Walking Labyrinths

It is Holy Week, a week that includes Good Friday and ends with Easter Sunday.
While normally I love tradition and ritual and the comfort of repetition with routine, I am in a state of flux right now. Nothing feels quite right anymore and I am allowing myself some options. This year I do not feel like focusing on remembering the torture, agony, and death associated with the Christian traditions. I see enough of that on the evening news!

Then I remembered the Labyrinth built by a local church, Grace Episcopal, a few years ago. It not only has a beautiful stone walk, but it incorporates a Biblical Garden.  The pastor there tries to include only old plants known during the time of Jesus; some  are  from lands Jesus walked. He has included a fig tree and an olive tree. Right now the garden is full of color and cheer, a testimony to spring, the season of rebirth. This positive scene sounded more soothing to me right now, and I paid a visit there during this Holy Week instead sitting inside a church.

A labyrinth is a walking meditation. While meditation usually means sitting still and experiencing spiritual reflection, a labyrinth reaches for the same state with movement. Built like a maze, a labyrinth isn’t full of tricky corners or dead ends. It is a slow path to the center and back out again. The center is marked by a petal shape with six sides. Hopefully, by the end of this circular walk, one finds a peaceful feeling, a spiritual space, or maybe the answer to some inner question. According to the book Walking a Scared Path by Dr. Lauren Artress, “Through the proportion, placement and position of stone, wood, and mortar—using a complementary system of numbers, angles, and design—the mind can find rest, comfort, and harmony.”

My friend has walked the labyrinth in New Harmony, Indiana. I have seen it and would love to go back to walk it someday. It differs in that its borders are not marked by stone but by neatly trimmed hedges. I do not have a great deal of experience with labyrinths, but I think they bear some investigation and further study.

What about you, have you walked labyrinths?