Caught Up in God

(Please be patient, as there are several pictures to load. For more pictures of the urban mandalas, visit Unable to Grasp God’s Essence.)

Since I’ve taken to riding a bicycle around town, I find myself in a proximity to my surroundings impossible from the insulation of a car; and I have discovered places I had no idea existed.

One of these is a real jewel: the McRorie Community Garden in the southeast part of town, incorporating vegetables, flowers, and artwork. All of these, it seems to me, testify to the hopefulness and creativity of the human spirit, especially since the art is for the most part constructed of found objects.

Some of the artworks are made of old hubcaps and are what I would call “urban mandalas.”

Mandalas

We tend to see the mandala as belonging to the East — indeed the word comes from Sanskrit and means “circle.” However, the mandala, although we haven’t always named it that, is also part of Western art and symbolism, found in the rose window, the labyrinth, and the Celtic cross, to name a few examples. In any context, the mandala can symbolize wholeness, the universe, or the Eternal. In the Christian context, the mandala draws us toward Christ.

While it is easy to live our lives on the periphery, the mandala seeks to draw us inward, toward the center of reality. In the medieval rose window, the center typically (though not always) contains a representation of Christ.

Labyrinths in the Middle Ages, such as the one in the Cathedral of Chartres, allowed Christians to make a virtual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, or even to the heavenly Jerusalem, while the four quadrants made visible the cross of Christ.

The Celtic Cross, with its circle representing eternity and embracing the cross itself, leads our eye to the intersection of the arms of the cross, and thus symbolically to the center of the mystery.

Toward the stillness

Whether labyrinth or rose window or Celtic cross, these mandalas encourage us to long for and move toward the still point where our spinning minds and emotions can rest in the divine mystery.

And this brings us back to our hubcaps. In its myriad forms, not just in meditation using a mandala, prayer draws us from the peripheral toward the hub of the wheel, toward what is essential, toward what is real, toward that point of stillness that always exists, even as the wheel spins. (Note that a simpler form of window related to the rose window is called the “wheel window.”)

As T. S. Eliots writes:

At the still point of the turning world….
…at the still point, there the dance is…

T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets

I admit that I wasn’t thinking about wholeness or eternity or the divine when I visited the garden. I was simply delighting in the unexpected beauty of the mandalas. But happily we don’t have to be conscious of the meaning of symbols in order for them to have an effect on us.

For more urban mandalas, visit visit Unable to Grasp God’s Essence.