This year the Queen will celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. To mark her Golden Jubilee ten years ago a labyrinth was laid at Norwich Cathedral. A labyrinth is like a maze, except it has only one path; no dead ends or wrong turns. There is just one path to follow to the centre and back out again. You can’t get lost. If a maze confuses you, imprisons you, and makes you feel stressed, then a labyrinth clarifies your thinking, liberates you and makes you feel calm.
January is a time for new beginnings, fresh starts and looking forward. It is also a time when I tend to think back to what has gone before; the year gone by. I first came across a fingertip labyrinth in the back of a mother’s bible and prayer book shortly after I had my eldest son. In moments of quiet exhaustion as James slept and I felt overwhelmed I would trace my finger around this pattern, and gain a sense of calm.
When Christians couldn’t make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, walking a labyrinth became the equivalent of a trip to JerusalemAnother period of readjustment comes every year after Christmas, as life settles down after the excitement of the celebrations of Christ’s birth. At this time I find a fingertip labyrinth a useful tool for prayer and meditation.
The labyrinth is an ancient pattern, perhaps one of the oldest in the world. There is evidence of labyrinths in many faiths and cultures, including Islam. The pattern appears all over the world throughout time; it can be found in rock, mosaics and turf. There are echoes of the significance of labyrinths in myth and folklore; Theseus slayed the Minotaur who inhabited the Cretan labyrinth, although a little confusingly perhaps, this was actually a maze!
Theseus is helped to find his way back out of the ‘labyrinth’ by Ariadne who gave him a ball of thread to fasten to the entrance of the labyrinth and unravel behind him as he sought out the Minotaur. So, as in the later fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, Theseus can follow his trail in reverse and escape the dark, twisting passages of the ‘labyrinth’. There are pagan associations with labyrinths, but there is also a very strong tradition of their use in Christianity. Labyrinths are linked to the idea of pilgrimage.
The practice of going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land began in the fourth century when Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, visited Jerusalem and traced the steps of Christ on his way of the cross.
A pilgrimage is any journey to a holy place as an act of devotion, thanksgiving, penance, or in search of healing. Going on pilgrimage is an outward sign of our inward journey; and is about trying to come closer to God. Almost as ancient as the notion of pilgrimage is the symbolic journey of the labyrinth. When Christians couldn’t make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, walking a labyrinth became the equivalent of a trip to Jerusalem. In early Christian churches people walked labyrinths on their knees as penance. One of the oldest and best known labyrinths is in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. Completed around the turn of the thirteenth century, the labyrinth measures 131 feet in diameter and was used by monks and pilgrims as a form of penance or for meditation. The journey into the centre and back out again covers a distance of 964 feet. 
In Alkborough in South Humberside, there is a turf labyrinth which is said to have been cut by the Benedictine monks who lived nearby between 1080 and 1220. There is a local myth that it was here that the four knights who murdered Thomas Becket came when they were ordered by King Henry II to go to Jerusalem as penance for what they had done.
As Tolkien said, 'not all those who wander are lost'. The notion of there being only one way, one path, to the centre – which is the goal and where you will end up if you stay on the path - is reminiscent of our own spiritual journey towards God along the path laid down by Christ, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6).
As Theseus held on to the thread given to him by Aridane, we hold on to the thread of our faith and we walk towards the centre and God. Labyrinths have a number of different designs. The one at Chartes Cathedral has eleven coils - but the common classical labyrinth has seven. Seven is of course a biblical number; Joshua marched seven times around the city of Jericho, accompanied by seven priests with seven trumpets. Having created the world in six days, on the seventh day God rested. His creation also has the number seven imprinted upon it. A rainbow (which is a sign of God’s promise) has seven colours, which refocused through a prism re-combine into white light: sunlight, the light and heat from which help to sustain life. Every cell in the human body is renewed in seven years. When Lizzie Hopthrow saw a labyrinth in the transept in Canterbury Cathedral she was struck by its spiritual resonance.
If a maze confuses you, imprisons you, and makes you feel stressed, then a labyrinth clarifies your thinking, liberates you and makes you feel calm. January is a time for new beginnings, fresh starts and looking forwardLizzie Hopthrow is the Chaplain at the Pilgrims Hospice in Canterbury, where the first Hospice labyrinth was opened in July 2008. One patient who walked the Pilgrims labyrinth said, ‘it was as if I was in the centre of myself. I felt my own pain, but also tranquillity and comfort.’ Another bereaved relative explained, ‘since walking the labyrinth over a period of time, the depression that had settled over me since my husband died has lifted.’
The therapeutic garden at the hospice is open to the community, it does not have to be issues as big as life and death and hope and faith that are contemplated during walking the labyrinth, a local student said that they had been troubled and walking the labyrinth ‘helped me to calm down and sort my thoughts.’ Lizzie Hopthrow has done some research into how labyrinths work. What happens, she says, as we go into a spiral walk of this kind is that we slip from the left side of our brain, which is always analysing and worrying, into the right-hand side; the intuitive, imaginative, creative part of ourselves.
Walking has a way of quieting the mind. Walking a path where you don’t have to think, where all you need do is put one foot in front of the other, allows you to stop thinking about where you are going, and gradually let go of thoughts and worries. It is an opportunity to concentrate on the spiritual and to reflect. In the words of St Augustine of Hippo, ‘It is solved by walking’.
