I've sometimes seen this journey toward deeper spirituality as a pilgrimage that would help me "arrive" at some new state or consciousness. Certainly, there is movement, but like the labyrinth, it seems to be a movement that carries us deeper or shallower. The hope is that the deeper moments somehow change us as we move outward from the center.
These prayer labyrinths look a little like mazes, with an important difference. Modern mazes tend to be puzzles where you try to draw a line from a "start" position to an "end" position, without running into dead ends. They are a bit goal-oriented and self-focused. I think that if we try to approach our prayer life and spirituality this way, we will likely (if honest) become very frustrated.
If life is like a labyrinth (& it is), it suddenly occurred to me as I stepped out of the labyrinth, that it is a journey that doesn't necessarily have a clear beginning or ending, at least in this: it is not that I invite God into my journey and life, but that he has allowed me to step into his.
These are some thoughts that coincide with Kevin Seasoltz's comments about sacred places: There is a tension, a "dialogue between landedness and landlessness, between a people settled in a place and a people in exile... The God of the promised land is also the God of the wilderness" (A Sense of the Sacred, p. 70).
Jesus assured the Samaritan woman that a day would come (is here) when God would be worshiped, neither on Mt. Gerizim nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit and truth. He said he would be where two or more gather in his name. His central message was, of course, the establishment, or the fullness, of God's Kingdom. This Kingdom would not be identified with places but an Encounter that results (finally) in reconciliation and peace with God, and love among God's people (ibid. p. 71). This Encounter happens in place and time, but always points beyond that place and time, and then moves on.
Spirituality is a journey, to be sure, but it is God's ongoing journey that his grace invites and welcomes us to intersect and even to influence. That is our salvation, which has already been moving in and with us, now and indefinitely. If there is a goal--it may be to arrive at a peace with God and his creation--so that we are no longer consumed with trying to control or convince him through our prayers to do things our way, or to follow us. Instead, a spiritual goal might be to trust him enough (or more and more) to see him in the encounters, places and times: to feel him cry with us, to hear his little jokes and wondrous laughter. Can you sense his loving frustration and anger with us, and with the self-righteous piety, arrogance, the fearful self-indulgence, and the hatred that divides people and rends creation...all for whom and for which he has asked us to care?
The second greatest commandment is like the first (that is, it supports and reflects the truth of the first) to "love your neighbor as yourself." How we care for creation and our neighbors is the primary way we obey the greatest commandment; it is the primary way of worshiping God. Like the labyrinth I walked today, our liturgical worship is meant to be an artistic and ritualistic expression of these two greatest commandments.
So, again, even without a marked "goal" or spiritual "achievement" liturgy, worship and life are--at their best--movements in and deeper, and then back out as renewed, ...no, as changed people.
In art class, I painted a coffee cup today--practicing the grey-scale.
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