Exploring the Labyrinth_ A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth - Melissa Gayle West [12]
Walking by candlelight in the church with the three of them—a young girl on the threshold of womanhood, her mother in the full flower of her maturity, myself in the beginning of perimenopause, and Peter entering elderhood—I wept for the poignant passage of time. Here we all are, I thought as I walked, moving through our lives together. I brushed Peter’s hand when we passed on neighboring circuits, overwhelmed at the unbelievable preciousness of relationships in the face of our own mortality.
When walking the labyrinth to deepen relationships, the “other” need not even be present physically. Renee Gibbons, a writer and performer of a one-woman show on breast cancer, experienced the healing of a long-standing painful relationship with her sister who lived a continent away. One morning Renee “happened” upon the labyrinth in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and, knowing nothing about the labyrinth, decided to walk it.
When Renee, a self-styled “militant atheist” since age thirteen, reached the center she heard a voice say “Send an angel to your sister Fiona.” Renee was deeply angry at Fiona and hadn’t talked to her in several years. Unsettled by the communication, Renee stopped in the cathedral gift shop to ask for directions to the bathroom.
“When I went in,” Renee remembers, “my eyes went straight to this book—it just popped out at me. I opened it up at random, to a big picture of an angel. I read the frontispiece to the book and it explained that these were illustrations from Morse melodies. These melodies were songs we had sung as a family growing up in Ireland. I was hooked; there was real power in what happened in the labyrinth and now this. I bought the book. I thought, how am I going to send this to my sister? I don’t want to endorse her mistreatment of me. But I thought, I’m obviously supposed to send it to her. I just wrote inside, ‘Ever your sister,’ and mailed it to her. I was so relieved.
“A lot of the bitterness and bad feelings I had toward her just dissipated with the labyrinth walk and the sending of the book. It was a huge relief, and a huge healing of a very old wound. We are now back in relationship, something I didn’t think was ever going to happen.”
WALKING INTO COMMUNITY
Walking the labyrinth doesn’t just deepen intimacy with family and friends, however. It can be a powerful catalyst for opening to others we know little or not at all. I use the labyrinths in as many workshops as I can. Walking the labyrinth can build community quickly even in a group of strangers, cutting through the resistances to intimacy we all carry through the opening of the heart on a shared journey.
Mary Ellen Johnson recalls the life-changing walk of a woman in one of her labyrinth workshops. “I worked once with an older black lesbian who walked the labyrinth with a lot of people she didn’t know. In the sharing afterward she said, ‘My life has been about hating people who were prejudiced against me. I realized in the labyrinth we’re all on the same path. Maybe I ought to not assume that people will be prejudiced against me and instead focus on the commonalities we share as human beings.’
“I was thinking, that’s big stuff—she has three of the biggies that people can be prejudiced against, and after that walk she realized she could be a catalyst for change and healing rather than be aware of differences and division. It’s so true that once you walk the labyrinth with a group of people they can never be strangers to you again; there is something about walking with others that lets you see them as real people, without all the projections we lay upon them.”
I, too, had a life-changing walk where I learned how labels hinder community. I once attended a weekend workshop that the Reverend Dr. Lauren Artress, whose groundbreaking work