Bread for the Journey

I was fascinated when introduced to an artist who creates art from nature, knowing it would eventually be whisked away by the elements. I thought about how I would feel. Then I thought about things I’ve held onto in life versus what I’ve experienced. The experience won out.

“We are kept from the experience of Spirit because our inner world is cluttered with past traumas . . . As we begin to clear away this clutter, the energy of divine light and love begins to flow through our being.” – Thomas Keating

When my mind wanders while practicing forms of meditative prayer, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just one more opportunity for me to be transformed by attempting to regain focus and find God again.

Today we walked our hand-created labyrinth for the first time. Several people commented on how many things were happening in their lives, and how peaceful it was to let go of some of this anxious busyness. Walking the winding path helped them brush away thoughts that didn’t seem as important anymore. After walking, they had an opportunity to write or draw reflections in a book. This book will travel to General Assembly next week where hundreds more will add their thoughts. Whenever I experience something good or bad, it helps if I am able to share my thoughts with someone. If a person I trust is not available, I know I can always call on God. People used to tell me this all the time when I was younger, and I didn’t fully understand how true this is. God is always willing to listen. When my orientation is fixed in the center, where God dwells, I live my life with meaning. And one by one we can help each other heal and find inner peace.

I realized it would be a much longer night if I decorated complete labyrinths on all the cookies, so I switched to a larger decorating tip and streamlined the design. These are in celebration of our first labyrinth walk at Ladue Chapel. The simpler cookie design is actually the center of a completed classical labyrinth. Ask me and I’ll show you how to draw one. Doodling in this way, like moving around the path of a labyrinth, can help to free our minds and allow space for God.

Presbyterian theologian, Craig Dykstra, observed, “You can also ‘know’ things while meditatively walking the circuitous path of a canvas labyrinth which you can’t know sitting still. The very action of walking serves to still our thoughts, allowing space for God amid the usually jam-packed confines of our minds. The unpredictability of the labyrinth’s twists and turns helps us to relinquish our need to feel ‘in control’ and to acknowledge our dependence upon God. The certainty of reaching the center inspires us to trust in God’s providence. All of these things can serve to draw us into a genuine experience of prayer – of allowing our hearts to lay ‘open before God.’”

When I first walked the path of an indoor labyrinth, I felt pretty silly. “How? How, could this be prayerful?” I thought. I don’t remember much, except I do remember not giving up in its midst. As I slowly walked around the hairpin turns, something inside of me was unwinding and allowing me to be more receptive. To what? I didn’t know at the time. But looking back, I can say with conviction that this form of walking meditation was and has been an important tool in my prayer life and faith transformation.

Labyrinths are found in all cultures and all religions. Many Gothic cathedrals housed labyrinths in medieval times. The Ladue Chapel labyrinth is an eight-circuit version of the Christian design in the nave of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres (pictured above) completed in 1220. The labyrinth, with its twists and turns, symbolizes the spiritual journey, a path for pilgrimage. The pilgrim seeks the presence of God. Walking the path offers to us all the possibility of insight, wisdom, transformation and renewal.

The Chartres-like labyrinth at Ladue Chapel is twenty-six feet wide and is made of canvas. Paper templates were ordered from a labyrinth company in Connecticut and the canvas was seamed and hemmed locally. The process of creating the labyrinth was quite extensive. The canvas was stretched taut using bungee cords, tarp clips, and heavy objects such as cinder blocks and stacks of chairs. Members cut out the templates, carefully traced them onto the canvas, taped the lines, and painted the path. Twenty five members from our church and other local churches worked from one hour to as many as thirty four hours, creating this prayerful path in five days.

Walk the labyrinth at your own pace. Give yourself a gift by using your “walk” for meditation, prayer or working through a problem or concern that has been on your mind. I hope to share this experience with you on Sunday anytime between 11:15 am – 2:00 pm. We will be in Fellowship Hall.

As we prepare to walk our labyrinth for the first time this Sunday, I looked back at this photograph of the mound of painters tape removed after painting the canvas. What a mess! It brought back memories of the hundreds of hours spent creating this walkable piece of meditative art. The thing is, this mess of tape is right in the middle, the “goal” of our walk, where we pause and spend time with God. That’s exactly where God resides. In the middle of our mess and pain. In our hearts. God takes our messy lives and creates something beautiful; if we let him. Come walk with us. God is waiting.

As a musician, I have learned to collaborate with other musicians in making music together. This is not a simple thing. When I perform by myself, I have the freedom to express the music in a very personal way. As soon as another musician is added, we work as a team. But this team may not work the way we hope unless we learn to create music “as one.” This teamwork may never happen, just as two people may never become close friends, but when it does happen it can be an amazing experience. It can also be a wonderful thing to listen and watch as others “become one” together with the music. That’s how I feel while watching the two musicians in the following link. What joy they seem to share as they dance and create music together. And most striking for me is how the string bass sings so musically! Thank you to my friend for sharing this beautiful experience.

https://www.facebook.com/patrice.lockhart.3/posts/2157679007579561

In a foreign land for the first time, navigating a non-English speaking country, our son got lost the day he arrived. He wandered the city four times before finding his overnight hostel. His adventures continued the next day when he used his phone to translate a sign that warned of explosives nearby; he turned around. Then later, on a coastal hike (in his words) he “nearly got dive bombed” by hundreds of territorial birds. Although it seemed he was a bit shaken up, I was secretly cheering that…1. I didn’t know about these adventures until after he was safe, and 2. He experienced being lost and found. Only through being lost has my faith grown. And I continue to transform by challenging myself to embrace those uncomfortable times.

The Wanderer learns to look deeply into the face of her aloneness and discover what truly brings her alive and what doesn’t. . . . You discover ease, inspiration, belonging, and wisdom in your own company. . . . When wandering, there is immense value in “finding ourselves lost” because we can find something when we are lost, we can find our selves. . . . Imagine yourself lost in your career or marriage, or in the middle of your life. You have goals, a place you want to be, but you don’t know how to reach that place. Maybe you don’t know exactly what you want, you just have a vague desire for a better place. Although it may not seem like it, you are on the threshold of a great opportunity. Begin to trust that place of not knowing. Surrender to it. You’re lost. There will be grief. A cherished outcome appears to be unobtainable or undefinable. In order to make the shift from being lost to being present, admit to yourself that your goal may never be reached. Though perhaps difficult, doing so will create entirely new possibilities for fulfillment.

Surrendering fully to being lost, you will discover that, in addition to not knowing how to get where you had wanted to go, you are no longer so sure of the ultimate rightness of that goal. By trusting your unknowing, your old standards of progress dissolve and you become eligible to be chosen by new, larger standards, those that come not from your mind or old story or other people, but from the depths of your soul. You become attentive to an utterly new guidance system. . . . This kind of being lost and then found is one form of ego death and rebirth, one form of entering the tomb-womb of the cocoon. . . . In order to live your soul into the world, you must continuously loosen your beliefs about who you are. ~ Richard Rohr

This Sunday we walk our handcrafted labyrinth for the first time. The labyrinth is a single path that facilitates the spiritual wisdom of losing self to find self. It takes you inward and outward as you walk. In this way one embodies their prayer of being in relationship with oneself, others and God. The path is walked slowly, contemplatively as a spiritual exercise of bringing mind, body, heart and soul into harmony with God.

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. – Matthew 16:25

Today was one of those days I was just “not feeling it.” It began when I woke up, thinking of all the things left to do in increasingly shorter periods of time. The upcoming big event, General Assembly, is approaching, and things are finally pulling together. But with any large-scale project, there always seem to be missing pieces that cannot be answered until the action begins. This can be unsettling, however; that’s when faith kicks in. So during morning prayer, the line that jumped out at me, begging to be prayed, was, “Awake, my soul!” Repeating this phrase carried me through the day and continues into tonight. Sometimes my soul needs a bit of a “jumpstart,” and then I’m fine. But, it takes me to realize that’s okay and to then act on this need to refuel. By reawakening my soul, I can then help others find the path to energize theirs.

A high school student once asked if she could take a photograph of my hands for a school assignment. “An unusual request,” I remember thinking as I told her yes. Today, as I listened to Carolbeth True Trio’s amazing celebratory jazz in worship, I could picture Carolbeth’s hands dancing across the keyboard. Then I thought of the hands that cut and served bread for today’s communion and the hands which decorated the Gathering Place with fun, red balloons for our Strawberry Festival. Hands greeted people as they came to worship; hands prepared food for Urban Plunge, and hands painted prayerful art.

Hands helped offer support in many ways today. I saw it happen. So many hands participated in unseen ways, as they do every day. What do these hands speak of? Work? Prayer? Joy? Sorrow? Pain? Serving others? Peace? Love? Readers try to interpret their intricate lines, but only God truly knows the hands and of what they speak.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Your name be praised forever and ever! -from Psalm 139: