Build your own religion - find your Holy Places

Lent 2020 - Day 12

The founders of early Christianity would often appropriate the trappings of earlier religions - for example the festival of Sol Invictus on 25 December became Christmas Day. And places of veneration from neolithic times, especially on hilltop locations, were often chosen as sites for early Christian churches as the religion spread across Europe.

Spirit of place - genus locii - platzgeist - that specific character, atmosphere, ambience or klimat - is particularly important to me. It has a huge influence on one's state of mind. Some places make me feel happy, some anxious, some get me down.

I feel the comfort and familiarity of the Old. From soaring medieval cathedrals and half-timbered village pubs to Brictorian Britain and heritage railway centres, anywhere that carries me back to times before my birth will attract me more than a landscape of distribution centres, service stations, flat-roofed pubs and 1930s terraced houses. The sprawl out west from Ealing before Greater London finally meets the countryside.

Spirit of place is very important to me. Setting down spiritual roots, a beacon, a milestone. Call me unambitious, but I have no great desire to travel further than around Poland and Great Britain; these two countries are where my soul is from, I want to know them even better, depth rather than breadth.

Where are you actually from?

Time to think about Spirit of Place and what it means to the human consciousness. Unbidden memories of places I've visited are fascinating. They are of specific places/moments, which for no reason, pop into my head. I can be doing something around the house, working at my computer, sitting in a canteen or office meeting, and *PAFF!* - there it is - the perfect simulacrum of how I felt at a precise place, at a precise moment in time, that qualia memory moment.

William Wordsworth described this phenomenon accurately in his poem The Daffodils:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude

Thinking back about the many of these I have had, I can see a pattern. The places, the moments - they repeat themselves frequently. New ones are added to the canon. But they too repeat. They resurface, combine and recombine in dreams. Often my dreams are in a hybrid Warsaw-London, England-Poland setting.

Some places have a strong fascination for me. Watching Sir John Betjeman's Metro-Land on the BBC TV the night it aired, 26 February 1973, had a strong impact on me. I was 15 at the time, and after seeing it, I was drawn to visit, time and time again, many of the places shown in the programme. In particular the far reaches of Metro-land, beyond Aylesbury - out to Quainton Road, Verney Junction and Brill. Another such area is around the Catesby Tunnel in Northamptonshire. I have been many times, it inspires me.

Poland has vast appeal to me - the chance to travel out into the Polish countryside in high summer by motorcycle. I cannot wait. Poland has an entirely different feel to Britain - different topography, the lie of the land, the roads, the villages. More like America of the late 1940s and early 1950s, I feel a strong affinity with that klimat. Moving to Poland had a profound impact on my spirit-of-place sensibilities.

"It don't matter which way I'm comin' from, it's which way I'm goin' to."

The Road goes on Forever

 I feel with each journey, I am laying down markers, preferences, familiarities; they return to me - not just 10,000 daffodils, tossing their heads in sprightly dance - many scenes; rural, urban, sunny, snowy, foggy *PAFF! A foggy morning, Elthorne Park, Hanwell, autumn 1969, on my way to school, Boston Manor Station on the Piccadilly Line, posters for the musical film, Paint Your Wagon on the platform... that exact feeling I had that day.

Pilgrimage features in many religions, it is a surprisingly common feature. The journey to a place of cult or veneration, is a ritual, an obligation. But why that particular place? What was it about the spirit of that place, its klimat, that determined that it should become a shrine, a place of pilgrimage? To what extent is the journey as important as the destination - a metaphor for spiritual quest?

Why does our brain store and then reform memories of place and time? What evolutionary advantage does this phenomenon bestow upon us? Like beacons, drawing us back, memories that will return and strengthen association of mind and place. Familiar, anomalous memories in future lives...

Once you have your place, you can set off on Pilgrimage...

This time last year:
An introduction to quantum physics

This time two years ago:
Right and wrong in science and philosophy

This time four years ago:

Free thinking at the Second Vatican Council

This time six years ago:
Getting ul. Karczunkowska ready for Biedronka opening

This time seven years ago: 

God's own risk

This time eight years ago:
A third of the way through Lent

This time eight years ago:
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This time ten years ago:
Congruent consciousness