Inside the Labyrinth

I hope you’ll indulge me in a second post on Eric Weiner’s Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine. He has a lovely passage in which talks about one of my favorite holy places, the Lascaux cave in France. Weiner’s words made me see the caves in a new light–and they also make an important point about the religious quest:

Inside the vast, multichambered recesses are hundreds of elaborate drawings dating back to the Paleolithic era, at least twenty-five thousand years ago. The drawings depict elaborate hunting rituals, leaping bulls, droves of trotting ponies, a shaman dressed in a bird costume. What I find most fascinating, though, is not the sophistication of these depictions but where these ancient humans chose to draw them:  in the most remote corners of the labyrinths. The artists had to navigate blind passages and sudden, perilous drops in order to reach these places, sometimes more than half a mile in depth. Why did they choose these locations when it would have been so much easier, and safer, to create their art near the entrance to the caves?

Good religion makes demands on us. It is supposed to be hard. Good religion pushes, as well as pulls, and in so doing tackles head-on [Abraham Joshua] Heschel’s urgent question: “How does a man lift his eyes to see a little higher than himself?”