Advertisement
After a 6:30 p.m. dinner, Normajean Strommen, a spiritual director for the Northeastern Minnesota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, will teach how to lead a weekly prayer hour in their religious communities using a scripted format.
She said learning to pray well is essential, given the U.S.’s frenetic culture.
“A lot of people are just tired,” said Strommen, 58, whose husband is bishop of the Northeastern Minnesota Synod. “My goal is for them to have the experience of creative ways to pray.”
The weekly prayer script designates 20 minutes for sitting in silence with Scripture, 20 minutes for small group discussions and 20 minutes for learning a new prayer practice.
“People don’t know how many (prayer practices) there are,” said Strommen, who Saturday will teach how to center prayer, maintain a journal and create sanctuary space at home.
One prayer practice rising in popularity is walking the labyrinth. At the retreat Saturday, Lisa Gidlow Moriarty will show how to pray walking along these two-dimensional paths.
Like Strommen, Moriarty hopes the experience will help people find peace amid a society of chaos and constant stimulation.
“The path is not straight but winds around and has frequent turns,” said Moriarty, 51, of Stillwater, Minn. “You can’t move as quickly through a labyrinth as you can walking a straight line to some place. The design of it forces one to slow down.”
She said the labyrinth is a universal prayer tool, found in ancient societies that did not necessarily interact. In contemporary times, it can be found in worship spaces, parks, schools and health care facilities, such as the one that opened last spring at Franciscan Skemp’s Cancer Center.
Moriarty designs labyrinths, and said they can be made out of canvas, concrete, stone, a pile of rocks or pennies, snow, grass or “whatever you have a lot of.” She painted a 20-foot labyrinth on canvas for the St. Paul’s retreat. She calls it Circle of Peace, which is related to the famous labyrinth built about 1200 in the Chartres Cathedral in France.
She said a labyrinth is a metaphor for the spiritual journey.
“Oftentimes when you’re walking along the path, the turn looks like it’s taking you away from the goal as you turn outward and away from the center,” she said. “Once folks understand that it’s a single path and they just need to follow it, then it becomes an intriguing journey.”
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or jorso@lacrossetribune.com.
