Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

THE COASTAL FOG lifts to the height of soft bluffs and a man appears on the beach. The tide is low. I watch him hold a specially crafted staff in his right hand that he uses to poke, prod, and drag lines in the sand. He totters along like a modern Rumi, hand scribing an elegant poem on the strand. Perhaps in sand script it says: “Small birds destroyed an army, so you’d know they gained their strength from God.”

For the past six years, Denny Dyke has kept his morning ritual, creating intimately carved, hundred-feet-wide sand labyrinths—sacred circles, holy walkways, salt-soaked mandalas—on the Oregon coast. He draws for an hour, outlining 4,000-year-old designs and adding his own, creating ephemeral art.

I met Denny near Bandon, Ore., at a time I was desperate for spiritual rest. It has been an exhausting year. A year since the demon of white supremacy recaptured the White House. A year of rapacious capitalist thugs masquerading as legislators, callous political buffoonery inciting legislative chaos, greasy fingers tweeting too near the nuclear button, acts of hate rising like sea levels.

Lately, I’ve been clinging to a phrase written by John Chrysostom during the uprisings in Antioch in the 4th century: “The waters have risen and severe storms are upon us, but we do not fear drowning for we stand firmly upon a rock.”

I brought my inner chaos to Denny’s sand labyrinth. A labyrinth is not a maze. There are no blind alleys or cul-de-sacs. It is the opposite of chaotic. Labyrinths are orderly, even though you may not be able to see the end from where you start. A one-way path leads from entrance to goal. Without struggle, in stately movement with stranger-companions, one walks prayerfully along the way, spiraling around the previous night’s flotsam of kelp or beer cans and around thousand-year-old sea stacks. Encountering the moveable and the immoveable, the minor problem and the major circumstance.

Labyrinths, when entered as a spiritual exercise, quiet the mind so one can listen.

I’VE FOUND IT hard to listen to God this year. It’s hard to hear with the devil tweeting in your ear. This devil is known by its fruits—it incarcerates, detains, deports, and buries our children and neighbors at an accelerated rate. It “prowls around looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). The greedy muzzle opens: Hear it roar.

Step by step in the sand, I let God reign over my mental mobocracy. Slow, slow. Breathe. Breathe. It was breath that brought creation out of chaos.

Chrysostom preached on the “affair of the statues”—a tax revolt against Roman Emperor Theodosius led by the conquered Antiochenes in which they pulled down statues dedicated to the imperial family, thus desecrating deities. They lived in terror of fire and fury soon to be unleashed by the emperor. Chrysostom reminded the Jesus-followers that power was not found in statues or great architecture from the past, not even in the imperial shock troops. True power was built on the virtues practiced by the people every day: prudence, justice, courage, temperance.

“Let the sea rage,” preached Chrysostom, “it cannot break the rock. Let the waves rise, they cannot sink the boat of Jesus.”

After the thick fog-veils are pulled back and the sun is fully in its temple, the labyrinth, pilgrims, and Denny vanish. Soon enough high tide returns, teething the labyrinth edge, swallowing chunks of Denny’s perfect circumferences. All return to the given day. And a flock of small birds rises over the Pacific.