprouting up between the bricks. The labyrinth looks like it just came from the barber’s chair.
The woman, a retiree, declined to be interviewed or named in this article. Recognition is not what she seeks, nor did she ask to be paid.
“I did it because it needed to be done. This was meant as a gift,” she told Ward.
Last week, I visited the church, 7845 N. River Road, to walk the tree-ringed labyrinth myself. It’s free and open to anyone who wants to use it.
At first, I did it wrong by walking on the bricks. The intended path is the grass between the bricks, and it leads back and forth and finally to a spot in the center. Unlike a maze, you can’t get lost. I must be a quick meditator because my walk took just four and a half minutes.
The area is marked with a plaque saying the upgraded labyrinth, installed in 2002, was a gift in memory of church member Susan N. Moore. For four years before that, it was merely a mowed path with no brickwork.
Moore died of ovarian cancer in 2000 at age 39.
“She would come by and walk the labyrinth when she was able to. Sometimes she would stop in and say hi, and sometimes she would just come and I’d look out the window and she was out there,” said the Rev. Amy McCreath, the assistant rector at St. Christopher’s at that time.
I don’t know if Moore ever met the woman who did all that edging this summer, but the two could have bonded over their love of the labyrinth, I think.
Ward said the woman easily could have contacted the church and asked someone else to trim the labyrinth. Instead, she found a way to give back.
“Which is a lot of what the labyrinth is,” he said. “It’s a spiritual journey into the center and then coming out. She actually personified that in the way of a gift to the people of St. Christopher’s and River Hills.”