of attention and hospitality
For centuries we have known thin places where the boundary between the quotidian world and the other feels permeable. We call it atmosphere, spirit, genius loci, presence. We sense it along ancient pilgrim paths, on small islands and mountain tops, beside holy wells, in forests or along remote shorelines. We feel it in places that have known centuries of prayer and reverence across traditions, from ancient tombs and megaliths to soaring cathedrals, from a tenth century mosque in Toledo to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community believed that the separation between heaven and earth is only in the mind’s eye, that, in truth, there is no separation, which reminds me of Wendell Berry’s assertion that there are no unsacred places, only sacred places and desecrated places.
This is less about a place where heaven briefly breaks through than the belief that the whole world is permeated with whatever we might mean by ‘sacred’, if we attend to it. The belief too that we can break the spell with desecrations of pollution and colonisation, our reduction of the world to commodity and ‘thing’. The thin places become simply the sites where attention has accrued, over decades, centuries, back beyond memory… A sacramental imagination found in Celtic Christianity and Druidic tradition and other ancient ways of perceiving: that all places can become transparent to grace when we dwell in them attentively.
I’ve come to Zaragoza with Adam to research a novel that includes the elusive Ben Haddaj. It’s a labyrinthine place where I get lost on every trip to the market, certain that the streets move overnight. The city buzzes with treasures — an amphitheatre of the former Roman city of Cesaraugusta and the Aljafería Palace, Ben Haddaj’s home.
We visit on a blistering day, sit under trellised arches listening to water tinkle along irrigation channels into a pool, finches celebrating their nests in the plump orange trees, fruit hanging like Christmas tree ornaments. We marvel at the Great Hall and courtyard and I leave Adam photographing exquisite white arches while I cross the north portico and stand in the doorway of the tiny oratory, where once Ben Haddaj worshipped.
Alone in the tiny mosque’s cool dark shadows, I imagine Ben Haddaj making his last prayers as a Muslim before boarding a ship to Jerusalem, a place he would never reach.
[…] The horseshoe archway over the mihrab on the qibla wall, pointing the way to the Kaaba in Mecca, is a small copy of the one in the Mezquita of Córdoba. […] I look towards the domed ceiling and back to the niche where…
Ben Haddaj stands, hands raised as though in surrender, his back to me, facing the mihrab. The hood and fabric of his burnous are thrown back. His qamis, which falls to his knees, is of the same cotton as his sirwal and he doesn’t wear a turban, but a simple taqiyah, similar to a Jewish yarmulke.
Allahu Akbar, he says, as he places his right hand over his left and begins to recite the Istiftah Du’aa, his voice clear but soft. […] Finally, his voice so low I can scarcely hear…
He turns, smiles in my direction. And I shiver in the heat as he lifts a hand in salute and…
Ah, there you are, Adam says behind me.
As an earnest twelve-year-old in confirmation classes at my local church I learnt that a sacrament is ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’.
Sacrament is a word that comes from Old French:
consecration
mystery
In Latin, sacramentum, a sacred oath.
Grace is a multi-faceted word:
pardon
mercy
favour
thanks
elegance
Now I find sacraments in the forest. The pardon of the earth’s gifts that persist despite the many ways we wound her. The mercy of a thunder storm after a long heat wave. The favour of herbs whose good will speaks to our bodies if only we will listen. The sense of thanksgiving that comes from paying attention to the trees, the plants, the birds, the land… The elegance of an ecosystem that is visible and invisible — the life under the ground that sustains the life above.
Walking in the forest that surrounds the house, a gathering of plants and butterflies, trees and birds, insects and animals. I stop again and again — a world on fire, a world of abundance —
honeysuckle
valerian
nettle
cow wheat
royal fern
bramble
gallic rose
pennywort
enchanter’s nightshade
bittercress
bird’s foot trefoil
meadowsweet
marsh thistle
yellow pimpernel
campion
loosestrife
sweet briar
Last year, on a tiny patch of scrubby ground at the entrance to the forest, a little enclave of flowers appeared overnight. A profusion of borage, meadowsweet, and magically, one tall yellow evening primrose. After the October storms, the patch was devastated by heavy machinery that went in to extract fallen trees. I thought there would be no growth this year, the ground churned and compacted. But late in the summer a single evening primrose springs up… then more and more. A vulnerable-looking flower rising from a small patch of traumatised ground.
There is, across all sacramental language, a sense of permeability — to listen with all senses open to the heart, to the land, to your particular experience of the divine. A sense of hospitality. Many ancient sites of prayer are places of refuge, places that would take in travellers and strangers. A hospitality that dwells in places, people and non-human creatures, that says yes to the question: Is there room for you here?
In so many places I experience being welcomed, being made room for, an experience that is fundamental to opening in welcome in turn.
Growing up I had an uncle who loved the folk music of Gordon Lightfoot and used to buy me each new LP as it came out. There’s a chorus line from one of the songs that seems to have become the epitome of Ti Triskele, our house in the forest:
The house you live in will never fall down
if you pity the stranger that stands at your door
The house seems to be a beacon to people a little lost. Two elder Belgian ladies cycling the route vert and unable to recharge their ebikes at the local Gite d’Étap that is often closed despite existing for those on the path. An Italian family of three generations, soaked with rain, hungry for breakfast and bemused that every boulangerie for miles had been closed (the phenomenon of Monday). A drunk young man who’d got off his bus at the stop near us, not realising that any other bus would be a matter for consulting the auguries. A party travelling by several horse drawn painted caravans who’d forgotten to pack a barbecue set to cook on. Many cyclists seeking to pump up tyres or in need of a puncture repair kit…
Tina arrived around 9.30 in the evening. I was finishing teaching online, tired and struggling with gallbladder pain. She’d arrived too late to be let into the tourist Gite and wanted a bed for the night. She hadn’t eaten. We chatted as she ate, made a bed on the sofa in the living room, found clean towels. She asked if we were going our the next day. Adam was going shopping but she wanted the other direction so he said he’d drive her to Huelgoat to get her started.
In the morning she had disappeared.
There was something strangely unsettling about her slipping out without a word, but I’m glad we were open to her.
I’ve been reading the letters and journals of Louisa May Alcott. Her house was often open house, especially during summers when it became her father’s philosophy school. And she struggled with it. I understand the ambiguity. I love to host people — for dinners, for visits, for writing weeks… yet I love solitude too and the balance can be delicate, easily tipping into exhaustion. But hospitality isn’t the same as sociability. It’s not about whether or not we are energized by company, but whether we have cultivated a space — physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual — where another person can find welcome and sanctuary. If I’m exhausted beyond measure, I can’t truly attend to another person. I can only react, or perform. Perhaps solitude and spending time being received and listening in the more-than-human world are not the opposite of hospitality, but of its conditions.
Each time we go to the UK we stop at Buckfast Abbey, usually on the day of the return journey. I can sit for hours in the little physic garden, listening to the bells that lull me into trance.
And I always sit for some time in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament. After the work-place assaults in the church, I could only describe my former faith as amnesia. It had blazed bright since I was four years old, entranced by a stained glass window that admitted me to otherness. The amnesia had nothing to do with bad things happening to me, things that left injury and chronic illness, and everything to do with who held me and who didn’t. So many people who never stepped inside a church rallied in support. There were individuals in the congregation who were miracles of kindness, but many felt angry and betrayed by my vulnerability to physical and emotional fragmentation. And in the wider hierarchy the response veered from cold to hostile. My being assaulted was showing the church in a bad light. My illness was questioned or simply labelled as fake. Diocesan representatives visited to threaten me with homelessness if I didn’t pull myself together. Not one priest or bishop ever offered to pray with me or to bring the sacrament.
The language of the Bible and liturgy had formed me and runs through my veins still, but I did not step inside a church for years. Now I sit in this chapel and talk to the figure of Christ as an ancestor and a friend, the way I talk to writers who have helped me become the story I am. Not authorities, not gods, not gurus, but people who walked the path before me, whose legacies accompany me —part of the landscape through which I now walk.
The stained glass is in the chapel is beautiful and deeply moving — the host at the table, giving all that he has. I have reservations about sacrifice, but the permeability, the hospitality are unquestionable.
I am in a place where the sacred meets the material.
What are your places?
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*the long quotes are from my memoir, At the Heart’s Farthest Edge