Labyrinth walk offers time of spiritual exploration

Some months ago, I began a one-person consulting business called Elder Advocates. My mission is to provide direction to adult children and their elders through the maze of elder care.

My logo is a stylized maze, with the path through it clearly identified.

I spent 27 years as a parish pastor and five years in long-term health care. This fairly unusual combination of experiences gives me a special insight into the increasingly complicated maze of tasks and emotional dynamics our elders face as their lives change.

I chose the maze as a symbol because it is usually a series of dead-ends we bump into before we eventually stumble out to the exit. Elder care can feel like that.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. The labyrinth is a unique kind of maze that doesn’t require the retreats and frustrations found in a typical maze.

The labyrinth differs from a maze in that there are no dead-ends. Instead, there is a continuous path leading from the entrance to the center. Then you can turn around and follow the same path – in reverse – back out to the entrance.

For centuries, labyrinths of various kinds and in various places around the world have been created and used for spiritual purposes – symbolic pilgrimages, prayer or internal reflection.

We are almost two weeks into Lent, a traditional time of reflection, so let’s take a brief journey through a labyrinth.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I visited friends in Tucson, Ariz. They belong to a United Methodist Church that has built a large labyrinth on its property. While I did get in a few exquisitely painful rounds of golf on our vacation, I also spent some time meandering through that labyrinth.

The church folks patterned their labyrinth after the classic 13th-century labyrinth created in the Chartres Cathedral near Paris. The pattern consists of 12 circuits that wind their way toward the center.

The path you walk doubles back 28 times – seven times on the left that moves you toward the center, seven times on the right toward the center, seven times on the left toward the outside, and seven times on the right toward the outside.

Some people call this “sacred geometry.” It is mathematically designed, but with a spiritual rhythm of movement. Your move toward your interior life alternates with re-engagement in the world; then you move inward again before a second journey toward the outside world.

You end up in the middle of the labyrinth, where you can stay as long as you choose, then retrace your steps and the sacred geometry design to return to your place in the world. On your return, your spirit is hopefully refreshed and/or challenged in a way you didn’t expect as you first entered the labyrinth.

On my second journey through the labyrinth at the Tucson church, I was barely into the first quadrant when I saw something on the rock-covered ground. I bent over and picked up a cigarette filter. I carried it in my hand the rest of the way.

As I walked, one of the things I wondered about was the person who dropped that cigarette filter on the labyrinth’s floor. A man or a woman? What story did this person have that brought her/him into the labyrinth? What was the person hoping to find on that journey? Was she/he successful?

I spent time on my own inner journey, of course. I seemed to be doubling back a great deal, wondering how I was going to get to the center. In that moment, it didn’t seem like I was really getting anywhere.

Then I would look behind me and ahead of me. I was making progress after all.

I was aware of moving both toward the center of the labyrinth and yet also toward the “outside world.” That kind of movement is only one part of the multilayered symbolic journey available to those who walk a labyrinth.

Lent seems to be a great time to invite yourself to enter a labyrinth. You may find a new part of your soul waiting for you.