WILTON – St. Luke’s Episcopal Church is now offering the public a little peace and serenity just outside its doors.
Parishioners have completed the installation of an outdoor labyrinth on church property, located at the corner of School and High streets. The spiral-designed walking path is created of bricks and gravel and the public is encouraged to give it a try.
“We would like to offer this sacred space for our neighbors to pause, step away from the busyness of life for a few minutes, and simply follow the path, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time,” said Corey Walmer, a deacon at St. Luke’s.
Walmer applied for and received a New Initiatives Grant from the Episcopal Diocese of Maine, which is intended to support outreach projects in the community. The grant helped fund a portion of the project.
Cousineau’s excavator went to work to prepare the site for the construction of the labyrinth by digging up the lawn, providing drainage and leveling the area next to the church building, said Lisa Lindsay, a project coordinator.
Mike Monahan mapped out the design, then lines were drawn and about a dozen parishioners of all ages worked over two weekends to arrange the bricks just so. Gravel provides the paths’ surface.
“It was really fun to do,” Lindsay said.
Labyrinths have been around for a long, long time. An integral part of many cultures such as Native American, Greek, Celtic and Mayan, labyrinths today are being used for reflection, meditation, prayer and comfort, Lindsay said.
“When a person walks a labyrinth,” Walmer explained, “you meander back and forth, turning 180 degrees each time you enter a different circuit. As you shift direction you also shift awareness from right brain to left brain. This is one of the reasons the labyrinth can induce receptive states of consciousness.”
Labyrinths are often mistaken for mazes, which have dead ends and trick turns. Instead, labyrinths have only one path leading to the center and back out again.
While the labyrinth construction is complete, a prayer garden located on the south side of the building will be planted in the spring. Benches will also be installed then.
The labyrinth is free and open to the public until the snow flies and covers it. For more information, call the church at 645-2639.
How nice! Thank you for this.
A wonderful contribution to the community. I think a invitation to the pyblic to hear about labyrinths would be great.
A good possiblilty for children also.
It is not a “mistake” (as the article says) to call a maze (with trick turnings) a “labyrinth.” See Webster’s, or this from the Oxford English Dictionary as the first definition of “labyrinth”: “A structure consisting of a number of intercommunicating passages arranged in bewildering complexity, through which it is difficult or impossible to find one’s way without guidance; a maze.”
The term “labyrinth” is borrowed from Greek and goes all the way back to Greek myth, where Theseus had to trail a thread behind him on his way into the labyrinth on Crete so he could find his way out afterwards.
If builders of single-path labyrinths want to use the word in a special way for their own purposes, they’re free to do so if they make their usage clear and confine it to special contexts, but they’re wrong if they call the more common and historic usage “mistaken.”
A spiritual labyrinth is not a maze; therefore, it is a mistake to call a labyrinth a maze. Mazes may be labyrinths, but not all labyrinths are mazes.