Description: Invite young adults to experience a walking prayer by visiting a labyrinth in your community together.
Get Ready
- Prep Time: Several weeks before the event, find a labyrinth in your community. If you wish to create your own labyrinth, you may need more time to prepare. Publicize the event as soon as you have set a date and location. Plan to set aside time several days before the event to prepare the prayer materials and coordinate carpools or public transportation instructions.
- Volunteers Needed: You might recruit one or two volunteers to help with coordinating rides, prayers, and logistics.
- Reserve the Space: Some labyrinths are located in places where you may have to call ahead to reserve a time.
- Supplies: Labyrinth, prayers, that’s it!
- Ideal Group Size: Two to 25.
- Who is this for? All young adults.
- When is a good time for this? Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
- Publicize the Program:
- Use social media to publicize the event: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Post information about labyrinths for people who might be unfamiliar!
- A Walking a Prayer Labyrinth YouTube video can be shared to promote the event.
- This is a great ecumenical event. The labyrinth is not specifically, or even historically, only a Catholic prayer tradition. It could be a good opportunity to reach out to another church nearby and invite their young adults to join you for the afternoon.
Prayer for Program Planner: May God’s presence manifest as we take the time to pay attention and pray into each step, each breath, each curve of the labyrinth. Amen.
Community Building: Field trips are great community builders because you get bonding time on the carpool or public transit rides. There should also be time after walking the labyrinth to share with one another about the experience.
Make It Happen
- Find a labyrinth in or near your community. If there is not one near you, here are instructions on how to make one of your own.
- Advertise the event as a half-day event. Allow time for getting to the labyrinth, 1.5 hours at the labyrinth, and then time to get back.
- Time there should include:
- A brief introduction to how to pray the labyrinth.
- A group prayer.
- Time for everyone to walk (25 minutes or so).
- Time for sharing in pairs/large group about the experience:
- What was that experience like for you?
- How/Did you experience God in the Labyrinth?
- What was easy about it?
- What was difficult about it?
- What did it leave you questioning or sitting with?
- What prayers are on your heart now?
Ideas
- Suggestions for group prayer before entering the labyrinth:
- Come Holy Spirit, Come. Teach me your paths, Lord. Show me your path. (Psalm 25:4)
- My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself; and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. (Thomas Merton- Thoughts in Solitude 1954)
- Make an afternoon out of it! Research a restaurant or ice cream shop near the labyrinth to have some time for socializing after the prayer experience.
- Have a follow-up session where you create your own finger labyrinths for your desk or home.
Help
- Walking a Prayer Labyrinth YouTube video
- More info on labyrinths from Creative Prayer
- The Labyrinth Society
- “Labyrinth: The Inward Journey” from American Catholic
