c. 1996 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS (RNS)-Aimee Dominique walked slowly over the footpath in the semi-darkness, eyes down, hand over her heart, lost in thought. Gregorian chant and candlelight filled the room.

Sally Gale walked a similar path a few feet away, to her enormous surprise weeping quietly but not self-consciously.

Sister Adele Lambert, a Catholic nun, walked dreamily, concentrating on the sensations of her fingertips. Two women sat in the center of the walkers, breathing deeply in the lotus position; others ranged along the walls of the parish hall of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church here, writing thoughts in their notebooks.

All were praying, using a rediscovered spiritual tool that feels and sounds New Age, but dates from medieval Christianity.

They were “walking the labyrinth” under the guidance of the Rev. Lauren Artress, an Episcopal priest and psychotherapist from San Francisco who has dedicated herself to spreading the meditation technique around the country.

Nearly every weekend Artress finds herself in a new city showing the world what she calls “the sacred path.”

It is, she believes, a way back to God that Christianity lost 600 years ago.

Walking the labyrinth is a spiritual technique, not unlike centering prayer or the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, she told a workshop of more than 50 people at St. Paul’s.

The labyrinth itself is an archetypal design found far back in ancient cultures. Not a maze or puzzle, the labyrinth has but one path, which leads cunningly to the center, a place of rest and illumination.

Two dozen or so people can walk it simultaneously, following a path so sinewy with switchbacks that a trip in and out from the center covers nearly a third of a mile over a 38-foot canvas spread on the floor.

Walkers sometimes find themselves near each other; sometimes not. They find themselves sometimes near the center-destination, then suddenly distant, then unexpectedly at the end of the journey.

A lot like life, Artress said.

Indeed, the labyrinth is suffused with metaphors for journey.

The pattern Artress uses is modeled exactly on a labyrinth that craftsmen embedded in the floor of the great French cathedral at Chartres at the close of the 12th century.

In its day it served as a metaphorical substitute for medieval pilgrims who could not manage a literal pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And today it is largely forgotten, covered with chairs and ignored by tour guides, she said.

But the psychotherapist in Artress suspects something profound in the design-something that winked out 600 years ago as Christianity moved into the age of Galileo and Newton and the ascendance of rational thought.

“It represents a cosmology quite unrecognizable to the modern mind,” she said. “It’s a place where the boundaries between body, mind and spirit disappear.”

Artress believes that something in the design itself-its “sacred geometry”-bestows on the walker a “calming, quieting, clarifying experience.”

“It calms your monkey mind,” she said.

“It’s a tool of mysticism-not superstition-but a mysticism that helps us come into a direct connection with the ultimate reality,” she said.

“Those masters knew more than we know.”

Much of the language of the labyrinth is the language of the New Age: “energies,” “gestalt,” “patterning,” “finding space.”

But Artress keeps it rooted in Christianity, arguing that its merit is its ability to help people connect with the divine, the better to live Christian truths like love of one’s enemies.

After an all-day session, walkers who paid $40 to be briefed and guided by Artress reported a range of emotional or spiritual experiences-whether surprising grief over the loss of a mother long ago, like Gale’s, or sensations of joy, community, anger and tranquility that may take months to understand, Artress said.

Artress discovered the labyrinth during a 1991 weekend retreat at the home of a psychologist colleague who had one taped to her floor.

Its effect on her was profound, and Artress began to research its past and employ it in San Francisco as part of her work at Grace Episcopal Cathedral to reach people hungry for spirituality, but suspicious of religion and unused to liturgy.

Now she serves as a Johnny Appleseed for labyrinths in city after city. And from Grace Cathedral she runs a non-profit foundation that hopes to see them placed in inner cities, parks, airports-even, or especially, in prisons.

“It is a creative tool,” Artress said. “We bring our souls to it, and it reflects back what we need.”

MJP END NOLAN