Labyrinth for mostly beginners

Well, at a few minutes past eleven in Shanandoah 'B' room at the Hotel Roanoke I finaaly decided that it was time to begin 'my' workshop on the labyrinth at Diocesan Council. Actually a really nice group of people most of whom had not had a go before. I did a brief intro mostly with suggestions of how people often used a labyrinth and made the offer to prebrief or debrief the extraverts who wanted to talk out loud to process their reflections in a corner of the room away from the walkers, then pretty much left people to it. We must have had close to 20 people on the mat [courtesy of St.John's Lynchburg, I gather -thanks people!] and pretty much they walked it in 30 minutes first to last. Some interesting discussion in the debriefing corner and in plenary afterwards. It seemed to me that a lot of the attraction seemed to be in the region of finding a timespace to get away from everyday concerns in order to have meditation/time with God. I suspect that the bodiliness of this meditation technique is a big help.

For me, I found myself reflecting on why the labyrinth at Chartres should have been installed in the first place .... I found myself musing over the importance of pilgrimmage in medieval times and wondered whether part of it was to provide some of the spiritual benefits of pilgrimmage in a small space, constrained time and safe environment .... ? In fact, on checking later I discovered [not unsurprisingly] that this is in all probability one of the uses that would have been made of it.

I also flagged up to the workshoppers that there was the BYFC variety too. Worth a go; shame I couldn't have arranged the logistics to have brought it here. Shame too that we couldn't get the thing set up for the whole day but spaceand security issues prevented it. Another time perhaps.