The Labyrinth – The Journey Within
Rev.
Paul Beckel
First
Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org
Quotes
from Lauren Artress, Walking a Sacred Path :
“...She
noticed that her place in relationship to others changed as she walked. She saw
other walkers from the back and from the side. Some were flowing with a silent
melody of their own. Some were joyful, some solemn. Some remained near her,
others brushed by as they completed their walk. In the human rhythm of the
walk, the woman was able to see that she had unrealistic expectations of her
friends and family. She assumed they saw the world just as she did. And when
they didn’t, she felt betrayed and abandoned. She saw for the first time that
everyone was on the same path, but at a different place in their own journey
through life.”
“In
the labyrinth our life patterns become clear. One man had a very uncomfortable
walk through the labyrinth during a workshop. He did not feel free to pass his
friend, a serious Buddhist meditator who walked the labyrinth matching one
breath to one step. Staying behind her, he disregarded his own pace, his own
needs. He found himself getting depressed on the labyrinth. Later, he realized
what he had done. He also recognized that subjugating his own needs to follow
someone he perceived as more knowledgeable, or as having more authority, had
been a pattern in his life.
...If
we are impatient or unassertive in life, we will most likely begin that way in
the labyrinth. If we allow ourselves to evolve with the meditative process...
we can begin to experiment with new behavior. We can find new ways of being
that our souls longed for us to express.”
The
labyrinth will be available November 13, 14 & 15 from 12-2 and 6-8 pm.
Please
let us know if you’d like us to make the labyrinth available at other times or
places.
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Give yourself ample time (15-30 minutes)
to complete the walking meditation.
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Please help to maintain a quiet
atmosphere.
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Please remove your shoes unless you need
them for health reasons.
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Allow about 15 seconds before following
someone into the labyrinth.
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There are no wrong turns on the
labyrinth. Just follow the path. When you get to the center, take time, if you
wish, for further meditation/prayer before returning.
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If you wish to stop at any point, feel
free to sit on a chair or pillow along the edge of the labyrinth.
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At times you will need to negotiate
passing of others going in either direction.
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Afterwards, feel free to write or draw
with the materials provided...for yourself, or in our community journal.
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As you walk, name what it is you are
seeking. But also be open to whatever may arise.
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Try walking with another person to help
you define your relationship... with your family, partner, work group, team,
committee etc.
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Share an invitation to the labyrinth with a friend ™
“You must have a room or a certain hour of the
day or so, where you do not know who your friends are, you don’t know what you
owe anybody or what they owe you—but a place where you can simply experience
and bring forth what you are and what you might be... At first, you may find
nothing’s happening ... but if you have a sacred place and use it...something
will happen.” Joseph Campbell
“Many tears have been shed on the labyrinth.
At a Woman’s Dream Quest workshop, one woman who came to walk the labyrinth
said to me, “If I start crying, I will never stop.” I encouraged her to let
herself cry. I guessed that this was most likely why she came in the first
place. She had experienced a double mastectomy and a divorce within a year’s
time. Her grief was deep, and her fear was all-encompassing. She cried long and
hard. And afterward she was radiant.” Lauren Artress
MESSAGE
This
coming Thursday evening we’ll be acknowledging the courageous pilgrimages taken
by those seeking religious freedom. I love this tradition which has been
celebrated here for many years on the Thursday before Thanksgiving. This is
more than a meal, it is a participatory ritual, retelling the drama of European
pilgrims in colonial America blended with the stories of Jewish slaves fleeing
Egypt, and weaving in all of the ongoing
struggles for political, economic, and religious freedom -- faced by pilgrims
in every age and continuing to this day. Do join us for this extended
meditation, this enactment of poetry in community...this wonderful feast of
fellowship, food, and freedom. All are welcome.
==
Thanksgiving...
Gratitude... these can be confusing words. There are other words like this too
(worship...forgiveness...). Because of the way some words have been
traditionally understood, or even because of their standard grammatical usage,
when we hear these words we may hesitate. We so easily get diverted to
analytical conundrums. We stop to think:
what am I grateful FOR... or TO WHOM am I giving thanks? We can get
so twisted up in this mental exercise that we fail to actually notice, feel,
and bask in what can be a truly
marvelous experience.
Gratitude.
/ To whom? For what? Who cares? Sometimes it’s better just to experience it.
==
The
living tradition we share draws from many sources, including direct experience
of transcending mystery and wonder.... Direct experience. / Direct personal
religious experience was one of the key components of the Puritan’s religious
tradition. They believed in this so strongly that they would not even allow
their own children to become members of their congregations until they had had
some kind of personal conversion experience.
Another
key component of the Puritan tradition was congregational governance. That is,
fleeing the church of England, they wanted nothing to do with ecclesiastical
hierarchy. So they insisted that in the New World they would have a more local
source of authority, the congregation itself.
Over
the course of 200 years, from the landing of the Mayflower in 1620, until the
organization of the American Unitarian Association in 1825, these 2 principles
– congregational polity and the importance of personal religious experience –
led to the extinction of the Puritans... and the emergence of religious
liberalism. This was a very gradual
evolution. But it’s not hard to imagine what can happen over the course of 200
years when you give every congregation the authority to govern itself. And it’s
easy to imagine that, over the course of many generations, if you emphasize
personal experience in religion, there is going to be a gradual broadening and
liberalizing effect on theology.
Except
when there isn’t. Some congregations, some individuals, were content to rest
upon their faith -- as revealed in the Bible long ago – and explained by John
Calvin more recently. These churches – the conservatives of their day – shared
a great deal with their liberal counterparts (congregational polity and
emphasis upon personal experience). However, where conservative theology
remained inflexibly based in faith, the liberals added a new ingredient to
religion: reason. Instead of faith they brought doubt to their study of the scriptures. Instead of blind trust,
they brought skepticism. Instead of taking ancient texts at face value, they
turned to modern methods of literary criticism, language study, archeology. The
religious liberals also appreciated the revelations of modern science. Given
this approach, inevitably, they diversified and diversified and diversified. Some
became Unitarians, some decided that religion was irrelevant in the modern
world, and some carried this liberal approach with them into countless other
religious traditions.
I’m
sharing this bit of Unitarian history because I think it’s important for us to
recognize how fundamentally similar we are to those whose religious views may
seem worlds apart. I’m also sharing this history in order to state clearly how
important I believe reason to be in
the development of our Unitarian tradition.
I
wanted to begin that way because now I’m going to criticize the use (or perhaps I should say misuse) of reason in
religion.
Reason
is good. Reason in religion is essential, [I think]. It would be a mistake,
however, to imagine that reason can stand by itself. Reason is a tool that we
use to reflect upon our experience. Direct
experience of the world, direct experience of the divine, experience of one
another, and experience of everything
concrete and mysterious. Experience
is the raw material of religion. Reason is a tool that we use to look at our raw material and try to make some
sense out of it. That’s theology: reflecting on our experience and coming to
some conclusions – perhaps tentative conclusions – about what our experiences
might mean. What’s our life about? What’s our purpose?
Trying
to do theology without personal experience is like trying to define love
without ever having loved. It’s like theorizing about the creation of the
universe without looking at the data. And this is very tempting. It’s very easy
to invest ourselves in theories based on other theories based on other
theories. Speculation based upon hearsay based upon the authority of somebody
else.
Thinking
is good. Reason is indispensable. But the thinking that characterizes the
liberal approach to religion cannot stand without experience.
Notice
I’ve been talking about Unitarians so far, contrasting the Unitarian emphasis
upon reason... to the conservative
emphasis upon faith. The early
Universalists, however, were less concerned with either faith or reason. They
focused instead on experience. And not just a past conversion experience, but
ongoing everyday experience of the everlasting love of God.
So,
almost 200 years later, when the Unitarians and the Universalists finally
merged, a potentially wonderful balance of reason and experience came into
being.
==
By
introducing the labyrinth today, I hope to introduce another tool for personal
religious experience. We have many
such tools: the chairs in which we can sit and breathe. The parks in which we
can gaze out over natural beauty. The sounds of music, the stillness of prayer,
the glow in the eyes of a new parent. So many opportunities to step away from
thinking and planning and interpreting. So many opportunities to just
be...grateful.
If
you are already making use of these other tools, these other opportunities,
hurray. I’ll still encourage you to check out the labyrinth, but follow your
bliss. If, on the other hand, you have not
yet found a spiritual discipline which works for you, open yourself to the
possibility that this form of walking meditation may be the sacred space within
which you might pray without having anyone to pray to ...within which you might
worship without needing anything or anybody to
worship ...within which you might appreciate life’s gifts, or grieve life’s
losses ... where you might release your anxieties, or accept your realities ...
where you might forget the inane, or remember the unspeakably profound....
==
Before
I go further I want to say thank you to those who actually put the labyrinth
together: Marguerite Donnelly, Cindy Owen, Laura Lantzer, Joe Arts, Betty
Karki, Gina Literski, Barb Seegert, and probably some others – acquiring
materials, sewing, painting, drawing, and of course the research and planning and
calculating that went into creating these massive concentric circles....
==
What
is a labyrinth? Or, what is the
difference between a labyrinth and a maze? Clearly we already have a nice 3
dimensional maze in this old building. What is different about a labyrinth is
that there are no wrong turns. A Labyrinth has a single path from the edge to
the center...never crossing over itself. To walk the labyrinth, one simply
walks forward. When you arrive at the center you can stop, sit, kneel, whatever
you wish. Or you may choose to simply turn around and take the path back out
again.
One
difference between a labyrinth and a maze is that with a maze, wherein we can
get lost, or stuck, the goal tends to be to try to get through it -- and get
out -- as quickly as possible. With the labyrinth, I encourage you to enter
knowing that this will take some time. Knowing that there is something for you
to find within...something for you to receive and take with you when you go.
Of
course that is just one possible approach. There have been thousands of
labyrinths in myriad forms throughout history. But there is no definitive
history of where they came from, or why, or what they are supposed to
mean.
Perhaps
the labyrinth is an archetypal image. Something that appears in various forms
in our dreams and throughout human history simply because we are wired to
resonate with this shape or this pattern.
There
is a large labyrinth laid in a floor in Cyprus, dating from the first century
of the common era. There is a minotaur at its center, a reminder of the ancient
Greek myth. There are labyrinths in medieval cathedrals throughout Europe.
Today labyrinths are used by christians and pagans and those who avoid
religious labels.
If
no two people agree on what the labyrinth means, I take that to be evidence of
how profoundly adaptable it must be to our diverse needs... and how inevitable
it is that human beings will seek meaning in life by adapting and recreating
such tools and rituals.
The
labyrinth can be a metaphor for the circle of life, the dance of life, the game
of life. It can be a metaphor for death
and rebirth. But more than the canvass or the painted lines, the labyrinth is
an experience, and that experience contains countless
metaphors for courage, navigation, mystery, detachment, leaving a trail of
crumbs... leaving behind: our grief,
our fear, our anxiety... leaving behind our resentment, blame, defensiveness,
desire, or addiction (at least for a few minutes).
Walking
the labyrinth is an enactment of our life’s poetry. Even when it does not
engage our reason it can elicit bodily knowledge. Like dance, music, and art
woven into one, the labyrinth experience elicits potent indirect knowledge. If we understand all of this later, great. But
if not, that’s fine too. We don’t need to “understand” every experience in
order to benefit from it.
==
The
labyrinth is for all ages – or at least for anyone willing to show respect for
others on the path. Today and for the most part I would encourage you to see
this as a place for quiet reflection. But I was on an outdoor (turf) labyrinth
a few weeks ago at a beautiful retreat center near Racine overlooking Lake
Michigan. As I was calmly stepping through my meditation, a big dog approached
and, ignoring the lines completely, walked right up to me in the center,
dropped her ball and waited for me to throw it for her. It was a good reminder
that creating sacred space is a choice that we make...and we’re better off not
getting hung up on the choices that other creatures make.
==
Here
are a few forms in which the labyrinth has appeared in human history: [slides]
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St. Quentin Cathedral, France, laid 1495,
bombed but survived in 1917
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San Vitale, Italy, 16th
century
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Copenhagen, outdoors, lines made of
stones
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Essex, England, cut in 17th
century, nearly 1 mile each way
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Switzerland, modern, turf
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Johns Hopkins medical center, paths wide
enough for wheelchairs
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Prairie restoration project in Missouri
(cut into a field of native grasses)
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Manhattan, downtown
==
Throughout
time people have gone on pilgrimages. Muslims to Mecca, Native Americans on
vision quests, Australian aboriginals on walkabout. The rich and the poor always walking the same
paths. In medieval Europe, where few people could read, pilgrimages were an
important opportunity for direct devotional experience – direct engagement with
the divine and one’s whole self.
Today,
many of us have more opportunities to travel than the average 12 century serf.
We have opportunities to experience both the world around us and the world
within. / As we take these journeys, though, do we travel as pilgrims, or as
tourists? / When we are in our homes – some of us in quiet cavernous
conditions, some in constant chaos – do we walk through this as pilgrims, or as
tourists? When we are in our workplaces, our parks, our church...do we come as
pilgrims, or as tourists?
==
The
labyrinth will be available today, Monday, and Tuesday from noon till 2 and 6-8
pm. Actually it’s open pretty much any time, we just had to come up with
something simple to advertise. So if you prefer, come at some off hour when it
will be fairly quiet. Or walk it every day. The same path can be new each time
out.
Bring a friend or give a friend the colored insert
in your order of service with the schedule. We have to roll it up to make room
for the Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, but let Marguerite know if there’s
another time which would work out
better for you.... Or another place
where you think this ministry would be appreciated.
The labyrinth isn’t for everyone. Nothing is. But if
you’re skeptical, consider this: The map is not the territory. The word, “God”
is not God. The canvas is not the experience of the labyrinth. In fact, even
the labyrinth is not the path that
one walks.
Joseph Campbell wrote: “[Those who do not know that
symbols hold hidden meanings are] like diners going into a restaurant and
eating the menu rather than the meal it describes.”
The labyrinth is not for everyone, but still, try
it. One bite won’t kill you. It is one of many ways to explore our internal
space. It is one of many ways for us to grow more comfortable with our internal
space – which in turn will make us better able to appreciate one another as
free people.
SENDING SONG Voice Still and Small #391
BENEDICTION
“It
is my responsibility as a spiritual being to clear out the static from my
center, to realize my inaccuracies of perception, to rid myself of resentments
and insecurities, and to ask for the release of the pebbles in my heart when I
am unforgiving. This will allow me to keep focused on the Divine. It is my
task, my calling, my responsibility as a human being to find compassion for all
forms of life. Through this I am more deeply connected to others and to the web
of creation, the source of the thread that guides us and leads us home.” Lauren Artress