We are not human beings on a spiritual path, but spiritual beings on a human path. In 1992, the Reverend Lauren Artress brought the labyrinth to Grace Cathedral in an effort to bring people back to their center and allow them to experience Spirit for themselves. It's been a tremendous success. Over a million people have walked the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral alone, with hundreds of other sites springing up across the country. Artress feels that walking the labyrinth can help us regain our spiritual base by emphasizing the intuitive, caring, and creative aspects of our selves and relaxing the logical, reasoning aspects which have been dominant in Western civilization over the last few centuries.
Labyrinths are different from mazes.
Labyrinths, on the other hand, have one well-defined path that leads us into the center and back out again. Labyrinths predate Christianity by over a millennium. The most famous labyrinth from ancient times was the Cretan one, the supposed lair of the mythological Minotaur, which Theseus slew with the aid of Ariadne and her spool of thread. Turf labyrinths still exist in England, Germany and Scandinavia, and are thought to be linked with local feminine deities and fertility rituals. The adoption of labyrinths into the Christian Church is not very well documented, but they were used traditionally as a site of pilgrimage.