Solvitur ambulando
(It is solved by walking)
St. Augustine
I come to my spiritual path. I think it is not possible to inquire into spirituality without examining my own. It appropriately begins uphill. So much about spirituality is metaphor.
The path leads from my religion, which has all but lost its power to touch me, from hymns and words and rituals that have become no more than nice. It leads from there to glimpses, glimpses,of something profoundly present and infinitely greater, at once incomprehensible and something I have always known.
I have not so much been reintroduced to God over the past few weeks as introduced for the first time. In California. In a church gymnasium in Hamilton, Ont. In books. On the Internet. By a Jesuit T.S. Eliot scholar on a farm near Guelph, Ont.
I am one early morning in San Francisco. I climb the cliff-like street from my hotel to the city's neo-Gothic Grace Cathedral to walk its labyrinth.
Outside the cathedral's central doors, a construction crew's jackhammers define sound, companions to the rumbling, visual sludge of rush-hour traffic.
The circular labyrinth in the cathedral nave is of grey, woven tapestry, 14 metres in diameter. Its path is outlined in black and resembles, at first sight, a diagram of the intestine with a rosetta at its centre. I had expected to be met by Rev. Lauren Artress -- I like the name -- but there has been a misunderstanding about time.
So I remove my shoes and walk the labyrinth, unbriefed, uninformed, alone. Turning, turning, turning inward on the path, concentrating on where I step so that I do not cross the black lines and become lost, concentrating, focusing, the noise of jackhammers and cars sliding unnoticed from my mind until, after about 15 minutes, unexpectedly and in magical silence, I reach the centre.
I stand there, in the rosetta, in another world, thinking an indiscriminate prayer because I do not know what else to do.
I then retrace the path to the perimeter -- a labyrinth, unlike a maze, has only one intricately winding path -- turning, turning, turning outward, becoming aware of being unburdened, peaceful, internally quiet.
The in-and-out walk is half a kilometre.
Canon Artress, a sparkling, assured woman in her early 50s, a former New York psychotherapist, meets me in her cathedral office. She regrets she was not present to walk the labyrinth with me.
She is a labyrinth evangelical.
Since meticulously measuring the medieval labyrinth in France's Chartres cathedral nine years ago and replicating it in San Francisco, she has formed the World Wide Labyrinth Project to promote the construction of labyrinths in religious buildings, hospitals, prisons, parks, universities, airports, pretty much wherever people gather.
Her objective is to help people find spiritual renewal. "My reason for being on this planet is to address the spiritual hunger of our times."
She calls labyrinths "divine imprints . . . universal patterns most likely created in the realm of the collective unconscious, birthed through the human psyche and passed down through the ages."
What it is that they do:
"The labyrinth does not engage our thinking minds. It invites our intuitive, pattern-seeking, symbolic mind to come forth. It presents us with only one, but profound, choice. To enter a labyrinth is to choose to walk a sacred path. . . .
"Our souls hunger for the lost connection to our intuitive nature expressed through myths, dreams, stories and images. We long for a creative, symbolic process that nurtures our spiritual nature, that feeds our soul."
The path of the labyrinth -- having quieted the noisy, chattering mind -- prepares the consciousness for what is called authentic or centring prayer, that experience of deep, refreshing silence in which one is said to rest with God and listen for God.
Canon Artress says most of the experiences that occur in the labyrinth are unexpected, guided by a sacred wisdom, a creative intelligence -- the God-within-self, the immanent God -- that knows more about what we need than do our conscious selves.
We talk briefly about religion and spirituality.
She wrote in her 1995 book, Walking A Sacred Path: "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. . . . Spirituality is the inward activity of growth and maturation that happens in each of us.
"Many spiritual seekers stay in a traditional worship setting briefly but leave the church with disappointment, feeling the lack of spiritual nourishment, . . . stultified by what seems to be a static and dogmatic tradition. The church is unable to help them with the transformation of their own lives."
The United States has about 1,000 labyrinths, 300 of them public. One is just off Wall Street. Another, at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, can be navigated by wheelchair. They exist in English fields, in Scottish woods, in Germany's Black Forest.
Canon Artress has a staff member provide me with a computer printout of the 26 public locations in Canada (Toronto's city government assisted in the creation of one beside the downtown Eaton Centre).
There is a Web site: http://www.gracecom.org/labyrinth/locator .
Outside, on Grace Cathedral's square, I see a second labyrinth in granite and terrazzo. It is being walked by half a dozen elderly women of Chinese descent. I join them, feel again the peace, a calm that stays with me for the walk back to my hotel, the taxi ride to the airport, the two-hour wait for my flight to Toronto.
Yes, there is a secular explanation.
Dr. Herbert Benson, director of Harvard University Medical School's Mind/Body Clinic, says focused walking -- meditation by another name -- reduces anxiety and diminishes negative thoughts. After 20 minutes, the body's "relaxation response" kicks in, slowing the pulse and lowering blood pressure.
That does not explain why archeologists have found 4,000-year-old labyrinth designs, why they are associated with almost every religion, are found across Europe, Asia, in Amerindian spirituality, appear in out-of-time mythologies such as Theseus and the Minotaur, are the ancient symbol for the Divine Mother, the God-within, the Goddess, the Holy in all of Creation.
"The labyrinth was designed by an intelligence we cannot fully understand," Canon Artress says. "But this much I do know. The labyrinth is truly a tool for transformation [of self]. It is a crucible for change, a blueprint for the sacred meeting of psyche and soul, a field of light, a cosmic dance. It is a centre for empowering ritual."
The language of spirituality is difficult. Language is finite and falls within time and history, and the spirit is infinite and exists outside time and history. It is why the language of spirituality uses metaphor.
In Christian mysticism, the labyrinth is called the Threefold Path.
On the path in (purgation), the walker releases from his or her mind what is not needed. At the centre (illumination), the walker receives new insights into self, into the sacred, into God. On the way out (unity), the new knowledge is assimilated.
The New Testament's synoptic Gospels provide a slightly different template:
Metanoia: meaning "likely to change one's mind," to welcome the transforming power of God -- the inward path.
The place of encounter: the desert, the wilderness, where demons are wrestled and we acknowledge the brokenness of our lives and set aside the illusion that they can be repaired without God -- the centre.
Purity of heart: where we harmonize our desires with the energies of the spirit and the power of good -- the outward path.
A couple of weeks after San Francisco, I walk a candle-lit labyrinth laid out on the floor of the dark gymnasium of Hamilton's St. Paul's Anglican Church. A CD (bought from Grace Cathedral's gift shop) of Sufi music sung by the fusion group Musica Divina is playing. The church has advertised the labyrinth walk on its outdoor sign.
Seven of us walk. An eighth, Vanessa Compton, artist and doctoral student in education curriculum at University of Toronto, elegantly -- cosmically? -- dances the path. Ms. Compton wrote her master's thesis on the sacred geometry of labyrinth design.
Rev. Paddy Doran moves about the perimeter, praying for the journeyers at each quadrant. Such is the spiritual energy in the room, the peace, the connectedness among walkers, dancer and priest, that I feel a wash of love for Mr. Doran as I walk past him and grip his shoulder warmly.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits
I am in Guelph. I am asked to think of God as a moody woman to be romanced. I shout at God in a field and am surprised at what I say.
Loyola House sits near the edge of 245 hectares of farmland, bush and orchard owned by the Jesuits outside Guelph, an hour's drive along the freeway southwest from Toronto.
I am here for three days of silence and spiritual direction. I will read only what I am directed to read, speak to no one except -- for one hour a day -- Rev. Monty Williams, my assigned spiritual director. I may attend Eucharist at night.
The lounge and dimly lit corridors are thickly carpeted, the colours muted blue and earthen brown. Signs ask that doors be opened and closed quietly. My room has a bed, a basin, a desk with a Bible, a chair. Toilets and showers are communal.
A notice says the Loyola House dog (I have forgotten her name) is interested in going for walks, but must not be allowed inside.
Thirty of us eat together in the dining room. Bach is played, softly, at dinner.
A glass wall of the lounge, with armchairs arranged before it like deck chairs on a cruise ship, accommodates contemplation of a small, bronze statue outside in the garden: St. Ignatius the Pilgrim, leaning into the wind, clutching his cloak around him.
There is a labyrinth mowed into the lawn. Rev. Philip Shano, director of the Guelph Jesuit Spirituality Centre, of which Loyola House is a part, is not ready to make it a more permanent structure. At a time when spiritual hunger in the culture is palpable, Father Shano says, there is a risk of becoming trendy, a risk of the spiritual currency Loyola House offers being debased.
The centre is considered one of the two great Jesuit spirituality centres in the world, the other being St. Bueno's in Wales, where the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote.
St. Ignatius, a 16th-century Spanish military officer, came to realize in the course of a long convalescence from battle injuries that contemplation of Jesus and the saints gave him peace and satisfaction, whereas contemplation of fame and romance -- with a woman who has never been identified -- left him restless.
He gave away his possessions, went to live in a cave for 10 months and spent hours of each day in prayer. This experience led him to formulate the Spiritual Exercises, which are the basis for Loyola House's directed retreats.
The 11 exercises are a seamless blend of contemplative spiritual journey and psychological growth, to which many theologians and psychologists would respond, "But of course the two are the same" -- knowledge of God (the sacred) and knowledge of self.
Ignatius believed that people needed to know themselves, their own history, their own sense of where God is in their lives.
The Guelph spirituality centre carries that one step further into a management technique: preparing people for how to use their time on retreat, how to enter into prayer, how to decide on what to focus on in prayer, how to decide on moving forward spiritually and psychologically -- and how to assess the costs of that decision, whether it might mean going in a direction in life they do not want to go.
Father Shano says 90 per cent of people who come to Loyola House have stressed and busy outside lives and need preparation.
The exercises, optimally spread over a 40-day retreat, are:
Discovering who I really am; directing myself toward God; noticing God's action in my life; responding to the movements of my heart; discovering the nature of my deepest desire; seeking God's will; becoming free of all that distracts me from my deepest desire; making choices in line with my truest self; connecting my lived experience with the life, death and resurrection of Christ; responding to God's love for me, and finding God in all things.
On my first morning, I feel an edginess, a discomforting sense of tasks undone in the outside world. I count the people who don't know where I am.
At 11 a.m., I knock on the door of Father Williams's study.
We sit in comfortable chairs. He asks me how I pray, how I know when I am in conversation with God. I say I know when I am not in conversation with God, but not when I am. I say I don't think I know what prayer is.
Father Williams talks of prayer as listening for God. A prayer to God without any understanding of who God is, he says, is not a conversation but a monologue -- without any connection, any sense of God being present.
Think of God as a moody woman who needs to be courted, he says.
I see what he means. The key element of courting is the antithesis of monologue. It is attentiveness: listening to every word; responding to every gesture; anticipating every request.
I think of the metaphor from Richard Tarnas (The Passion of the Western Mind): "If you are the universe, which suitor would you accept, who would you open your deepest secrets to? The suitor who is unconscious, impersonal, who is there for exploitation, for the enhancement of his own ego? Or the profoundly deep, beautiful soul-being who is there for the purpose of knowing you, to become one with you?"
Father Williams also says being attentive to God means a turning away from the world.
He asks what grace I desire most. I say humility.
He talks about God as a horrendous risk taker -- risking Jesus's life, risking Isaac's life by asking his father Abraham to kill him, risking Moses's life. He quotes an Old Testament verse about God catching up with Moses at a lodging house and trying to kill him. He says he does not know why God tried to do that. "This is part of the mystery," he says.
He asks whether Isaac could ever again trust Abraham. He asks me to meditate on a verse from the Song of Solomon:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arms,
for love is strong as death
passion fierce as the grave.
He gives me a meditation on St. Francis of Assisi to read.
I spend the rest of the day walking outdoors. I think a lot about hubris, about ego, my ego. I enjoy silent meal times -- no need to be on stage. The food is great. I find myself becoming greedy about silence.
Through the evening, I read the St. Francis meditation:
"The body grows by taking on size. The spirit grows by losing height, by losing hauteur . . .
"There comes a time when what a man has made of his life begins to close back in on him and suffocate him. You thought you were making your life and now it comes about that your life is unmaking you. . . .
"In giving animals a name, man enclosed them in his own history. In speaking to them of God, Francis liberates them from this destiny, returns them to the absolute from which everything escaped as from an open birdcage . . ."
With my tongue quiet, I am interested in so much more. At breakfast, I stare at the shiny red of an apple. On a walk, I stare at a hickory weed. Going past a young cow looking at me, I say hello to my brother the cow. (I decide to stop eating meat.) I am curious about paths into woods. I walk the lawn labyrinth.
At 11 a.m., I tell Father Williams that the word "seal" can mean a tattoo. God wants himself tattooed on humankind's heart just as men tattoo on their arms their lovers' names.
I say Isaac's mind would tell him never again to trust his father, but his heart could say "Trust" because love is irrational. I say God's attempted killing of Moses shows that God is unpredictable because He is unknowable. Meaning the transcendent God cannot be trusted because no one knows how God's mind works. The immanent God, tattooed on our hearts, can be loved. That God is us.
Father Williams talks about moving away from naiveté about God to a new understanding. I ask him how to do that. Not intellectually, he says, but by a prayerful approach of listening to God.
He is an Eliot scholar. We read East Coker:
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from
experience.
As well:
The only wisdom we can hope
to acquire
is the wisdom of humility:
humility is endless.
I borrow his Eliot anthology. I read Eliot all afternoon because it is raining too much to walk. I cannot remember the last afternoon I read Eliot, or anyone else.
I read Eliot all evening, scribbling down lines I want to discuss with Father Williams.
We must be still, and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper
communion.
I read Eliot the next morning.
At 11 a.m., Father Williams says he actually does not like Eliot, which is why he became an Eliot scholar. He considers him somewhat of a mystic poseur.
Back to prayer: Father Williams asks me to think of prayer as waiting for God.
When I say I don't understand, he explains that there is waiting in a dentist's office, which is unpleasant anticipation, or waiting for Christmas, which is pleasant anticipation, or waiting for a sexual climax in which the waiting is everything, the ecstasy.
Ah.
Nietzsche (or someone else) said the two names for life are sexuality and death.
Father Williams says he wants me to shout at God what disturbs me most about myself.
I walk and walk and walk in the fields and woods. My thoughts go deeper and deeper, beneath words. Hours go by. I am wet in the rain.
I suddenly shout at God: "I have no faith in my own personality."
I did not expect to say that.
Maybe I meant to say: "I have no faith in my own will." Thy will, not mine, God.
But I have to go back to Toronto.
THE SERIES
SATURDAY, Dec. 23: Pilgrims in search of the meaning of life
TUESDAY, Dec. 26: Pamela's quest for something to believe
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 27: Marianne's quest in the forest
THURSDAY, Dec. 28: The quest to reunite body, mind and spirit
TODAY: Michael Valpy concludes the series with a personal quest
See the whole series by going to The Globe and Mail's Web site at http://www.globeandmail.com
and clicking on "Focus."
