In a recent band meeting I felt the Lord reminding me that the journey in the process of discernment is often as important, if not more important, than the decision at the end of it. And that reminded me of a pendant that someone sent me attached to a quote from a book. Unfortunately I can’t credit the book because I don’t know what it is, but I wanted to share it in good faith. I feel like it speaks to so many of us at the moment as we feel lost in the complexity of life in a pandemic. I was also interested that the example of the labyrinth in the Cathedral goes around four quadrants. Maybe that is a helpful image for the four elements of the Inspire Way of Life.
“The difference between a labyrinth and a maze is that a labyrinth has no end. A labyrinth may be complex but is not difficult to navigate because it has a single unambiguous route to the centre and back
The famed eleven-circuit labyrinth inlaid in the floor of Chartes Cathedral in France has just one path, which takes the pilgrim in and out of four quadrants in the spiralling motion through dozens of left and right turn, before reaching its rosette centre. Such a pattern invites meditation, the mystics say, and reminds the pilgrim the journey of faith is rarely a straightforward one.
It has become cliche to talk about faith as a journey, and yet the metaphor holds. Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God. This is a keep-moving, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, who-knows-what’s-next deal, and you never exactly arrive. I don’t know if the path’s all drawn out ahead of time, or if it corkscrews with each step like in Alice’s Wonderland, or if, as some say, we make the road by walking, but I believe the journey is more labyrinth than maze. No step taken in faith is wasted, not by a God who makes all things new.
‘To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something,’ said Walker Percy, ‘Not to be onto something is to be in despair.'”
