Circumambulation

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Are you discussing the Monastic tradition or an Eastern tradition?
 
Making a vow to pray is an okay thing to do. Turning it into “you must walk counter clockwise around the church” moves from prayer to some sort of superstition. The Church defines positions for the Mass, not for personal prayer.
 
It’s not a vow to pray. It’s something like this:

“Saint X, if you help me with this, I will walk around your church/ pray the Rosary twice/ make a pilgrimage to your shrine.”

Really, the vow depends on the person. It’s a private thing. I understand that it’s not done everywhere , but please stop calling it a superstition.

The OP was vague in his orginal post, he specified what he was talking about here:
Arimor said:
People would pray for a favour and make a promise that if the favour was granted, they would then fulfil said promise by, e.g. praying the rosary whilst walking on their knees around a church or up a long flight of steps etc.
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In addition, I should have probably added before in answer to the OP that since his vow is a personal thing, there is no right way to fulfull it. Depends on what he promised to do in exchange for the saints’ intercession.
 
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Does it work? Please tell me it does! If it does I shall be forever praying to St Anthony.
 
BartholomewB said:
If I had to guess I’d say anticlockwise, in the same direction as the Stations of the Cross.
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The Stations are not always anticlockwise. I was just at Mass this morning in a church where they are clockwise. Pretty sure I have seen others like this too, although it is more common to have them be anticlockwise.
 
Another poster, @esieffe, said the same thing. I admit I’m surprised. It isn’t something I ever paid close attention to, but it was my impression that they all went the same way.

In the case of the OP’s planned circumambulation, if it’s something a fair number of people do in a particular church, then it’s obviously helpful to have them all going in the same direction.
 
In the case of the church I just mentioned, it is one of the “modern” (appears to have been built maybe in the 70s from the artwork) churches and has the tabernacle off on an altar to the side rather than in the center of the main sanctuary. The stations begin on the side without the tabernacle and end next to the tabernacle. This makes sense to me, but I’m not sure if they planned it that way.

The same church has outdoor stations of the cross which for some reason unknown to me has a carving of Jesus getting stripped as Station #2 whereas the carving of Jesus taking up his cross is labeled right in the carving as Station #10 and put in the sequence right before Jesus is nailed to the cross. It was extremely confusing till I realized that whoever carved the stations had gotten these two reversed, I’m presuming it was an error.
 
Anicette said:
@BartholomewB, What is the link between the direction of the station of the Cross and the direction of circumambulation?
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On the assumption – which has now turned out to be false – that the Stations of the Cross were invariably placed so as to run in the same direction, I would imagine there must have been some underlying reason for that choice. I don’t know what the reason was, but there must have been one, otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.

Whatever the reason was that led to that choice, it would presumably influence all other choices of a similar nature, i.e. one direction would be seen as the “right” one in all cases, and the opposite direction as the “wrong” one.
 
Maybe the direction of the Stations of the Cross are influenced by the material constraints of the church building? To be practical?
 
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In a number of High Anglican churches I was involved with processions went clockwise when they were on ‘High days and Holy days’ and counter clockwise during penitential seasons.
 
Anicette said:
Maybe the direction of the Stations of the Cross are influenced by the material constraints of the church building? To be practical?
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Did you ever try reading the modern form of the rite of baptism? It’s brutal!! There are so many constraints and exceptions depending not only on the layout of the space but also on everything else that a lay person could hardly understand it. Yes it does cover every possible architecture plus layout of the baptismal and so forth…

Not only that. But some of the liturgical details were simply coded into tradition centuries ago (why were the stations of the cross carved into stone in that order in that XII century church?), some had been subjected to lengthy collective critique over centuries (the reasons aren’t given, because that would be to complex and lengthy, only the rules and guidelines are given). And some, we can suppose, was simply given by the Holy Spirit at one point to a mystic or saint and became crystallized, as is…Tradition.

Which is completely different of popular devotion…And if you notice carefully, hardly anyone comments on liturgical details or their origins because that’s a matter of expertise seldomly covered outside specialized literature (and some of the reasons were simply lost in time).

But yes, every single detail has plentiful reason to be conducted the exact way it is.
 
Unfortunately, in the 70s and 80s in USA, I don’t think people were paying any attention to these types of details. Which is how we end up with stuff like Stations of the Cross without a cross for each station, meaning that they don’t meet the requirements for a plenary indulgence, or the carving of Station 2 being labeled Station 10 and vice versa. For a while there the churches were getting so weird, you were lucky if they had stations at all, or even a Mary statue.
 
Okay…

I was just wandering because some people here link the direction of the circumambulation with the Stations of the Cross…
adgloriam said:
But yes, every single detail has plentiful reason to be conducted the exact way it is.
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Not necessary. For exemple a church near us is not built ad orientem. The original church was, but not the reconstruction, only because it was unpractical to build a bigger church is the right direction…
 
LOL, yeah, they have that effect on people! Where in the Domus Celtica are you from?
 
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