Every Wednesday, students and faculty looking for a spiritual experience or calming environment can visit Parkes Hall, Room 122 and follow a winding, circular path to the center of a labyrinth.
“I definitely found a sense of calm and peace,” said Jennifer Shuck, a graduate student in music education who visited the labyrinth.
The labyrinth is not a permanent fixture but a piece of fabric laid on the floor with a printed maze-like pattern. Candles are placed around the cloth, which is the size of an average classroom. The labyrinth was first set up during Holy Week, the week preceding Easter Sunday, April 4 and is open for anyone to visit every Wednesday throughout Spring Quarter.
“I just felt very soothed,” said Weinberg sophomore Katherine Woodrow.
Woodrow said she couldn’t say how conducive the labyrinth is to spiritual reflection but concentrating on the narrow path had a calming effect. University Chaplain Tim Stevens said the labyrinth was introduced to Northwestern with similar effects in mind.
“There should be a place where people can go and not be anxious about class, meeting deadlines, assignments, etc.,” Stevens said.
Stevens said people should not expect a great revelation or a profound experience while walking the labyrinth but will be able to clear their minds. The cloth labyrinth was purchased several years ago from a campus ministry group at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater using memorial funds for previous chaplains Ralph Dunlop and James Avery.
The cloth is dedicated to their memory.
But labyrinths do not have the same effect on everyone.
“I’ve walked a labyrinth once or twice and nothing extraordinary ever happened, but I do know a lot of people find that a peaceful kind of meditation,” said English, religion and classics Prof. Barbara Newman.
Newman said anything can be a spiritual experience, and the idea behind a labyrinth is to take one’s mind off the distractions of daily life by focusing on the spiraling path to the center.
Labyrinths only became popular as meditation devices in the past 20 years, said Dr. Lauren Artress, author of “Walking a Sacred Path” and a priest at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Artress started promoting labyrinths in 1991, founding the organization Veriditas with the goal of “peppering the planet with labyrinths.”
Artress said she started promoting the use of labyrinths when she noticed people needed something to give them sustenance and solace that was not exclusive to Christianity. She said her first experience with a labyrinth captured her imagination.
“It was such a wonderful way of being able to quiet the mind and focus, so I had control over my thoughts rather than my thoughts had control over me,” Artress said.
While labyrinths are used for walking meditations now, it is still uncertain what the original creators of labyrinths had in mind. Labyrinths appeared in pre-history in a variety of cultures around the world, said Kristin Doll, a doctoral candidate in religious studies at NU who wrote a master’s thesis on the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France.
“The way they actually used and conceived of the labyrinths is still mysterious,” Doll said.Despite its mysterious origins, there are many labyrinths around the country. According to Veriditas’ website, there are 2,660 portable and permanent labyrinths in the U.S.[email protected]
