In the company of angels…
Cathedrals of leaves and why I cannot stop tears when I walk into a house of God.
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
Albert Camus
Hello lovely readers and writers, welcome back, thank you for dropping by for another wander with me.
With autumn rains arriving late this year, my hill is quite lively! Mushrooms, have burst through the earth in their hundreds though not, sadly, so many of edible type. I’ve failed to find even one giant horse mushroom, cèpe or chanterelle. What I do find in abundance are the deadly poisonous Destroying Angels (amanita virosa), perfect, pure white mushrooms. Regardless of the edible mushrooms I don’t gather, they are utterly enchanting.
Unlike me, the trees that skirt the edges of the fields are sighing in appreciation of the nourishing rain, they have lost their water starved dullness, find energy enough to begin laying down autumn colours, carpets of gold, ochre and cinnamon, a last swishing song and dance before sleep - my hill is edged in gold crinoline dotted with white polka dots and a thousand tiny insects dance in low sunbeams between branches like choirs of angels! Can you imagine anything more beautiful?
But these are the harbingers of winter days and I wonder if the trees hear the sigh in my smile as clearly as I hear the relief in their sighs?
On the subject of angels, one of the classes I work with prepared a small concert for the their local church this week, tears rolled down my cheeks for the entirety…
When I was a child, before the Sunday mornings when I was forced into a taxi with my middle sister Gina to attend catechism lessons, the only angel I knew of was Hans Christian Andersen’s - The Angel. The God of this story seemed an irrelevance at that young age. All I could feel was the love and kindness of The Angel, all I could see were flowers and wings… and the saving of good and beautiful things. I was a dreamy child.
The primary instigator of our unwilling inauguration into the Catholic Church was my father. Perhaps gently persuaded, I realised in later years, by his very Catholic French mother, our grandmother, though I don’t remember her ever attending a mass. Certainly, we had never been regular church goers, far from it! The only occasion my father went to church was if there was something to celebrate afterwards with a glass of wine.
Our foray into religion was short lived however, by the time my younger sister (8 years my junior) was old enough to attend he had long since decided that the effort of trying to raise three indoctrinated angels was harder by far than accepting the three free spirited angels he already had and thankfully, baby sister Beth, was never subjected to the horrors of the interior of the convent or it’s terrifyingly bleak gardens.
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
― Tennessee Williams
Notre Dame was but a few minutes drive in the taxi, a journey lasted an eternity to us. The nuns who drove us never spoke, not even a polite hello which helped not at all in making either of us feel in the slightest way enthusiastic, we knew nothing of their vow of silence of course. The two hours that followed were filled with excruciatingly long lessons on scriptures we neither understood nor had any desire to. Both my sister and I agreed that the silence was preferable by far.
The convent was imposing, hostile, surrounded by a high sandstone wall. It was almost hidden from view by a meticulously kept garden full of dark conifers and evergreen shrubs. I can still feel the prickle of goosebumps tingling my skin the second we walked through the gates. The haunting darkness of the closely clipped yew hedges reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe stories my mother loved to read, terrifying imaginings of ghouls and ghosts crowded my head. It took all our will power to not run the few short meters to the entrance, to not scream. The hedges, three times taller and five times wider than we were could have been a maze, we imagined we’d never see the outside of which again should we be left. That garden never changed, not from one season or year to the next, always the plants that grew there were the same shape and the same colour, never a stray weed or a stone out of place on any one of the many paths. Like a painted backdrop rolled down from the sky. We never saw a solitary soul with a garden tool.
Inside was worse, forever dark; a labyrinth of corridors, doors and stairways that would have found us lost and terrified in seconds were we ever left alone - mercifully we weren’t. On every surface there were reliquaries containing hideous sculptures of someone deemed important enough to warrant the title saint. Religious artefacts and paintings peered accusingly down at us from the walls and every windowsill as if willing us with their piercing gaze to learn to accept their holiness. Demanding forgiveness for our sins. Lost souls seemed to speak in whispers everywhere, a haunting sound that echoed in every room; the sighs of the dead, or so we thought. We could even smell them. I still can if I walk into a church; that faintly musty aroma, dead flowers and old stone, mixed with a hint of the sweet scent of expectation; redemption that accompanies unwaveringly devout belief.
The fragrance of faith.
I think often of the hours we spent in the company of the nuns and their holy relics, their devoutness and immovable belief in the invisible god they worshipped. My older self has even envied such deeply embedded faith, the ability to transcend reality, a drug free form of escapism - Nirvana. For most of my life it has felt elusive, a state that not only took practice and patience but a belief in an entity entirely out of my grasp.
Yet always, to find faith in something felt intrinsic to contentment.
My sporadic search to understand religion has served to prove one thing; it is personal. To each and everyone one of us a different meaning can be told and held. A place or being for the individual alone to discover. The sisters of the convent were content with their God and their sacred statues and paintings, their prayers and scriptures. To me it needed to be something far more tangible, a physical entity I could touch and hold, it had to be visibly glorious or terrifying at the same time, for it to have any meaning at all.
That which I could actually feel and grasp with all my senses, I eventually discovered, was nature. More precisely, my hill, though it is no more mine than it is the farmers who plough and seed it. I think of it as my sacred place. I am, after all, one of only two humans that walk its slopes every day, that know every contour, shed tears of grief when a tree is ripped from its roots whether by wind or machine. These millions of tons of volcanic rock and stone with all its secrets and stories, this is what I was searching for.
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim defined religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things”. Well, my own is perhaps not unified but it has become a sacred belief ever growing, ever stronger.
Here, on my hill, I have found all I need.
Today, if I walk through the door into a religious building, I still hear those voices we heard as children walking the corridors of Notre Dame, so much so that tears fall unbidden from my eyes, every time. And, why I am drawn to the slopes of a hill, its woodland and meadows, a sacred place of worship.
Thank you for reading A hill and I
With love and wishes for a gentle glide into the weekend…
Susie
I have discovered so many writers who link nature to our senses and beliefs on
, the following are just a few that you will absolutely love too; writes beautifully about the power of memories and how they can be brought to vividly life again by scents… the connection between human and tree - an essay written from her heart on some of the worlds oldest and most sacred trees. by Samantha Clark - an essay questioning a right to beauty.
“Beauty can be understood as a door into the realm of the sacred, a glimpse of the divine. But even if our worldview is secular, beauty still opens us up….”
Kindest thanks for sharing this piece Chasey - you’ve made my day! 🙏🏽
Your story brings back my own unpleasant memories of the Catholic religion. Like you, nature is where I feel most content, it is my sanctuary, my Eden. Love n light my Sweet Soul!