Walking A Sacred Path
Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Path
by The Rev. Dr. Lauren Artress
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The Great-grandmother's Thread, pg. 15
We long to know ourselves deeply, to know the place in which we can discover the Divine. We long to temper and hone our gifts, to put them in action in the world. Our times hold within them great challenges and great potential.
To walk a sacred path is to discover our inner sacred space: that core of feeling that is waiting to have life breathed back into it through symbols, archetypal forms like the labyrinth, rituals, stories and myths. Understanding the invisible world, the world of patterns and process, opens us up to the movement of the Spirit. Hildegard of Bingen was a twelfth-century mystic, composer, and author of a theology that knitted together nature and spirit, cosmos and soul. She described the Holy Spirit as the Greening Power of God. Just as plants are greened, so we are as well. As we grow up, our spark of life continually shines forth; if we ignore this spark, this greening power, we become thirsty and shriveled. And if we respond to the spark, we flower. Our task is to flower, to come into full blossom before our time comes to an end.
Blossoming, coming to full flower, gives quite a different sense of the Holy than we get in most churches today. "Religion is for those who are scared to death of hell. Spirituality is for those who have been there." A division has emerged in Western culture. We have confused religion with spirituality, the container with the process. Religion is the outward form, the "container," specifically the liturgy and all the acts of worship that teach, praise, and give thanks to God. Spirituality is the inward activity of growth and maturation that happens in each of us.
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Excerpts from Walking A Sacred Path ©1995 by Dr. Lauren Artress used with permission from the author. To purchase a copy of Walking a Sacred Path, visit the non-profit bookstore Sacred Path Books & Art. This link is provided as a service to explorefaith.org visitors and registered users.
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