A Room with a View
Peering into the window of my smartphone, which is propped on a little pile of books, I try to screen out the sounds of the valley and concentrate on what is happening in the zoom space. It feels counter-intuitive. Surely I should be giving my whole attention to the living world behind the wooden shutters rather than staring at this piece of glass? But this is the Encounter course. It is Wednesday evening and the fact that I am in the mountains of Abruzzo during the half term break is neither here nor there. I turn up the volume to better hear the group over the screaming of the swifts outside the window. And yet, perhaps one of the most important things I have learned over the last two years, through the study and practice of Spiritual Direction, is that there is no ‘here or there’. Everything is a part of the whole.
Views from the window.
In our first year we examined the origins of the tradition. Perhaps because we live on the island of Britain I found myself particularly attracted by the lives of the Celtic Christians. ‘Here is the Celtic way of seeing the world,’ Esther de Waal writes, ‘it cannot be understood only in cerebral terms; it speaks to the heart. It is closer to poetry, and, like poetry, it must remain ultimately elusive.’ The Celts believed that our true home is in God, and that God lives in our hearts. In order to better understand this, the Celtic Christians left their homes, and went on pilgrimage, taking their true home with them. When a group of Irish wanderers were presented to King Alfred of Wessex, and were asked to give an account of why they had been drifting in a well-provisioned little boat, without oars, for a week before washing up on the coast of Cornwall, they gave this account of themselves:
“‘We stole away because we wanted, for the love of God, to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where.’ ”
I have come to this hilltop village in Abruzzo by way of a holiday, yet this too is a kind of pilgrimage. Everything is, if we will let it. In the church in the piazza there is a saint. His name is San Buono. Saint Good. When I first visited the church, and when Mass was ended, my companion showed me his resting place. The place where the altar is situated is directly over the place where San Buono is entombed, lying peacefully on his side, a palm leaf and a sword denoting his martyrdom and the method of his execution. Buono was a young priest who had been executed on the Via Latina, along with eleven other Christians, in the year 259 for refusing to renounce his faith. His feast day is August 1st. At this space of time very little can be known about San Buono’s life and death. It is his influence, his tenacity, and his purity of heart – his legend – which permeates every stone of the village. The Catacombs of Via Latina, which date back to the 4th Century, were rediscovered in 1955 with their rich haul of frescoes depicting both Christian and Classical scenes. The physical proximity of the early history of the church defines the valley, the Mass bell in the convent below a reminder of the rule of life.
The following images depict the death of Cleopatra, the Samaritan woman at the well and the raising of Lazarus, the secular and sacred are depicted side by side in the Catacombs.
When we stop for our break in the Encounter session I open the shutters. The light has faded. Green forest rolls in every direction. Below, the back of a red kite is briefly visible as it drifts on the warm air. The back! The swifts have all but gone, rising on their vesper flights. Named after the evening prayer, this describes their circular evening flight pattern. It carries them to heights of perhaps 8000 feet from which they can safely sleep, or at any rate, half-sleep, shutting down one side of their brain at a time, some part of them always attentive. A last cuckoo calls across the darkening valley, and I’m returned again to the Celtic saints, to the notion of pilgrimage as adventure, and of poetry as a way of seeing the world:
“The clear cuckoo sings to me, lovely discourse
in its grey cloak from the crest of the bushes;
truly – may the Lord protect me! –
well do I write under the forest wood.”
Questions for you and your directee
What does the word ‘pilgrimage’ mean for you? When did you last consciously find yourself thinking of your actions in terms of pilgrimage?
How do you balance the life inside the electronic screen with what is going on outside the window? Do you find yourself separating your ‘spiritual’ and ‘secular’ ‘lives’? What is the impact of this?
When you visit a new place, how open are you to the life and traditions of that community?
How ‘porous’ are you?
What does the word ‘welcome’ mean?
Katharine Norbury
Katharine Norbury is a writer and lecturer in creative writing. Her first book, The Fish Ladder (2016) Bloomsbury, combines travelogue, nature writing and memoir. She is the editor of Women on Nature (2021) Unbound, a collection of over one hundred women’s voices on the natural world expressed through poetry, gardening diaries, journals, fiction, travelogue and life writing over a period of 700 years in the islands of Britain and Ireland. She lives in London and is a second year student on the Encounter course.