Walking a Labyrinth seems to be gaining in popularity. My friend in Melbourne tells me that she heard an interview about them on popular radio. I don’t think it is just a fad. I believe there is something about moving within a circle on a path that can be thoroughly confusing and yet takes us unerringly to our centre. The more I walk the labyrinth path the more I glimpse the truth of what someone once said to me – that he found it an extraordinary spiritual way.
It’s interesting that the original ancient Cretan seven-circuit labyrinth is connected to a story. – the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The hero goes in to the labyrinth to kill his enemy. It can be quite terrifying to imagine this journey but through it all the princess Ariadne arms him with a powerful sword and waits at the entrance holding a ball of thread attached to the hero. He finds his way out safely by following this thread.
Another story has a similar theme. In the Great-Grandmother’s Thread, a princess in danger, is given a ring by her grandmother which is attached to an invisible thread. Every time the princess is at risk she tugs the thread and her grandmother comes to help her.
Stories engage us. From the familiar nursery stories we listened to when we were children to a multitude of stories in our screen and television entertainment industries. There is a huge appetite for stories.
But not all stories are helpful because sometimes they don’t engage us. In our current avalanche of entertainment stories, I can look back on some that have stayed with me and seem to have taken up lodging in my consciousness – I’m not sure why. A film called Kaos – a group of stories taken from southern Italian folklore: another was a Japanese film with superb cinematography, an eerie story in which time collapses in a kind of Rip van Winkle experience. And of course there are the collections of folklore stories, fairy tales and ancient myths that we may have listened to as children which could be quite scary. Each of us will have our own collection of stories that still resonate.
In his book Story Medicine, Horst Kornberger writes that ‘stories deal with powerful realities … The function of stories is to regulate the household of our soul … They transform, heal and educate the psyche and via the psyche, the world.’ He goes on to quote C.S. Lewis, the great storyteller of the Narnian series. In the book one of his characters meets a dragon and is transformed into one. ‘That’s because he has read only the wrong kind of books. Books that were weak on dragons.’
In the two stories above, the ‘dragons’ must be faced by the hero and the princess. And he same powerful realities face each of us in our life journey. But help is at hand so long as they (and we) trust and do not forget to keep hold of the thread.
This is the theme we will explore in our next Labyrinth day on Sunday 2nd June at Barragup. What is the invisible thread we need to have hold of and how do we keep it in mind?
See Events page on our website.