I really like those blasts from our pasts that Facebook invites us to share. This is the labyrinth at the Franciscan Renewal Center in (of all incongruous places) Scottsdale, Arizona. Facebook reminded me that I was there for an Alban Institute training five years ago.
I tend to walk labyrinths, and other paths of prayer, barefoot. It helps ground me. It slows me down. There’s a sole / soul connection.
Sometimes it hurts. The Scottsdale sand is hard packed, coarse-grained, just a bit painful on my usually-protected feet — but Ah! there were fresh hoofprints that morning. (Deer? Javelina!)
(The labyrinth at the Whidbey Institute, by contrast, is worn into a grass lawn, and when I walked it, was deliciously cool, damp soil.)
A bit of Hopkins’ sonnet, “God’s Grandeur,” speaks of the degradation of earth by our action, and our alienation from earth:
“The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”
And then comes the poem’s turning point.
Taking off my shoes, becoming re-grounded, is a turning point.
Walking the labyrinth is an exercise in turning.
The lines that follow are after the turning point of the poem.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Hopkins could sense this in the 1800s. Perhaps we will too, when we take off our shoes, and turn.
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