Editor’s Note
Walking by Faith
Sitting across the table from a friend, I listened as she explained the decision she was facing. The more immediate choice presented considerable risk, while the choice to delay could provide resolution — or lead to enormous complications down the road. She questioned the things she might have done differently to avoid ever reaching such a predicament.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” Robert Frost wrote, lamenting that he could not travel both. So often we reach a fork in the path and turn to look back on our lives, questioning whether things would have been better had we turned here instead of there. Or, like the poet, we gaze down the paths ahead, trying to decide which to pursue. These are the turning points, the choices that have the power to set our lives on entirely different courses.
Throughout the centuries, people of all religious faiths — and of no faith in particular — have found meaning and clarity by walking a labyrinth. The pattern of the path makes little difference, but the walking has an almost mystical way of busying the body just enough to free the mind to pray, to meditate, to contemplate the matter at hand.
Unlike the myriad choices and multiple dead ends of a maze, the labyrinth’s single path demands no decisions of the walker. The journey inward is a time for reflection, culminating when the walker reaches the center, which many say is a place of refuge, a haven for asking questions, finding answers. The journey outward is a time of affirmation and integration, bringing revelations and discoveries back out into daily life. The labyrinth is not a puzzle, though the ritual of walking its path can be an aid in sorting through the quandaries of life.
Whether we walk our lives with faith in Divine guidance, with confidence in our personal values or philosophy, or with a belief in ourselves and others, we all have faith in something. Faith is both internal and external, a belief and its expression. We all seek answers to the questions in our lives because we have faith such answers exist. Even the act of seeking is an act of faith.
The stories in this issue of The Scene explore that theme. What do we do when what is right isn’t necessarily in our own best interests? How do we celebrate the joy in our lives? How does personal faith affect public life? Can other people’s faith in us make us believe in ourselves? How do we find purpose in our lives? Can the hurts of the past be redeemed?
May this issue of The Scene encourage you to ask your own questions, find your own answers, and draw inspiration from others to pursue your own path — the one that will make “all the difference.”
Rebecca Brant
Editor