 |
| Laberinto 1 (del Nordisk familjebok) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
* At some point address these questions:
1) Did you find value in the experience. Why? 2) Who else might, and why?
* Answering these questions will lead into your final statement: I do/do not recommend walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral for these reasons.
* Should you interview other walkers? Some students do, and some don't. This effort can be as much feature story as a review.
* Here are some leads from past stories:
- Driving east up the hill on California Street, Grace Cathedral’s size and ruddy color loom from the surrounded buildings, playground and opulent hotels and venues. Inside, I find the architecture and artistry astonishing, busying with myself with taking photographs I might share with my mother. It was also to stall in participating in the “meditative labyrinth," something which made me feel the opposite of the enthusiasm I had about playing photographer.
This “meditative labyrinth” and its accommodating choir was exactly what I wanted to avoid. My mother said, “You should try it and take it seriously,” but I had already done such things in elementary school all the way through high school, completely being negative to the whole experience or what they call, “closing yourself from God."
- I can not remember the last time that my Grandpa broke-wind in a church. I actually can not remember the last time he was even in a church. But there he was, crop-dusting his lunch gas across the Grace Cathedral's candle-lit corridors. My Grandma was quite embarrassed, but I believe that it added to the experience.
- Many people seek to find themselves. I’ll admit, growing up in my teens, I did not know who or what kind of person I wanted to be. In the Jewish Community, a Bar Mitzvah signifies as a rite of passage to who a boy is to become but I wasn’t Jewish. For others, finding self can occur through hot-stone yoga, a run at Golden Gate Park, or at the Labyrinth in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.
- There it lay, the labyrinth at the center of the church. It wasn’t exactly what I expected to be there when I heard that I was visiting a labyrinth. My first thought was that we were going to be lab rats in a maze in search of the cheese.
- I was raised a Christian Scientist – no, not Scientology (though I do favor the notion that aliens exist) – a religious practice that puts the power of healing into God’s hands and not a physicians. I would go to Sunday school, draw some pictures of God (who apparently looks like a firefly...), and not pay any attention to the Bible stories being taught. As the members of our church steadily began to die from old age, untreated sicknesses and suicide, I began cementing my notion that religion is utter garbage. This is the view I had all throughout my adolescence: that religion is a bunch of trite fiction that gets renamed and recombined; subsequently spurring people of “different” faiths to annihilate one another through endless warfare. As we all recall, adolescence is a time full of angst, and these notions were certainly fueled by my anti-authoritarian fervor.
No comments:
Post a Comment