BY ELAINE KLAASSEN
St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church— on Franklin Avenue in Prospect Park—welcomes parishioners, friends and neighbors to walk the labyrinth in their sanctuary twice a year—during Advent and Lent.
If you’ve never heard of labyrinth prayer or labyrinth meditation you might be confused by what those steeped in the Christian labyrinth tradition have to say about it. After all, Merriam Webster defines a labyrinth as “a place that has many confusing paths or passages; something that is extremely complicated or difficult to understand.”
Scholars of the labyrinth meditation tradition and people I’ve talked to who practice it say the exact opposite. Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality, a ministry of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, states:
“A labyrinth is an ancient circular diagram found in many cultures around the world. In its classical form, this sacred diagram consists of a single concentric circular path with no dead ends. Labyrinths have been found in almost every religious tradition in the past 4 to 5,000 years.
For the past 12 years, St. Francis Cabrini has rented a canvas replica of the Chartres Labyrinth, the most well-known Christian labyrinth, from Wisdom Ways. Found in the central nave of Chartres cathedral, southwest of Paris, the original “was laid in stone pavement during the 12th and 13th centuries. It was used … as a substitute for the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and for penance,” according to Wisdom Ways.
The first time a labyrinth spoke to me was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ 2013-14 “Sacred” exhibit. A replica of the Chartres labyrinth was installed in the Target Wing atrium, and M.J. McGregor, who has spent the past 20 years immersed in labyrinths, presented an introduction. She said the labyrinth is “a pattern with a single path one follows to a center and then back out.” It’s not a maze, puzzle, test or challenge to figure out how to get to the center.
I don’t know if it was her suggestion: “You may reflect on your experience as metaphor for life … ” or something inherent in the act of walking that did it, but I was very aware that the endless turning of the path is exactly like life, where you make progress and then you have setbacks. And you never know how far along you are. You don’t know when the end will come, but you know it will. It gives you a sense of unity with everyone else. Everybody’s born and everybody dies—all 7.3 billion of us. Everyone’s at a different point in their journey. I felt intense compassion for all of us.
As I emptied my mind, I could feel the beginning of time, if there ever was one, and the end of time, if there will ever be one, and all the life forms that have ever lived.
Afterwards, I thought of (or sensed) the center as the end of earthly life, and then as a place of transformation so you could travel to the exit, entering into eternal time, another form of life.
During Advent this past year, I went to St. Frances Cabrini to walk the labyrinth. I took off my boots and walked to the center and back out twice. The sun was setting as I listened to the ethereal Gregorian chant-like vocal music ringing out from the CD player, lit a candle and wrote in the journal. It was again a near-mystical experience. My heart and mind were completely open. I think there’s power in the beauty of the pattern itself. They call it “sacred geometry.”
What Jill Kimberly Hartwell Geoffrion writes— “Labyrinths connect people with God. the Chartres labyrinth was mathematically and theologically designed to communicate that God can be known and experienced”—could be true, especially if you expand your definition of God.
At the MIA I only walked for about FIVE minutes. But ever since, those five minutes have loomed large in my memory as a profound pilgrimage. And I have to wonder if my experience had something to do with “sacred geometry.”
Everyone who walks the labyrinth has their own unique experience. For example, a friend of mine says he also has experienced the divine of the labyrinth, but more in the sense of the divine feminine. He sees the labyrinth as the womb and the center as the egg.
Chris Kosowski, the liturgist at St. Frances Cabrini, and fellow parishioner Dave Schultz talked about labyrinth meditation as a way of connecting with other people.
For Dave, walking the labyrinth is about visualizing other people in other places, perhaps walking the labyrinth, like himself, perhaps grounded in labyrinth tradition, perhaps not. “We’re all on the same journey,” he said. Being connected to others is expansive and “extends the realm of the self so that self is not so small and into itself.”
For each person walking the labyrinth, all journeys can vary from one time to the next. Dave said he and his wife always walk together except that once he walked alone and found it very difficult.
Chris recalled using labyrinth meditation to connect with a dear friend whose granddaughter had died suddenly. The two women arranged to walk labyrinths in separate locations at the same time, Chris at St. Frances and her friend at a retreat center, both thinking about the granddaughter. Chris carried her photo. “It connected us across the miles at a time of deep grief,” she said.
Labyrinths are not only meditative. They can also be fun as they bring people together. Dave and his wife, Mary, were walking the labyrinth at Chartres, in France, with several women and some children watching them. He recounted, “After we started, a child began following what we did and then a few of the women joined in. The child rushed her way through it but definitely had fun turning and twisting. The women enjoyed watching her.”
It’s a prayer of the body, says Chris. It’s physical and involves the senses. Every year the children at St. Frances Cabrini love walking the labyrinth, she says.
The congregation at St. Frances is talking about building a permanent labyrinth outside, behind the church, in the pattern of the Chartres labyrinth. The idea is growing. There are questions about the size, how to incorporate the trees and how flat or hilly to have the surface, but a committee has been formed, and funding is available from an endowment in honor of Sally Jernberg (1932-2004), sometimes referred to as the “aesthetic conscience of the parish.”
If you would like to find a labyrinth in the meantime, there are many in the Twin Cities, both religious and secular. Some are replicas of the Chartres pattern but many are designed by contemporary labyrinth artists. Go to www.labyrinthlocator.org.
Experience the labyrinth in Lent on Wednesday, March 2, from 12 to 9 p.m. and on Thursday, March 3, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church, 1500 Franklin Ave. S.E.
