The Place Within

I have recently returned from pilgrimage and, while I am sad at seeing what was a beautiful experience come to an end, I was also glad to be home.

As it was my first overseas trip in over a decade, I found being personally present on the sites where St Paul would have been present exhilarating. This is not only due to the historical significance of the sites themselves. As a Christian, such visits to those sites were an the embodied connection to the foundational figures of the early Church, particularly in circumstances where the pilgrims celebrated Eucharists. From where I stood, it was a visceral ecclesiological experience, where the one Church is expressed in time as well as space.

Another dimension that I only became aware of since coming back is the great difference between seeing a historical site on a screen and actually being there yourself. A lot does depend on the quality of the guide, but when one has a good guide whilst in a site, one gets far more than an immersion into the historical situation. Indeed, one really gets a visceral experience of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called “intervolvement”, in which you are not only within the life world situated in the site, but also that both the place and its situation moves within you, as if the ancient city is now mapped out within one’s innards.

Where I got this sense was in the monastic region of Meteora (pictured above), where monastaries built from the early 1400s sat on the edge of mountain up to 400 meters above the ground. The  visage of the mountain itself was not only imposing. One clearly got the sense that, moving through the monastic sites and the liturgical spaces adorned from floor to ceiling with icons, that those spaces pierced the barrier between myself and those lifeworlds, and moved within me as I moved within them.

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