"Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls."  Jeremiah 6:16

Yesterday’s Star Tribune had a lovely article on labyrinths, reporting on a workshop that is being held at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum this week. I was thrilled to see the various forms the labyrinth designer Lisa Gidlow Moriarty has taken in creating these mindful prayer patterns she has built in her yard. They were thoughtful, playful and beautiful.

We have been blessed at this church to have a labyrinth for prayer since 1994. I remember the "risk" we felt we were taking when we introduced it to the community. Yet many of us had experienced the power of this walking meditation and believed it was yet another way for people to experience the Holy. The perception of risk came from those who thought it was "new age" or "not Christian". After careful education we were able to calm their fears as we shared the labryinth’s Christian and world-wide cultural history.  Over the years we been blessed with many important worship experiences that have taken place on our canvas labyrinth which uses the same pattern that exists on the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France.

When walking the labyrinth, you stake a claim that you walk life’s path with God. That path moves in and out and twists and turns as you travel, but there is never a way to be lost, to be disconnected from the Sacred One. This is a very different way to see our walk in life. Most of the messages of our culture are that our life is a puzzle to be solved, a maze to be "figured out", that at each twist and turn there is a trick that will ‘get you’ or leave you behind. Not a very generous or gracious view of life and not a view that, at least from my experience of God, has any truth.

Each day we set out on our daily path. Will it be like the path of the maze….where mental puzzles must be solved to continue, where the construction of the path hopes for our failure? Or will it be like the labyrinth…..walking with God, toward God, surrounded by God, finding rest for our souls?

"All of the larger-than-life questions about our presence here on earth and what gifts we have to offer are spiritual questions. To seek answers to these questions is to seek a sacred path.As we find our meaning and purpose we also realize that some invisible form of guidance has been leading us. We may not be able to recognize this in the moment, but in looking back over our lives we see the footprints of an invisible being that has guided us, challenged us, and carried us through times of crisis."Dr. Lauren Artress