Would George Washington or Robert E. Lee have walked the
labyrinth? This potentially New Age tool is now available at
Christ Episcopal Church in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, which
both generals once soberly attended.
Almost maze like, a labyrinth is a circle with a winding path
within it, leading to its center. Liberal churches frequently
host a labyrinth, typically a large canvass sheet thrown on the
social hall floor, so that spiritual seekers can meditatively
walk it on a path of self-exploration.
Christ Church Old Town now regularly hosts a labyrinth on
Saturday mornings, with passers-by invited by a large sign
fronting George Washington Parkway. The 230-year-old sanctuary
majestically bestrides a leafy block in the center of what used
to be a seaport town, but which is now a posh and historic
bedroom community for Washington commuters. The churchyard
includes the graves of Confederate soldiers, and a few
Revolutionary War ones. Recent head stones mark the graves of
Kennedy-Johnson era U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler and his
wife, signifying that Christ Church remains socially and
politically prestigious.
Inside the sanctuary, George Washington’s original pew box
remains. Across the aisle is Robert E. Lee’s pew. He was baptized
as an adult in the church, which is a few blocks from his boyhood
home. Both soldiers were admired for their piety but, as Virginia
gentlemen, reticent to share details of their faith. Picturing
either one popping by the social hall on Saturday morning to
slowly walk around a canvass labyrinth is hard.
On a recent Saturday morning, the labyrinth at Christ Church is
empty, though three women in upper middle age circle round it,
reading the explanatory literature. “I don’t do visualization,”
one comments to the others, as she evidently pondered what is
expected of labyrinth walkers.
Often touted as an “ancient” Christian rite that allowed Medieval
pilgrims symbolically to sojourn to the Holy Land without having
actually to go, the modern labyrinth movement actually seems to
have started mostly in 1990s era San Francisco. Its chief
popularizer was Episcopal priest and psychotherapist Lauren
Artress of Grace Cathedral, who wrote Walking a Sacred Path:
Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Practice in 1995.
She recalled walking her first labyrinth at a 1991 “Mystery
School” seminar with psychologist and mystic/channeler Jean
Houston, who later famously assisted then First Lady Hillary
Clinton in trying to summon the spirit of Eleanor
Roosevelt.
Artress was particularly captivated by the labyrinth in the floor
of Chartres Cathedral in France. She described her epiphany when
she surreptitiously cleared chairs off the floor design and began
to walk it in a meditative state. The popularity of Artress’s
movement later motivated other labyrinth seekers routinely to
perform their own ritual in the cathedral. Initially, cathedral
officials erected a sign warning that the labyrinth “cannot be a
magical place where man pulls hidden forces from the Earth. That
would be (were one to do so) a perversion of the
builders/creators. For in doing so, one would substitute man in
place of God.” But confronted by increasing numbers of American
tourists, the poor priests struggling to upkeep an 800-year-old
cathedral, eventually embraced the fad, though they do not claim
labyrinth walking is “ancient.”
The labyrinth as a design is ancient, often associated in Greek
mythology with the legendary palace at Knossos of King Minos of
Crete, where the Minotaur, who was half beast and half man,
roamed. In the ancient Roman-Greco world, labyrinth mosaics, with
the legendary bull-man at its center, often appeared on villa
floors. The originally pagan symbol eventually surfaced in the
architecture of Medieval Christianity. But even Artress has
admitted there are “no known records of anyone walking the
labyrinth” in Medieval churches and “no Christian writers or
artists who directly refer to the labyrinth as a spiritual tool”
in early or medieval history. She has speculated that labyrinths
possibly were a “sacred tool that no one was allowed to talk
about.”
Artress herself is no fan of orthodox Christianity,
pantheistically honoring “the Source,” “the Sacred,” and “the God
within,” which has been “destroyed through centuries of
patriarchal domination, through fears of creativity and of the
traits associated with the feminine.” Artress prefers this
“Source” to the more traditionally transcendent God “out there”
who “keeps track of whether we follow the rules.”
Not surprisingly, critics complain that labyrinths are more a New
Age tool than a Christian rite. The explanatory sheets at the
Christ Church Old Town labyrinth do little to allay that
criticism. One fact sheet promises that “psycho-spiritual healing
does happen on the labyrinth” and admonishes that “those
practicing ‘new age’ spirituality are usually very sincere
spiritual seekers. Try not to be judgmental.” The labyrinth
“symbolizes the journey to the center of self,” is “not doctrinal
or dogmatic,” and the “only dogma you will meet in the labyrinth
is your own.”
New Age or not, labyrinths mostly just seem a little silly, at
least for adults, who are expected slowly to perambulate across a
canvass matt with a straight face. An instruction sheet at Christ
Church suggests: “Walk alone and with a crowd. Notice the sky.
Listen to the sounds. Most of all pay attention to your
experience.”
The stately symbols of more traditional faith that litter the
churchyard and animate the sanctuary of Christ Church seem to
offer more mature spiritual uplift than the canvass labyrinth
that occasionally appears on the social hall floor.
