Sanctuary
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Ian Hill
And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it. As You Like It, Wm. Shakespeare, Act II, Sc. 1
… we believe if we can say what many already know in such a way as to incite courage, if the image or the word or the act breaches the indifference by which people survive, day to day, enough will protest that by their physical voices alone they will stir the hurricane. Resistance, Barry Lopez.
I had no dreams of leaving; only of arriving.
In mediaeval England, fugitives from justice could seek sanctuary in a church or monastery. Some were criminals; some were misfits, outcasts, the dispossessed. After 40 days, however, it was necessary to abjure the realm; to confess one’s crimes and depart for the nearest port, from where one would either board the nearest ship or, if no ship was departing, to walk into the sea each day as a token of good faith.
Where did they go, these people who were forced to renounce all the norms and structures of the world they have known? On what strange ships did they sail, to which unknown ports? What may have been lost with their leaving, in the way that each departure also promises an arrival?
I think again and again of that act of walking into the waves, freighted with a sense of atonement, of absolution, of the healing promise of salt water; the salt of sweat, of tears, of the sea.
I think of the times I arrive at this upland moor on a summer’s evening, seeking some form of sanctuary as a penitent at the priory gates. I feel at times to be standing on the edge of some vast and unfathomable ocean, glimpsing only the blur of movement at the horizon, like the faint outline of a departing ship.
Perhaps those mixed senses of awe and fear spring from the same place, lodged deep in the pelvis like an ache. And perhaps rage comes from the same place, too; that sense of powerlessness and injustice which haunts our days like a ghost at a feast. It lies beyond, like a storm gathering over the hills. It is the darkness which clouds our days.
To abjure the realm is to commit oneself to a wholly new life; a life perhaps unknown until one steps into it, as a fugitive into the sea. It is a surrendering and a welcoming; a stepping away and a stepping beyond. It demands the sense of reverence which is necessary if we are to live a just life on this earth.
On the darkening hills, the evening sun touches each of the grass heads with gold. They glimmer with the last of the day’s light; like phosphorescence, like fireflies, like a map of the heavens.