The Long and Winding Road - Greenpatch Pilgrimage

All ready to tackle Hadrian's Wall - GP Ted  on our Durham to Iona Pilgrimage, April 2011

If you've been reading Growing Greenpatches for any length of  time, you'll have  spotted references to pilgrimage scattered here and there, especially to our Durham to Iona trip in 2011.  Now you can learn  a little more about what we got up to  on Offline Greenpatches, (think of it as an old, rather dusty, ramshackle conservatory) - home to some of my more confused meanderings, originally  inflicted on readers of "OldChurch"  parish mag. 

The long and winding road - praying the labyrinth

St Columba's Bay, Iona, labyrinth, May 2011

The labyrinth at St Beunos, retreat October 2011

Made one of those happy discoveries this evening when I stumbled across a labyrinth blog for the first time: agracingmaze, which  title I reckon deserves an award for both aptness and the most apalling pun ever! Looks to be some wonderful resources and a chance to share reflections on this means of prayerful walking.

As I've written before in my old Greenpatches blog, the labyrinth has played a significant part in my own walk; sometimes affirming, always challenging. Yet, do you know, it's only as I was pondering earlier on the struggles of somebody else that the realisation is  dawning a) of the tremendous distance I've travelled (spiritually as well as physically!) since those first, hesitant steps, and b) an emerging pattern: each time the labyrinth symbolising a time of transition,  liminal space, a turning point, a call to go deeper with God.  And yet I'd not always appreciated this at the time. I guess when you're in the thick of a situation it's easy to feel that you're going nowhere, trudging  round in an endless circle. Only time, space and perspective reveal  that this circle, is, in fact, a spiral. Quietly breathtaking.  Cue imitation of a (happily) stranded guppy...

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