Crawling up the Devil's Backbone

I'm sorry I was absent for a couple days. As luck would have it, I was on an extremely blessed and relaxing work trip to southern Illinois. I had enough time between duties to sneak away--caught my first sight of the Mississippi and climbed up a bizarre land formation called the Devil's Backbone. (There's also a big rock they call the Devil's Bake Oven--nice to see some gender-role parity in language for the Evil One. I'm kidding.)

Look what else I got to do:


The labyrinth is a meditative bodily practice of walking a gradual path until you come to the center, then spiraling back out until you resume your place in the real world. Though it's not just for Christians, it can function as a metaphor for drawing closer to Jesus, then moving gradually back to the real world, hopefully with new spiritual insight. In Carbondale, there's a labyrinth painted on the ground, next to a Wendy's and close to one of the main streets. The would-be mystic becomes a public witness to the spiritual life as she moves rather portentously through the geometry of the walk. The cars go by, and people look at you curiously, but isn't that how it always is, trying to live as if God mattered? It almost makes no difference if no one notices that what you're doing is not what's done by everyone.