Healing Happens

 

Power of the Circle

“In a circle there is no above or below, ahead or behind. Everything is equidistant form the center.”

Joan Borysenko (A Woman’s Journey to God, p.82; Riverhead Books, 1999)

          I wonder if you’ve ever belonged to a “Circle?” When I was a young child, my great aunts, Lyda and Bess, had a Quilting Circle. The frame with the quilt wrapped on it, lowered from the ceiling so that chairs placed around it allowed the women to see each other while stitching. This was when they caught up on the town’s gossip, made plans for church events, discussed who was sick and needed food prepared for them, heard each other’s worries and concerns and fielded solutions. I think of Quilting Circles as an early form of group therapy—they certainly were where women went to get support and to experience community.

          In the church I attended, the generations before me had “Women’s Circles” which were study and prayer groups, but they also made things the church needed—like seat cushions and Chrismon ornaments. They raised the money for outreach services by having bake sales, and garage sales. At my church in the 90’s, every summer the Women’s Circle hosted what we called “The Blue Roof Gala,” because the church had an A-frame blue roof. It was a giant event that filled the building with every imaginable kind of junk and attracted thousands of people. That circle of women were formidable organizers and on Gala Day, trust me, you did not want to get in their way.

          In the early 2000’s, several women and I organized a different kind of circle—a Drumming Circle. We gathered once a month, both men and women, for drumming and exploring spiritual intuition and experiences. It was not uncommon to have forty or fifty people in the circle. We also painted a canvas labyrinth for walking to the center, and later built one on the church grounds. Nowadays, I think of my coffee klatch as this kind of circle—we meet outside, in a circle, and talk about things that matter to us.

          The circle with a dot in the middle is among the earliest human representations of God. God at the center. On the human body, this translates to the heart at the center. Circles are different from pyramids in that they have no top-down quality to them—everyone in the circle is equidistant from the center, and when a person goes to the center, they are encircled by the entire group. In our Drumming Circle, we built an altar in the center by laying a colorful blanket on the floor with candles and flowers. People brought whatever they wanted to have blessed that day and placed it on the blanket. As Joan Borysenko said in her book, A Woman’s Journey to God, “all forays into the center of the circle are marked by wisdom and healing power. And when anyone in the circle touches the center, information flows to everyone else.” If this sounds mystical to you, that’s because it was, and it still is. When people come together in circles with the intention of blessing each other and themselves, healing happens on many levels.

          Fr. David Steindl-Rast, in his interview with Krista Tippet On-Being, said that in the future, humans will not arrange themselves in power pyramids with one figure at the pinnacle and everyone else beneath him, but in a circular path that leads from one door to the next. I hope and pray that he is prescient in that prediction. What the world needs more than anything right now is a sacred center.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane