I sat with a stranger for lunch once. She wore beads and braids and the dark skin of her old African homeland. She, like I, was a preacher's kid who no longer practiced Christianity. She described her year-long initiation to her Yoruba Orisha. Our conversation, in just half an hour went deep in a way that made the rest of the world--in this case a bustling food justice conference--recede into the background. Before we parted ways, she told me that her father, a retired preacher like mine, prays every morning for his next divine appointment. She said, "Adam, we just had one of those."
There's so much in what you've shared here, Dougald. The church within a church. The state of un-belonging. Thank you for laboring to gather these potent words.
This really comforts me and I can’t fully explain why. The metaphor but also the idea that we physically build within the crumbling walls new ways of worshipping the Earth and slip backwards to reclaim what was there before those big churches came. There is a truth here, a simplicity, a homecoming and I find the thought of it so beautiful. I’m looking forward to the next part.
Ah, thank you Allie, I'm glad to know these images resonate with you. In his conversation with Anita Goldman, Stephen Jenkinson told a story of a Canadian writer being brought to the realisation, "Christianity does not belong here." What really struck me was the next thing he said: "That's not an eviction order, it's a description of a state of affairs." It raises the question, what would it cost, what would need to occur for what is held within the vessel of these buildings and this tradition to arrive at a state of belonging. Anyway, I'll try to follow where that leads in later posts.
So good and so true. It does not belong here but......it has been, it has built, it has held and it has comforted and like so many things that are changing, it needs to happen with love and respect. We always seem to throw the baby out with the bath water, so I love these discussions on how things might be done with empathy. I also love the image of a church ruin and like stone circles, the sky as the roof, the ground as the floor, lit up with the elements really getting into that decaying building and beautiful things growing inside; moss and ferns. Like all decaying buildings but so much more dramatic and poetic.
Anyway, largely I talk rubbish, but I love your writing and I'm going to go now and listen to that Stephen Jenkinson conversation! Thank you.
"It raises the question, what would it cost, what would need to occur for what is held within the vessel of these buildings and this tradition to arrive at a state of belonging."
We ask a lot of words. Does Ginsberg's poem, Song, address this infinite topic? Love which allows deep rest, deep rest which puts an end to fishing with nets... all the rest. Ginsberg, in Song, speaks of deep rest, of being fully at home, of belonging at last.
I want to find rest in the Christian story sometimes, but it has no rest -- not really. It begins --as typically told--in an expulsion from Eden for the pursuit of knowledge, a terrible sin! Christianity has always been restless, and won't quite let us rest -- or so it seems to me.
But I'm just beginning to understand (a late bloomer) that our culture isn't a long set of footnotes to Plato so much as footnotes to Genesis, Jesus and that weird Garden.
I can only gaze upon Christianity as an outsider while looking at its footnotes. But then, I'm no longer a believer of any kind, not even the Buddhism which was for a while my fishing boat. I'm still busy fishing, but only due to the momentum of the arrow in motion, seeking rest. Silly, no?
Thanks, James. All I'd want to add for today is that the Eden story has been a Jewish story for rather longer than it's been a Christian one, and talking with Jewish friends I'm often humbled at the reminder of how differently the same words have been read in different times and places*, how wide the range of meanings hung on them.
* or, more to the point, by different groups of people living alongside each other in the same time and place
Thank you for this one - I didn't realise your father was ordained! which denomination if I might ask? One other thing - the upturned boat image for every church (most...) is not just that the church is a boat, it's that the church is an ARK :)
Thanks, Sam! Yeah, my dad was a United Reformed Church minister for 35 years. His mother came from Peterhead, but settled in Birmingham, so our family came into the URC through the Scots Presbyterian connection.
And of course, the ark, thank you for bringing that into the weave of images here!
Chimes with a sermon I once heard given by a retired CoE vicar to a small N Yorkshire congregation. 'Maybe we shouldn't worry about what happens to the CoE. Maybe the CoE continuing isn't in God's plan. '
Even at the time, I thought that was a profound statement of faith.
Yes, I think that has to be the perspective of faith. Mistaking the institutions for that which they have, at best, been in service of – whether in a secular or a religious context, this is always an error. (So much of Ivan Illich's writing is about this, one way or another.)
Sep 13, 2023·edited Sep 13, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
When an article of yours appears in my inbox, I always feel a quiver of excitement and read it before anything else. Yet it has taken me this long to comment - sorry about that, because you are one writer for whom I believe it matters to hear from your followers. I'm wresting with my own writing at the moment! Anyway, this idea of "taking the roof off" is important in order to air what lies beneath, (the palimpsest), before building something new and humbler out of salvaged materials, as with the church of St. Andrews at Covehithe. Many years ago someone wrote a particularly offensive racial slur on the road in front of our house (not intended for our family but hurtful to others in the community). The municipality scrubbed it off right away, with all intent to erase its memory, yet leaving it still faintly visible beneath the surface. Over winter rains and traffic wear, it grew less visible but after all these years I still remember what was once there; a palimpsest no longer starkly drawn in white paint yet still serves as reminder of words that harm. Those of us living now must be prepared to "take the roof off" of modernity, raise what lay beneath, and see what good to salvage from the ruins. There's actually a lot of good and you are SO good at leading the way, Dougald!
Sep 7, 2023·edited Sep 7, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
We've been trying to grow woad on a farm not to far from Cove Hithe, on the road between between Halesworth and Laxfield - so called because of the flax, or linen you write about.
We've not been successful! Lol.
Wakelyns, the first agroforestry experiment in the UK, is now doing great work with hemp.
I love the practicality of the villagers rebuilding the smaller church. It makes me think of the Weald and Downland Museum, how these ancient homes can just be packed down, erected and with some mud manure and horse hair made anew. There is a story there of one of the houses that relates to this hinterland or transitional space . It's the house of a cobbler which was erected on the commons illegally but on the border of 3 parishes. It makes me smile. The combination of a useful craft and a question of jurisdiction saved the house from demolition for hundreds of years, it's bones standing renewed to this day.
My partner has the recurring image of the eye of the needle. The bible stories sit amongst us like all the great tales, to comfort and instruct about an older knowledge that's always present. Christianity seems to hold its own test of significance in that needles eye.
Thanks for writing this Dougald. Please keep exploring this aspect of "new-ruining"? "up-ruining"? "re-ruining"? It brought to mind the old Welsh chapel pew which we bought in an auction when the chapel closed some years ago and have outside our front door for putting our boots on. It used to be prayed on and now it's used most days to put boots on. I shall ponder that signficance next time I'm sitting on it to don my muddy boots!
Thanks, Mark! I've always loved stone circles, though somehow never made it to Avebury. Here in Sweden, the stones were erected in "ship settings" rather than circles – and it's striking to me how different it feels, standing inside a set of stones with this directionality, in contrast to the experience of being inside something wholly cyclical.
I've long been drawn to stories of the complex coexistence of different traditions and relations to the sacred on the same site. I wrote about this in the Devil's Door:
Alan Garner's novels Strandloper and Thursbitch contain extraordinary reconstructed accounts of this kind of thing in the northwest of England. And Alan's talk, The Valley of the Demon, tells the story of the journey that led him to write Thursbitch, including discovering an unknown alignment of monoliths in the remote valley where the novel is set:
Thanks a lot, dear Dougald, for these deep thoughts and sharing. In fact, somehow I sensed that you were “headed into these waters” as long as I started reading you. Being myself a catholic priest, one might say that I am sailing out to the “divine deep” from the opposite shore. Yet, I sense that we are somehow together on a common journey.
Thank you, Tobias, I'm glad to read this. There seem to be a lot of small boats out here on these waters. If you've not crossed paths already, let me recommend the writing that Andrew is doing at Bog-down and Aster:
Thanks for a stimulating piece of writing and thinking. A real conversation of thoughts!
What is Federico Campagna getting at with the idea of "making good ruins"? The way I'm thinking about this is through a notion of inverted scaffolding: it's what good ruins bring to the post-future. Speaking in metaphors, the ruined church is a potential scaffolding because what is collapsing is the exoteric dominance of its presence. Ivan Illich was glad to be living in a time of failing scaffolding, for him it promised the liberation of hope from the aspirations of power. Religious institutional collapse is a scaffolding through which its esoteric heart can emerge. To my mind a good ruin is one which is capable of sheltering and evoking the emergent gnosis of the post-future. May be we need good ruins to access the "mundus imaginalis"......
Thanks, Rob - and funny you should mention the Mundus Imaginalis, as I've been thinking about it a good deal this week, partly in relation to the next post in this series.
Campagna talks about "making good ruins" in the context of what kind of moves make sense if your discernment is that you were born into the ending of a world. I've talked about this in various podcasts and conversations - you might dig out the video of my conversation with Lydia Catterall, if you want to hear more.
And yes, Illich is on my mind a lot as we head into this territory. I reread The Rivers North of the Future this summer and its been feeding my thinking.
I just checked out a digital copy of The Rivers North of the Future from my public library. A rather odd thing to "check out" a digital book.... Anyway, I'll begin my reading of it now. A physical copy wasn' t on offer. Oddly, my multi-branch public library has nothing on offer from or about Illich. Nor do any of the many local bookstores!
Very evocative and thought-provoking, Dougald. I especially like your speculation about the vessel being turned upside down. It makes me think of things which were previously hidden coming to light, and things which previously supported from below becoming that which stirs the imagination. Also, I can't help thinking of the ark in the Bible that saved Noah and his family from the flood; the Christian tradition is full of images of arks that save, but the hull which becomes a dome goes all the way back to the creation account. Your meditation on the ruined church has, in other words, prompted me to recall the expanse that came into being on the second day, which always makes me think of an opening where forms may or may not materialise. All the best with your anticipated writing projects!
Ah, James, thank you for bringing me back to that! No doubt one of the things that set the image of the palimpsest ringing through my thoughts this summer.
By the way, the title of your personal 'stack just struck me. An REM reference?
In a curious way, Dougald, The R-Word borrows from the notion of the F-word. In many places (by far not all) the f-word is not to be uttered. It's very taboo -- say, in church. It's got to be among the most taboo of words.
When I began the R-Word, I had hoped to speak the R-word out loud and often, with the hope of wringing some of the taboo out of the word so that folks could have access to the energy embodied in it. The R-word, of course, is revolution, a word songwriter Tracy Chapman suggests we tend to utter in whispers. It's a slightly embarrassing word which we can reference in relation to history, but not to the present.
And the word has been deeply associated with violence for a long damned time. And I thought, hey, let's use this dangerous word right out loud. Let's talk about non-violent revolution -- after all, it's our only hope of having an inhabitable world in the future.
Ah, now, I reckon we find ourselves at crossed purposes, though I'm glad to hear you expand on that name. The poem-letter, though, is published on a 'stack called the Heron House, I think?
Oh, yes! I thought you were asking about The R-Word.
The Heron House, indeed, is a name I borrowed from the title of an REM song, Disturbance at the Heron House . I'm a huge REM fan. Michael Stipe's singing saved my life when I was in my mid twenties, and his painterly song lyrics too.
Cross purposes --- do you mean my positive evaluation of non-violent revolution? That' can't be at crossed purposes, as I understand it, because I fully subscribe to your praxes, which I find very nourishing to hang with.
Your praxes also strongly resonate with Bayo Akomolafe, whose praxis notions also resonate with me.
So I may seem to be missing the point from the two of you, but I doubt that I am. I'm comfortable with the apparent paradox, though. Indeed, it is just the paradox in which rest may be possible for me.
I wonder if you were thinking of stave churches, which, while not literally overturned boats, were built by Viking shipbuilders as a sort of boat in reverse: https://link.medium.com/aIKnCCHfSCb
That's fascinating - and also painful to read, when it comes to the history of conversion. The story I remember had to do with a particular church, I think in Yorkshire, though I couldn't swear it. But it could always be a game of whispers that started with those Viking churches. Thanks for the connection!
Thanks, Rebekah - I'll take a look at that! And more generally, I appreciate the invitation to nuance around these histories. I encounter a lot of black-and-white claims, one way or the other, about how Christianity arrived in our various parts of the world - often from people deeply invested in the side they are arguing for (and often people I have a good deal of respect for).
The phenomenon of the Devil's Door was my own route into a sense that things have often been more complicated, something I wrote about here:
I sat with a stranger for lunch once. She wore beads and braids and the dark skin of her old African homeland. She, like I, was a preacher's kid who no longer practiced Christianity. She described her year-long initiation to her Yoruba Orisha. Our conversation, in just half an hour went deep in a way that made the rest of the world--in this case a bustling food justice conference--recede into the background. Before we parted ways, she told me that her father, a retired preacher like mine, prays every morning for his next divine appointment. She said, "Adam, we just had one of those."
There's so much in what you've shared here, Dougald. The church within a church. The state of un-belonging. Thank you for laboring to gather these potent words.
This really comforts me and I can’t fully explain why. The metaphor but also the idea that we physically build within the crumbling walls new ways of worshipping the Earth and slip backwards to reclaim what was there before those big churches came. There is a truth here, a simplicity, a homecoming and I find the thought of it so beautiful. I’m looking forward to the next part.
Ah, thank you Allie, I'm glad to know these images resonate with you. In his conversation with Anita Goldman, Stephen Jenkinson told a story of a Canadian writer being brought to the realisation, "Christianity does not belong here." What really struck me was the next thing he said: "That's not an eviction order, it's a description of a state of affairs." It raises the question, what would it cost, what would need to occur for what is held within the vessel of these buildings and this tradition to arrive at a state of belonging. Anyway, I'll try to follow where that leads in later posts.
So good and so true. It does not belong here but......it has been, it has built, it has held and it has comforted and like so many things that are changing, it needs to happen with love and respect. We always seem to throw the baby out with the bath water, so I love these discussions on how things might be done with empathy. I also love the image of a church ruin and like stone circles, the sky as the roof, the ground as the floor, lit up with the elements really getting into that decaying building and beautiful things growing inside; moss and ferns. Like all decaying buildings but so much more dramatic and poetic.
Anyway, largely I talk rubbish, but I love your writing and I'm going to go now and listen to that Stephen Jenkinson conversation! Thank you.
"It raises the question, what would it cost, what would need to occur for what is held within the vessel of these buildings and this tradition to arrive at a state of belonging."
We ask a lot of words. Does Ginsberg's poem, Song, address this infinite topic? Love which allows deep rest, deep rest which puts an end to fishing with nets... all the rest. Ginsberg, in Song, speaks of deep rest, of being fully at home, of belonging at last.
I want to find rest in the Christian story sometimes, but it has no rest -- not really. It begins --as typically told--in an expulsion from Eden for the pursuit of knowledge, a terrible sin! Christianity has always been restless, and won't quite let us rest -- or so it seems to me.
But I'm just beginning to understand (a late bloomer) that our culture isn't a long set of footnotes to Plato so much as footnotes to Genesis, Jesus and that weird Garden.
I can only gaze upon Christianity as an outsider while looking at its footnotes. But then, I'm no longer a believer of any kind, not even the Buddhism which was for a while my fishing boat. I'm still busy fishing, but only due to the momentum of the arrow in motion, seeking rest. Silly, no?
Thanks, James. All I'd want to add for today is that the Eden story has been a Jewish story for rather longer than it's been a Christian one, and talking with Jewish friends I'm often humbled at the reminder of how differently the same words have been read in different times and places*, how wide the range of meanings hung on them.
* or, more to the point, by different groups of people living alongside each other in the same time and place
Thank you for this one - I didn't realise your father was ordained! which denomination if I might ask? One other thing - the upturned boat image for every church (most...) is not just that the church is a boat, it's that the church is an ARK :)
Thanks, Sam! Yeah, my dad was a United Reformed Church minister for 35 years. His mother came from Peterhead, but settled in Birmingham, so our family came into the URC through the Scots Presbyterian connection.
And of course, the ark, thank you for bringing that into the weave of images here!
Chimes with a sermon I once heard given by a retired CoE vicar to a small N Yorkshire congregation. 'Maybe we shouldn't worry about what happens to the CoE. Maybe the CoE continuing isn't in God's plan. '
Even at the time, I thought that was a profound statement of faith.
Yes, I think that has to be the perspective of faith. Mistaking the institutions for that which they have, at best, been in service of – whether in a secular or a religious context, this is always an error. (So much of Ivan Illich's writing is about this, one way or another.)
When an article of yours appears in my inbox, I always feel a quiver of excitement and read it before anything else. Yet it has taken me this long to comment - sorry about that, because you are one writer for whom I believe it matters to hear from your followers. I'm wresting with my own writing at the moment! Anyway, this idea of "taking the roof off" is important in order to air what lies beneath, (the palimpsest), before building something new and humbler out of salvaged materials, as with the church of St. Andrews at Covehithe. Many years ago someone wrote a particularly offensive racial slur on the road in front of our house (not intended for our family but hurtful to others in the community). The municipality scrubbed it off right away, with all intent to erase its memory, yet leaving it still faintly visible beneath the surface. Over winter rains and traffic wear, it grew less visible but after all these years I still remember what was once there; a palimpsest no longer starkly drawn in white paint yet still serves as reminder of words that harm. Those of us living now must be prepared to "take the roof off" of modernity, raise what lay beneath, and see what good to salvage from the ruins. There's actually a lot of good and you are SO good at leading the way, Dougald!
Thank you, Val – what a beautiful comment! Good luck with your writing.
We've been trying to grow woad on a farm not to far from Cove Hithe, on the road between between Halesworth and Laxfield - so called because of the flax, or linen you write about.
We've not been successful! Lol.
Wakelyns, the first agroforestry experiment in the UK, is now doing great work with hemp.
I love the practicality of the villagers rebuilding the smaller church. It makes me think of the Weald and Downland Museum, how these ancient homes can just be packed down, erected and with some mud manure and horse hair made anew. There is a story there of one of the houses that relates to this hinterland or transitional space . It's the house of a cobbler which was erected on the commons illegally but on the border of 3 parishes. It makes me smile. The combination of a useful craft and a question of jurisdiction saved the house from demolition for hundreds of years, it's bones standing renewed to this day.
My partner has the recurring image of the eye of the needle. The bible stories sit amongst us like all the great tales, to comfort and instruct about an older knowledge that's always present. Christianity seems to hold its own test of significance in that needles eye.
Thanks for writing this Dougald. Please keep exploring this aspect of "new-ruining"? "up-ruining"? "re-ruining"? It brought to mind the old Welsh chapel pew which we bought in an auction when the chapel closed some years ago and have outside our front door for putting our boots on. It used to be prayed on and now it's used most days to put boots on. I shall ponder that signficance next time I'm sitting on it to don my muddy boots!
I will, Alison! Thanks for the encouragement.
A church without a roof is no less a church.
Avebury Stone Circle, many hundreds of years older than all our churches, still gives a feeling of peace, to me at least.
There is a feeling in a place. Is it made by man or nature? I don’t know. I have felt it in a cathedral, and a mosque. and amongst the stones.
Thanks, Mark! I've always loved stone circles, though somehow never made it to Avebury. Here in Sweden, the stones were erected in "ship settings" rather than circles – and it's striking to me how different it feels, standing inside a set of stones with this directionality, in contrast to the experience of being inside something wholly cyclical.
I've long been drawn to stories of the complex coexistence of different traditions and relations to the sacred on the same site. I wrote about this in the Devil's Door:
https://dark-mountain.net/the-devils-door-a-call-for-contributions-to-issue-12/
Alan Garner's novels Strandloper and Thursbitch contain extraordinary reconstructed accounts of this kind of thing in the northwest of England. And Alan's talk, The Valley of the Demon, tells the story of the journey that led him to write Thursbitch, including discovering an unknown alignment of monoliths in the remote valley where the novel is set:
http://alangarner.atspace.org/votd.html
Amazing, inspiring piece, Dougald. Thank you
Thanks a lot, dear Dougald, for these deep thoughts and sharing. In fact, somehow I sensed that you were “headed into these waters” as long as I started reading you. Being myself a catholic priest, one might say that I am sailing out to the “divine deep” from the opposite shore. Yet, I sense that we are somehow together on a common journey.
Thank you, Tobias, I'm glad to read this. There seem to be a lot of small boats out here on these waters. If you've not crossed paths already, let me recommend the writing that Andrew is doing at Bog-down and Aster:
https://bogdownandaster.substack.com/p/ayelet-ha-shahar
Great, thanks for this recommendation!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=NkZDjPRpg0Y&si=A-joznZnCwu83DVT
Do you know this song? It comes to mind...
Listening to it now for the first time, Jacquelyn – thank you!
Thanks for a stimulating piece of writing and thinking. A real conversation of thoughts!
What is Federico Campagna getting at with the idea of "making good ruins"? The way I'm thinking about this is through a notion of inverted scaffolding: it's what good ruins bring to the post-future. Speaking in metaphors, the ruined church is a potential scaffolding because what is collapsing is the exoteric dominance of its presence. Ivan Illich was glad to be living in a time of failing scaffolding, for him it promised the liberation of hope from the aspirations of power. Religious institutional collapse is a scaffolding through which its esoteric heart can emerge. To my mind a good ruin is one which is capable of sheltering and evoking the emergent gnosis of the post-future. May be we need good ruins to access the "mundus imaginalis"......
Thanks, Rob - and funny you should mention the Mundus Imaginalis, as I've been thinking about it a good deal this week, partly in relation to the next post in this series.
Campagna talks about "making good ruins" in the context of what kind of moves make sense if your discernment is that you were born into the ending of a world. I've talked about this in various podcasts and conversations - you might dig out the video of my conversation with Lydia Catterall, if you want to hear more.
And yes, Illich is on my mind a lot as we head into this territory. I reread The Rivers North of the Future this summer and its been feeding my thinking.
I just checked out a digital copy of The Rivers North of the Future from my public library. A rather odd thing to "check out" a digital book.... Anyway, I'll begin my reading of it now. A physical copy wasn' t on offer. Oddly, my multi-branch public library has nothing on offer from or about Illich. Nor do any of the many local bookstores!
Very evocative and thought-provoking, Dougald. I especially like your speculation about the vessel being turned upside down. It makes me think of things which were previously hidden coming to light, and things which previously supported from below becoming that which stirs the imagination. Also, I can't help thinking of the ark in the Bible that saved Noah and his family from the flood; the Christian tradition is full of images of arks that save, but the hull which becomes a dome goes all the way back to the creation account. Your meditation on the ruined church has, in other words, prompted me to recall the expanse that came into being on the second day, which always makes me think of an opening where forms may or may not materialise. All the best with your anticipated writing projects!
I'm still reading this.
Midway, I had to look again at my letter-poem to you, Dougald.https://theheronhouse.substack.com/p/palimpsest
The best poems are either empty pages or wild mysteries. This poem is the latter. If I understood it fully I'd be kidding myself.
Ah, James, thank you for bringing me back to that! No doubt one of the things that set the image of the palimpsest ringing through my thoughts this summer.
By the way, the title of your personal 'stack just struck me. An REM reference?
In a curious way, Dougald, The R-Word borrows from the notion of the F-word. In many places (by far not all) the f-word is not to be uttered. It's very taboo -- say, in church. It's got to be among the most taboo of words.
When I began the R-Word, I had hoped to speak the R-word out loud and often, with the hope of wringing some of the taboo out of the word so that folks could have access to the energy embodied in it. The R-word, of course, is revolution, a word songwriter Tracy Chapman suggests we tend to utter in whispers. It's a slightly embarrassing word which we can reference in relation to history, but not to the present.
And the word has been deeply associated with violence for a long damned time. And I thought, hey, let's use this dangerous word right out loud. Let's talk about non-violent revolution -- after all, it's our only hope of having an inhabitable world in the future.
Ah, now, I reckon we find ourselves at crossed purposes, though I'm glad to hear you expand on that name. The poem-letter, though, is published on a 'stack called the Heron House, I think?
Oh, yes! I thought you were asking about The R-Word.
The Heron House, indeed, is a name I borrowed from the title of an REM song, Disturbance at the Heron House . I'm a huge REM fan. Michael Stipe's singing saved my life when I was in my mid twenties, and his painterly song lyrics too.
Cross purposes --- do you mean my positive evaluation of non-violent revolution? That' can't be at crossed purposes, as I understand it, because I fully subscribe to your praxes, which I find very nourishing to hang with.
Your praxes also strongly resonate with Bayo Akomolafe, whose praxis notions also resonate with me.
So I may seem to be missing the point from the two of you, but I doubt that I am. I'm comfortable with the apparent paradox, though. Indeed, it is just the paradox in which rest may be possible for me.
No, I meant only that I'd asked about the Heron House and you'd answered about the R-Word!
I wonder if you were thinking of stave churches, which, while not literally overturned boats, were built by Viking shipbuilders as a sort of boat in reverse: https://link.medium.com/aIKnCCHfSCb
That's fascinating - and also painful to read, when it comes to the history of conversion. The story I remember had to do with a particular church, I think in Yorkshire, though I couldn't swear it. But it could always be a game of whispers that started with those Viking churches. Thanks for the connection!
I think the history of conversion, particularly in late antiquity and the early middle ages, is much more complex than we realize. Viking culture was not pure nature-loving mysticism. There's much that would have been horrific and monstrous to our contemporary sensibilites. And the story of the stave churches is actually one of a really interesting and creative synthesis between Norse and Christian culture. I highly recommend this book if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Tree-Salvation-Yggdrasil-Cross-North/dp/0199948615/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3V3QKD887JT9F&keywords=yggdrasil&qid=1694018721&s=books&sprefix=yggdrasil%2Cstripbooks%2C91&sr=1-2
Thanks, Rebekah - I'll take a look at that! And more generally, I appreciate the invitation to nuance around these histories. I encounter a lot of black-and-white claims, one way or the other, about how Christianity arrived in our various parts of the world - often from people deeply invested in the side they are arguing for (and often people I have a good deal of respect for).
The phenomenon of the Devil's Door was my own route into a sense that things have often been more complicated, something I wrote about here:
https://dark-mountain.net/the-devils-door-a-call-for-contributions-to-issue-12/
By the way, congratulations on the launch of the new project you announced today - I'll be in touch about that!
Gorgeous. Ache. Thank you for writing and sharing this.
Thank you for reading and resonating with it!