On Your Knees

The physicality of worship.

For the last 12 weeks I have had a slow healing fracture in my foot that has required no weight bearing. Where I have been house-sitting this winter has required that I go up and down the stairs to my room and office on my knees. Just a couple of times a day traversing those stairs has led to callouses on my knees. Each night as I rub a little lotion into them it has prompted me to think about how physical the acts of devotion and work would have been in that island monastery and scriptorium of Iona at the time of our stories.

If minutes a day on my knees had this effect how would theirs have looked? The callouses on the knees of even the children would have been so thick. Was the give of a new dirt floor welcome over the hard stone of the Irish churches left behind? How would they have soothed the thickening of skin from devotion and labour? Would they have collected bladderwrack seaweed from the rocky edges of the white sandy beaches and squeezed the capsules onto their cracked flesh for relief?

Could you spot one of the scriptorium workers by their hands? Had the quills created a large callous on the sides of their fingers? Would the fingertips be permanently dyed from the inks?

Detail Young Priest Kneeling, Jean Leonard Lugardon 1801 - 1884

As the world I am imagining comes closer to me it makes me think of such small unremarkable things, the things we only start to notice about our own world when we are forced out of normal relationship to our days. Somehow this has brought the body of Erna, my forgotten saint, and her companions a bit clearer into focus. It allows her to move around the world a bit and be more free from the two dimensions of paper.

Despite its preservation on the page, the act of writing is a bodily endeavour. So is the act of prayer. The lesson of the last weeks for me that I think I will keep with me going forward is that I’ve left the body out of my appreciation and understanding of life so much. We’ve confused our comforts and health safety for a distance between our thoughts, creativity and body. In the Middle Ages that was not the case at all. They started the expression of their devotion with their bodies.

On your knees.

And as our story is not one of those that made it through the patriarchal ages of the Catholic Church, it makes me think of the scene in the brilliant BBC comedy Fleabag where the hot priest instructs the main character onto her knees in the church. It’s such a powerful, inevitable, collision of a moment of humans in bodies trying to reconcile life, fate, and faith. Our physicality has always been part of our devotion. Our making, our dancing, our cooking, our writing, our loving. It took centuries to take our bodies out of our worship.

I will be thinking about that a lot as I continue dreaming this story into existence. For your enjoyment I have included some clips of that moment and more from Fleabag below. Enjoy!

Susie