Walking A Sacred Path
Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Path
by The Rev. Dr. Lauren Artress
<Prev | Next>
The Great-grandmother's Thread, pg. 17
Karen Armstrong, author of The History of God, tells of her struggle as a nun to find God when she had no direct personal experience:
I wish I would have learned this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear--from eminent monotheists in all three faiths--that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of God for myself. Other rabbis, priests, and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was--in any sense--a reality "out there"; they would have warned me not to expect to experience God as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring.
 The product or the creative imagination, found inside ourselves, not "out there" or above us--this is what people are discovering in the labyrinth. It is a container for the creative imagination to align with our hearts desire; it is a place where we can profoundly, yet playfully, experience our soul's longing and intention.
Over the ages in the monastic traditions a discussion has continued as to whether people need a direct experience or the numinous, Jung's word for an experience with the Sacred, in order to serve God. It is generally thought that we do not need a direct experience of the Holy Spirit to sustain us. An active prayer life and the fruits it produces are thought to be enough to sustain people. Ruth Burroughs, a Carmelite nun, in her book Guidelines to Mystical Prayer makes a distinction between "lights-on" and "lights-off" mysticism.
<Prev | Next>
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.
|
