Invisible Thread

“A young princess is sent away from her father's kingdom, away from the world, to a castle of supposed safety. She begins to explore her new home and encounters an old woman spinning thread in the tower. The woman introduces herself as the princess' great-grandmother. She tells the princess that she has awaited her for years. In time, the great-grandmother gives the princess a ring to which she attaches an invisible thread. This thread, the great-grandmother tells the princess, will guide her through the challenges she meets in life. The child is disappointed in her gift because she cannot see the thread or the ball that it comes from, which remains with the great-grandmother…

"By following an invisible thread we connect to the Source, to the Sacred. We can't see it, and yet some deep part of us knows it is there. This innate awareness gives us solace and peace during stormy times. But it is difficult to find at first, even difficult to believe. To walk a sacred path is to know and trust that there is guidance to help us live our lives on this planet.

Guidance can come in many, many ways. It comes through synchronistic meetings, through being fully present in one moment or time, through informal ritual where one spoken word can break open a riddle that has stumped us for months. Guidance also comes through forms, patterns, and symbols that impart sacred meaning. "That is precisely the great dignity of the symbol, that it ... leads from the truths of the physical life to those of a higher spiritual order." Not only are we welcome to participate in these patterns or processes, our life does not take on ultimate meaning until we do. To discover the thread is to realize that a loving presence or force behind all the world urges us to risk our comfort and reach for meaning in our lives.

The great-grandmother's thread is the God within who has long been ignored and forgotten, who awaits discovery in our own castles. It is easy to forget something that is invisible, and yet that is the spiritual challenge. We must keep alive the innate part of ourselves that holds on to the invisible thread. Historically, many forces have destroyed the memory of the great-grandmother's thread. It has been destroyed through centuries of patriarchal domination, through fears of creativity and of the traits associated with the feminine, such as empathy, curiosity, community, and holistic thinking. Mistrust of the imagination has been engendered through centuries of power politics that have little to do with nurturing the Spirit within.

The challenge of discovery looms large because the thread is invisible. Educated in scientific humanism at the end of the twentieth century, we are casualties of our history in both the personal and the collective sense. The traditional God is a God "out there," a transcendent God who acts through history—a God outside of ourselves who keeps track of whether we follow the rules. This transcendent God is more associated with God the Father, who no longer satisfies the deep hunger in our souls. In the fairy tale, the source of the thread is hidden, but attached to the princess' ring. To walk a sacred path, each or us must find our own touchstone that puts us in contact with the invisible thread. This touchstone can be nature (as it was for me early on), sharing with our friends, playing with our children, painting on our day off, or walking in the country. It may be the Sunday-morning liturgy and Eucharist.

Walking a sacred path means that we know the importance of returning to the touchstone that moves us. The labyrinth can serve as a touchstone. The labyrinth stands with a tradition that recaptures the feminine sense of the Source. It utilizes the imagination and the pattern-discerning part of our nature. It invites relationship and offers a whole way of seeing. When we allow ourselves to be whole, we allow new visions to emerge within us and within our cultures. Due to the loss of the feminine, many of us are out of touch with the depths or our beings, our Source. The feminine must be enlivened and welcomed back into our male-dominated world so integration can begin to occur—between feminine and masculine, receptive and assertive, imagination and reason. But we are beginning to awaken, we are being freed to seek, we are feeling the restless force of our own longing. We long for healing and peace with the past. We long to know ourselves deeply, to know the place in which we can discover the Divine. We long to temper and hone our gifts, to put them in action in the world. Our times hold within them great challenges and great potential.

To walk a sacred path is to discover our inner sacred space: that core of feeling that is waiting to have life breathed back into it through symbols, archetypal forms like the labyrinth, rituals, stories and myths. Understanding the invisible world, the world of patterns and process, opens us up to the movement of the Spirit. Hildegard of Bingen was a twelfth-century mystic, composer, and author of a theology that knitted together nature and spirit, cosmos and soul. She described the Holy Spirit as the Greening Power of God. Just as plants are greened, so we are as well. As we grow up, our spark of life continually shines forth; if we ignore this spark, this greening power, we become thirsty and shriveled. And if we respond to the spark, we flower. Our task is to flower, to come into full blossom before our time comes to an end.

Blossoming, coming to full flower, gives quite a different sense of the Holy than we get in most churches today. "Religion is for those who are scared to death of hell. Spirituality is for those who have been there." A division has emerged in Western culture. We have confused religion with spirituality, the container with the process. Religion is the outward form, the "container," specifically the liturgy and all the acts of worship that teach, praise, and give thanks to God. Spirituality is the inward activity of growth and maturation that happens in each of us.

Spiritual growth can happen anywhere, anytime when we are living consciously, reflecting on our experience. When our senses are shut down, when we live on automatic pilot, we miss the opportunity to grow. Age is not a measure of spiritual maturity. A young child with cancer can develop spiritually much faster than an adult who has never had such a confrontation, an awakening jolt. To be spiritually mature is to grow in an ever-deepening sense of compassion, lessening our fear of change and of the differences between us. Spiritual maturity also means knowing the vicissitudes of our personality as it experiences the Light of the Divine.

~ Lauren Artress, Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Path

Photos ~ Old woman spinning wool, Bhaktapur, Nepal
~ Praying in one of the petals of the central flower of Chartres Cathedral labyrinth