Mazes | Modern Mazes | Mazes & Spirituality

Mazes and Spirituality

Many meanings have been read into mazes and labyrinths – most without hard evidence. But just because their origins are obscure, why shouldn’t they be used to communicate religious ideas or focus the mind prayerfully?

In recent years people have started to use them this way, notably Christians and neo-pagans. But as mazes and labyrinths are geometrical and non-figurative, they would be ideal for use in Islamic design and they also have similarities with mandalas – the complex geometrical designs used in Hindu and Buddhist rituals through which devotees tap into psychic energy.

Two examples of mazes and labyrinths used in modern Christianity:

1. From England: In 1950 Canon Harry Cheales, rector of Wyck Rissington, Gloucestershire, had a dream of a maze. He spent the next five years planting it in the rectory garden. Into it he built signs reminding visitors of the progression of life from youth, through old age, to death. The choices of path represented the choices – good or bad – which we all make in our life. At the centre was a tree which symbolised heaven and eternity. Each year, on the feast of St Laurence (patron saint of the village church) parishoners were invited to walk the maze. Unfortunately, after the Canon retired in 1980, the Church of England ‘downsized’ the parish and the rectory was sold. The maze was grubbed up to avoid it becoming a secular tourist attraction, but a mosaic replica was set into the wall of the church, as memorial to Canon Cheales when he died in 1988. His creation was one of the first modern mazes constructed to stimulate meditation and prayer.

2. From California: In December 1981 the Reverend Lauren Artress constructed a temporary replica of the Chartres labyrinth in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. The labyrinth was used during a New Year’s Eve prayer meeting for the problems facing the city – AIDS, poverty and unemployment. The media paid attention and the Reverend Lauren Artress has become well known as a speak and as the author of Walking the Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool. Lauren Artress uses the labyrinth as a three-fold walking meditation:

  • A journey inwards (releasing)
  • Reaching the centre (receiving)
  • Return

(More information about the Grace Cathedral labyrinth can be found by visiting the site listed on our LINKS page.)

In Chartres itself in recent years a different pattern has been used. There the pilgrim walks to the centre and then to the high altar. But as said earlier, labyrinths can be used in a variety of ways. It’s up to you!