Absent the Miracle

“Not another bloody photo of a church!”

It was early evening in Valencia. My sister-in-law was wheezing through the end of a cigarette, my phone in her other hand. She frowned, exhaling with tedium and a touch of irritation at the eccentricity of it: only a foreigner could be bothered with all that history and religion. “You’d think there was nothing else to see in Spain,” she passed sentence, and gave up on scrolling through the pictures.

My daughter Eva and I had just returned from four days of mid-winter travelling through fog-bound and half-remembered villages in the central and northern Spanish provinces of Segovia, Soria and Valladolid. This is the stone-hewn heart of Old Castile: here history looms so large—the silenced masses of rock, the carved splendour of objects—it can be easy to avoid looking beyond this collective museum to the lives and often ugly streets people inhabit.

The approach to so many rural Spanish towns is prosaic, a mess of grain silos, truck yards, scrap merchants, building suppliers, ceramics wholesalers, perhaps a garish roadside brothel, market gardens guarded by chained and starving dogs, one-euro shops and dumped rubbish; building after building of unadorned grey plaster, dusty lengths of corrugated iron fencing, fruit trees, and row upon row of modern townhouses. The gap between a legendary name and the weed-and-cement squalor of the present can be jolting: so many of those narrow streets that sit so prettily on postcards (and now on smartphones) are damp and lightless by night. They bear a cold that swims into the bones and lodges. Many former buildings of note are boarded up; empty lots are choked with discarded building materials, cats and excrement. Walls are graffitied with old political slogans, over which are daubed the practice runs of younger artists: a brief lesson in modern history on the walls, as the old style that served as social denunciation or a political call to arms from either side of politics is covered over with the newer decorative graffiti—more colourful, more affluent, less charged.

Unless they have been rescued by the very rich for purposes of rural tourism or architectural caprice, the old quarters of Spanish towns, and in particular the less-known ones lost beyond the highways, hidden behind the mountain flanks, are places for the poor. Few would choose nowadays to live in these primitive dwellings, preferring the low-ceilinged modern townhouses on the outskirts, built on land reclaimed from agriculture and resold—usually—at an extravagant profit through deals of petty corruption worked out in bars and council chambers.

My sister-in-law’s response was typical. Most Spaniards take little interest in the monuments that dominate their towns. In the smaller villages—partly preserved as tourist items and displayed as prettily as fridge magnets—young people for the most part leave for the cities, looking for greater excitement and opportunity. Those who stay seem oblivious to the monuments. The street sweeper of Coca, the waiter in Madrigal, the kitchen hand in Cantalejo, the deer hunter in Fuencaliente, the cleaner in Turégano, the stone mason in Alcañiz, the museum guide in Urda—these are all people inhabiting roles that have no beginning and no end; they are peasants in the global economy, tied to menial and often repetitive jobs. They are somewhere, and nowhere, on the sweeping radar of global finance and economics; they are tied to places—homes and villages—no less than their many generations of forebears for whom castles, palaces and halls laden with tapestries were just as foreign. In their forebears’ times, the remote world—setting aside that universe that lay over the oceans—was one inhabited by the nobility; for many contemporary peasant-slaves the remote world is the middle class, with its luxuries of full-time work and holidays abroad, languages studied, other cultures imagined and lived; its assumptions about what is of value in life. For here many exist in an eternal present tense of cheap labour and exhaustion, a drudge broken up by festivities that mark the seasons and the holy course of the year.

Robert Hughes once made this point a different way, mentioning that as far as he could see, the “Italians and French are [largely] indifferent to their national heritage, and … about painting, sculpture and architecture”. The comment is true, but the idea that most people would engage in the “high” culture he so admires betrays Hughes’s naivety and snobbishness. They don’t; or perhaps more to the point, they don’t have the time, or need, to examine it for life-affirming lessons. It is simply there.

As a traveller—and occasionally a working visitor—in many of these fabled Spanish towns, I found my eyes drawn to the spires, towers and turrets. I would sometimes feel cowed by the weight of history, intimidated by the strangeness of the past. I imagine it is a parallel yet quite different sensation for the foreign traveller entering an unknown rural town in Australia, finding the pub and post office, the school, the council chambers, the RSL, car yard, hairdresser, petrol station, Chinese restaurant, second pub, swimming pool, motel, dentist’s chambers, third pub and footy field. Or the memorial park with its war dead and public toilets: this must all be very strange to a visitor; perhaps there is the same sense of disquiet that stems from the impossibility of knowing the true interior of such remote buildings, or the interiors of the people who inhabit them.

Across Spain the examples are legion of legendary towns approached, only to find the stone implacable: the view is pleasant or pretty in that inconsequential romantic way, but all the secrets are withheld. These are scenes for jigsaw puzzles, calendars and coffee table books, but there is no indication of the lives lived within. Before long, the stone becomes oppressive. It’s easy to imagine young locals turning their backs on the litany of “five-star” villages, for there is something slightly unreal about places such as Sos del Rey Católico, Albarracín, Daroca or Morella. All are stunning in their various ways, and all equally as able to oppress. So too others, less famous and further off the tourist routes, but full of marvels: Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Chulilla, Morón de Almazan, Villafranca del Bierzo, San Esteban de Gormaz, Berlanga de Duero, Ciudad Rodrigo, Tordesillas, Úbeda, Almansa, Rubielos de Mora (or the nearby Mora de Rubielos) … the list is effectively endless. And yet for the difficulty in accessing the daily lives of citizens, the same can be said of countless ugly and anonymous Spanish towns that have no claim to fame or glory. There too, lives continue to tick over: Motilla del Palancar, Utrillas, Castellón, Granollers, Puertollano, Tomelloso, Paterna, Monreal del Campo. And on, and on—as they do in Logan, Wee Waa, Coober Pedy, Goulburn, Narrabri, Wodonga, Keith or Whyalla.

Within these Spanish outcrops of intricate brickwork, sandstone and granite, the churches were a natural target of fascination. There was the architectural element: the role of the church as fundamental physical component of the village, and then the inseparable socio-religious component. These buildings are first and foremost sacred monuments in stone; they form a kind of genus, or species, within the broader catalogue of the life forms of the country. The village church is a hulking thing, most usually a rocky beast imposed upon the civilian maze. If a village has no castle then the church will usually occupy the highest ground, or at least some prominent aspect that confers authority—judgment always comes from on high. Many are crippled with age and decreasing use; in a thousand years these will all have crumbled and rejoined the earth. Their walls will form faint skeletal traces in an accumulated future dust, and these brute limbs of Spanish Catholicism will forever disappear …

In terms of artistic culture and production, Australia missed that epoch, common to much of humanity for thousands of years and across cultures, whereby art was in the service of God, or gods. By and large, art in modern Australia has been in the service of identity. Rarely in the short history of white Australia has art been part of an act of worship, even allowing for a broader and secular definition of the term. (The annual Blake Prize for Religious Art is an exception that proves the rule.) In Australia, in any case, there was never much space for God; the concept of the miracle has a troubled place in our country, and manifestations of religious mysticism in our culture are few. Spirituality—as a kind of secular experimentation with elements of diverse religious practices cobbled together into a postmodern patchwork of convenience—is everywhere, but it is a form that sits best alongside material comfort and abundance. The strain born of desert suffering, or a life of cloistered abnegation, is foreign to us: it is a very specific form of the hysteric and the overwhelming, a blend of terror and abandonment, of ecstasy and denial.

Australians are not prone to believe in prayers cast at altars, bones kissed, sacred items clasped in fervour, photographs blessed, incantations. We have been as suspicious of these things as were our forebears; we are not a nation given to witches and ceremony. We are pretty sure a miracle is a coincidence, a blind chance, long odds coming good at the end of the straight. Miracles cannot be encouraged to fruition through complex packages of ritual. We have never adopted a sense of magic, and religious imagery was never an important part of our tradition. Australia began as secular, with all the advantages and disadvantages that has since implied for our nation and national character.

Painters such as Justin O’Brien, Stanislaus Rapotec or Keith Looby are a rarity; Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan treated the sacred in an altogether more secular manner, while for later generations, the sacred is but one of a gamut of “contested ways of seeing” rather than being the singular reference point for a moral order, a cosmogony, a ceiling of belief. Nolan and Boyd did create skies, however, that recalled the transcendental blue of the Flemish masters—a blue of deceptive beauty, under which any kind of Hell could, and often did, unfold. (Arthur Boyd’s youthful and experimental Landscape with Grazing Sheep, 1937, a largely unknown work, bears comparison in its quiet existential loneliness and pared-back simplicity with Goya’s eternally discussed and anthologised Perro semihundido (Head of a Dog), 1820–24.) Partly for this reason, the iconography of Catholicism was largely shunned in sun-swept Australia: no shady corners here, no dim rose-water pools of darkness and reflection where ambiguity might play—only the blazing glare of atheism and sunlight. We view nuance with suspicion.

Australia, however, is not without its monuments to longing and sacrifice; attempts to know in the midst of human darkness or, conversely, in the brightening light of faith. Scattered across Australia’s rural landscapes are thousands of small churches, simple in design, of timber or stone according to the resources at hand. Many of them are now stranded in paddocks or forgotten tracts of scrub, anonymous graves beside them, disappearing back into the earth, the iron bed frames that border young children’s graves rusting into nothing. These were often settler places and have in many instances been overtaken by time and new regimes of fencing or production, yet they remain a singular and remarkable testament to those generations of white Australians who invested their hopes in God, dedicated their Sunday mornings to Him, trusted in the fabric the gospel lessons provided for lives full of hardship. These people married and sometimes buried their children in the same church. For all that Australia is a secular and urban nation, these humble buildings are also holy sites for passing generations.

Having always been fascinated by the timber churches of south-east Queensland where he grew up, my father turned his attention, in mid-life, to the extraordinary stone churches of the Monaro, the highland region of southern New South Wales where he spent five years as parish priest. He authored a study of these sites of devotion and superb yet simple rural architecture: Witnesses in Stone (1984) was self-published, like all my father’s work, but was one of his finest, for he was setting out a trail in the true spirit of inquiry that is always the motor for progress and discovery of the amateur, the one whose curiosity and passion open new ground for the future perusal of professionals. When he asked me, years after we had lived in the region, to accompany him as photographer on a three-day trip to document the buildings, I jumped at the chance. In the town of Berridale, New South Wales, I had spent the happiest days of my childhood.

(For all he loved the churches in the Darling Downs, the Bega Valley or the Snowy Mountains—his three principal parishes, bookended by his early love and, later in life, study of, the timber churches of south-east Queensland—I remember Dad falling in love with the showy exuberance of Catholic Spain. The rich exoticism of the Marian rites appealed to him, as did the sculpted saints, the sense of extravagant sacrifice. The walls steeped in art and glory were foreign to everything he had known, personally or professionally, yet he was enthralled by the overwhelming treasures as we travelled along back roads, chatting in tiny villages with conversational priests, dipping into private vestries and art collections, getting access to pass through otherwise hidden doorways. Dad was on tenterhooks the whole time, as if his Anglicanism was being challenged by this aesthetic onslaught: could religion contain all that love and beauty?)

The Monaro is a place of rolling grass plains and granite boulders. It is freezing in the winter and can be blazingly hot in the summer. It is shorn of obvious attraction; there are no great forests or mountain peaks; even the Snowy River had been reduced to a sad trickle outside the pub at Dalgety. Sometimes attached to a township, but otherwise found without apparent reason in distant paddocks, are a series of simple stone churches: Boloco, where my sister married in 1979; Round Plain, Gedgedzerick, Berridale, Dalgety, Adaminaby, Numbla Vale, Maffra, Middlingbank, Michelago, Cooma and Jindabyne. As so often, lists of names sing a uniquely charming song: a siren-like experience conjuring both memory and fantasy, suggesting an infinity of possible experiences and the illusion, too, that through naming we might begin to frame those million impressions that constitute a past, a present and the imaginary future.

In the case of churches, my experiences return as the perfect point for comparison. Many of my childhood Saturday afternoons were spent—given there really was nothing else to do—in helping prepare these rural churches for their Sunday ritual. Chalices needed to be polished, prayer books set out along the simple pews, hymn numbers slotted into the purpose-built wooden frame. My mother would look after the flower arrangements while my father prepared the gowns and communion items, or slipped off to his study to pen a last-minute sermon. If both he and an instrument were available, my brother would run through the hymns on the organ.

Churches were for me like holy sheds: they existed at the far end of an acre of yard, and were places where Dad went to work. Seen from our house—known to others as “the rectory”—they were largely unvisited, except on weekends. Surrounded by flat patches of grass and a scattering of trees, they were plagued by rabbits at night. They were places where the community—or an Anglican cross-section of it—came together once a week, or month. There was very little ritual, no smoking incense; no Virgin Mary, no sculptures or paintings; no intimations of suffering beyond the children buried in the graveyard and the occasional funeral procession. Churches were places of plain timber or stone, unadorned other than a stained-glass window. The pews might have been cut straight from a tree and given a dash of varnish, such was their simplicity of design and elemental heft. Ornaments, if there were any, had come from the sewing hands of parishioners. Dust motes floated in the air, and farmers came with their tenuous hold on life, each Sunday, with family and children, or a catalogue of hardship. “It was an old and rather poor church,” Patrick White quotes Dostoevsky in an epigraph to The Solid Mandala, “and many of the ikons were without settings, but such churches are the best for praying in.”

In Spain, this all changed. From a plain simplicity to a rich and ornamented complexity, the church was a metaphor for the changes sweeping over my life. In any Spanish town or village I visited, I was drawn to churches not only given their fundamental role in my childhood, but also as sites where members of the community gather—they are among the best places to learn about the local people. I had some vague notion of what to expect but was unprepared for the way the Spanish church exploded above my head and all around me: the sheer burst and clutter of images, the volume of supplication, the variety of suffering, the multitude of sins, wounds, angels, decapitations; the profusion of gold and curlicue; the blood, the agony of the passion; the brutal murder of saints. Where the church of my boyhood had been a quiet place where my father pottered about in shafts of late Saturday afternoon light—and from where, chores done, I could return to the cricket or the footy on the radio—here they were suddenly places teeming with death. Religion had never seemed so serious.

With all this death went both terrible beauty and dark glory. The Australian bush church has its own dignity, with its simple architectural lines, its hymns, its brass candlestick holders caught in stained-glass light, its bow-legged parishioners in their Sunday best, its hand-sewn cushions, its shy brides and grooms under the pines, approaching the wooden church door on the way to a new life. In Spain, beauty was of another order altogether, for it was bound up intimately with death. Death had a meaning that spoke directly of sacrifice and submission, of a clear recognition of a higher force; of some smoky or glorious heaven. Cherubs burst from billowing clouds below the feet of saints and Virgins, airy volumes of cotton wool from which appeared armies of heads in song, and glistening hands, bright garments, symmetrical patterns and flowerage.

(This element of suffering and sacrifice was transmitted through the names of Catholic women: María was the gold standard, though her name was somewhat neutral for all she was the mourning mother of Christ; with her went Purísima, Ángeles, Amparo, Dolores, Angustias, Soledad, Martirio, Calvario, Custodia, Presentación. But so too the superb litany of Auxiliadora, Remedios, Socorro, Concepción, Consuelo, Asunción, Esperanza, Caridad, Piedad, Sacramento, Luz, Felicidad. These names were a roll-call of suffering: they called to mind some of the women cutting sandwiches in the school canteen, or pushing mops through the toilet block. But what could be wrong, I wondered, with a tradition whose women were named after Light, Happiness, Hope, Charity, Comfort and Remedy? It seemed to me that such a tradition could only emerge as a response to a long and deep history of suffering and joy. That is to say, of being intensely human.)

Meanwhile, in church after church—from squarish Visigoth lump to softly curving Romanesque, from cleverly engineered Gothic to flowery and cavernous Baroque to modern constructions planted in the new fields of suburbia—in all these places middle-aged and elderly women gather. These are the voiceless millions, and this their sanctuary. (Spain has too much history and self-respect to allow itself to be plagued by the shouty evangelicals of contemporary times.) Here are tiny creatures in brown stockings, kneeling before the physical space and mass of these stone temples, huddled together with their priests and assistants to keep alive rituals that give them heart and meaning. And while it is true most churchgoers in contemporary Spain are women aged fifty and over, they are by no means all; there is a surprising array of younger people bringing their cares to a place of quiet. Perhaps they are not looking for judgment—and certainly not for condemnation—but simply the space to be in awe and reflect. Perhaps they’ve found they have no need for the dry bones of secular counselling, with all its contemporary forms of condemnation and shaming, and prefer instead to ease their angst amid a site that offers beauty and history, a weight of past lives and lives lived, a weight of the experience that comes from suffering. Amid the spectacular global modernity of contemporary Spanish life, amid the trans-European and trans-Atlantic tides of influence on culture, thought, design and style, leisure habits and ways of being, there is solace to be found in a localised and domestic beauty.

Recently, having come from the castle of La Mota in Medina del Campo—another site laden with history becoming lost amid the industry and transport networks of contemporary Spain—I entered the astonishing church of Santiago el Real purely by chance, and just an hour after a 104-year-old widow had been farewelled; there was still a warmth inside the church that took the edge off an icy winter’s afternoon and added a glow to the not one, not two, but five bright polychrome wooden retables around which a mother and daughter, in casual aprons, were beginning to sweep. From Cantalejo, Illescas, Alcañiz, Urrea de Gaén, La Mata de los Olmos, Rebollo, Venganzones, Fresno el Viejo, Orgaz or Los Yébenes to countless other towns, these women reminded me of that generation—also voiceless, humble, hugely dignified—of rural farmers and their families to whom my father ministered. In those tiny churches of timber and stone—many would fit wholly within a side chapel of one of the Spanish churches—these men and women were perhaps the last generation to believe quietly in God. They have been replaced by neglect, atheism or cash-swooning evangelists; many of the gentle souls are gone, the rural life swallowed up by drought or misplaced choices, farmers gone to suicide and children to the cities. The rural churches stay behind, choked with weeds, saved perhaps once or twice a year by working bees and the odd eccentric soul fighting against the weight of a huge indifference.

Mid-week, mid-winter, early evening: in San Andrés church in Cantalejo, lit only barely from its vault of grey gloom, the sombre mood is sparked into life by bright red carnations bunched at the altar. Three old ladies sit apart, then come together to gossip, leaning over their pews; then back again to different places to pray. One looks remarkably like my old Scottish auntie Betty—may she rest in peace. Beside the altar is a man dressed in dark trousers and a hunting jacket, reading a thick volume—whether the Bible, a crime thriller or Don Quixote, it’s impossible to tell. Ten minutes pass in silence, with three or four more old women shuffling into the church, pausing to whisper to an exquisite plaster carving of Jesus. Then without warning old Betty is up and hobbles to a lectern; at the same time the reading man disappears behind a curtain to the side of the altar. There is a feeling of amateur theatricals. Old Betty begins to read through a series of prayers and invocations; after a few minutes the hunting priest emerges, dressed in a white chasuble with pale green silk adornments, heading for the confessional where, with much creaking of tired wood and hinges, he places himself to await sinners.

In the church of Our Lady of Charity in Illescas—a place of community, song and a sense of togetherness—all ages and social types are represented. On either side of the altar hang exquisite paintings by El Greco. The church had commissioned them from the artist in 1603 and there they remain, not so much museum pieces as a living part of the faith and daily practice of the community. These El Greco paintings—including Saint Ildefonso and the Virgin of Charity—were not hanging in a gallery, but amongst their own people, where they spoke to a community as they had done for 400 years. The thrill of this daily prayer with El Greco is to experience art as an act of faith and belief. It is outside art history, art theory or museum management and politics. It is beyond curators. Likewise Titian’s The Martyrdom of St Lawrence, which sits in a chapel in El Escorial where King Philip II ordered it placed and where it has also been for 400 years. The El Greco masterpieces in Illescas are humbler though, for being closer to an everyday community. This must be something like the experience of indigenous art used not as merchandise, or theory, or political claim, but as spiritual artefact, art whose whole significance lies in its power as a sacred object, a part of the quotidian belief system, having nothing to do with historical context, technique, or theories of value.

Outside another church in Illescas, the parish church of Santa María, are a blind man in a wheelchair and his assistant, who stands protecting the blind man with an umbrella. They are both tightly rugged up for it is a bitter night of sleet; snow is forecast. The blind man holds out a woollen cap: “Oh for pity! For pity!” he cries as I walk past the two men and into the church. If anything, it feels colder on the inside: Santa María does not have the congregation, or the El Grecos. On my way out, the blind man explodes into blessings as I place a few coins into the little cap in his lap. Both men shower me with praise in unison. All my way across to the other side of the square, their felicitations, prayers and recitations for my good health follow loudly and clearly through the darkness that had fallen, and with it the first flakes of snow.

For all its problems with entrenched illiteracy, Spain is at the same time, and paradoxically, a nation of addicted readers. There are centuries of rich literary tradition; a language bristling with classics. In my early years in Madrid, as I began to get to grips with the language, I would trawl through the innumerable small bookstalls (sadly, there are less of these with each passing year). Here I picked up what were to be the first books I was to read in Spanish cover to cover. I set myself the challenge of finding a level of language that would be both sufficiently accessible and yet demanding, broadening my vocabulary and knowledge of grammar without losing me altogether. And this all had to be combined with topics of interest. I found two slim volumes, one bound in dark green and the other in crimson, each with titles embossed in gold: an abbreviated life of St John of the Cross, and another of Santa Teresa of Avila. Lives of the saints are not everyone’s idea of an intoxicating read but I did not need any excitement from books—life in Madrid was both thrilling and exhausting enough as it was. The books were a place to slow down, a retreat from the hedonism. Contemporary Spain with all its art, cinema, music and bars was my everyday reality, but I needed to know much more about the multiple rivers from which the country drew its water. These lives of two of their standard-bearer saints were a way into a more sober element of Spanish literature, the flip side to the picaresque of Don Quixote. They were the mystic religious, not the anarchist secular.

These precious little books were instructional not for the Catholicism—they were not required to serve any purpose of religious instruction—but were an attempt to step inside that implacable and encompassing Spanish mysticism, to feel that merciless weight of Castilian stone that walled St John and Santa Teresa in. It was an attempt to try to know, in a secular and disintegrated age, what an all-consuming faith meant, and how it affected both the body and the mind. What was a life dedicated to prayer? Where did the mind travel; what was it possible, or not possible, to conceive? How did these two elemental figures attempt to surmount the barriers of mind and imperfection? How did they fill their lives with devotion and hope, in steep-walled Avila and the darkened alleys of Toledo? What happened when those nights cast the soul into its deepest dungeons and asked of it: How will you now respond?

Exploring the aesthetic wonders of this Catholic universe ran against the grain of so much contemporary life. All around were voices telling me there were no lessons to be found there, only oppression and vice. The Catholic universe was stained, literally and metaphorically. The only product of prayer is delusion and darkness, I was assured. Submission is the opposite of striving; only through programmatic rationalism can one’s “potential” in life be realised: through targets, goals, weights, times; measurements of affection, classification of memory and categorisation of the social. This is the dry, implacable march of the professional atheists, the proffered meal of desiccated rationalists. One universe seemed to offer succulent meats and shiny marzipan; the other, slabs of tasteless biscuit, mouldy old brown cheese, a table filled with stale crusts.

The search for meaning via the classical religious route, or through the pursuit of beauty, is an aspiration that stands in contrast to contemporary Australia’s hyper-rational now. Such a search has the same aura of the naive and musty arcane as horoscopes and tarot cards: only acceptable if cloaked in the protective garb of irony. One of countless lessons Spain taught me was that putting one’s strongest beliefs—religious or of any other type—on the line, thereby exposing the heart to the daggers of cynicism, rejection and critique, is a way of life. The incessant hedging, the qualifying, the contextualising, the defensive shield of distance-making irony, is unnecessary. How satisfying it is to talk with people solid in their convictions—whether “right” or “wrong”—who do not endlessly stand back to check where any belief might stand in relation to narratives of self-identity, sexuality, ethnicity or power. Their beliefs have come to them from tradition.

Naturally, there is a fine line between certainty and dogma. The strength drawn from centuries of tradition and conviction can provide more rounded characters, more self-confident people, and surer moral ground; the blindness of dogma, pure and simple, can cause tremendous harm. Postmodernity contains no less dogma than apparently less enlightened ages. What I envied, I realised, was that capacity to be whole that Spaniards seemed to possess—it was the wellspring of their unlimited generosity, love and enjoyment of life. Much is to be said for the way “young” nations such as Australia and the United States provide opportunities for people to create new selves, new traditions, new wealth, new fortunes: it is not for nothing both countries subscribe so deeply to the shibboleth of “one’s potential”. We sing the mantra of “change” as if it were always necessarily progressive. At the same time, it is hard for many in Australia to be sure of identity—not only are we, on a purely objective level, a nation composed of hundreds of different traditions, all packed in together, a refugee mosaic come good in the age of postmodernity; we have also become continuously unsure of ourselves because of the dubious nature of the origin of the nation. How hard it is to hold on to some sense of abiding tradition: in our anxiety, we want timeless things now. There is little time for less tangible concerns: the poetry of the heart, the slow caressing of the soul; the nurture of the gentle spirit that is as tough as iron.

Defending Catholicism in contemporary Australia is a mug’s game; I can only say that its aesthetic and moral universe, as experienced in Spain, left my life immeasurably richer. I came to realise, perhaps influenced by a vestigial presence of so many bush churches and Anglican ceremonies in my childhood, that this was not a question of religious belief, but of aesthetic pleasure. I was not Catholic; I had no truck with confessionals. I no more believed in the Virgin birth than any atheist, but I regretted the narrowing of aesthetic perspective that atheism ruled out. My childhood was filled with the smell of Brasso used to polish chalices and altar crosses, or the musty air of prayer books, vestry cupboards and old pews. The thousand shades of grass and paddock, and the endless intaglio of eucalypts, were complemented by the sudden flare of a stained-glass window in a country church.

This reading of the Catholic mystics, so far removed from my childhood and adolescent experience, was somehow at the same time a natural extension of it. Once again I was thinking about the role and contribution of religious faith in deepening the understanding of human relationships. Religious practice, faith and their arcane accoutrements will not provide answers to questions of the economy, or strategic management of business, but they do provide an insight into the black caves and bright fires of the human heart. What was offered up in Spain, and through these abridged versions of late medieval narratives, was not that sanitised Christianity that struggles for relevance in diminishing pockets of the contemporary West, but a robust Christianity that drew on its long centuries of rubbing up against, both clashing and sharing with, Judaism and Islam. It seemed to me an entity based on profound understandings of love and humility. Here was a phenomenon that removed the human ego from the centre of life – and in so doing ran against the basic tenets of contemporary capital with its narcissistic obsession with identity, its alienation and rampant loneliness. Here was a force and teaching—the question of belief was irrelevant—that placed the human heart, rather than homo economicus, at the centre of things. Here was a nation whose people displayed an emotional generosity greater in breadth and depth than anything I had experienced; this was not a matter of isolated cases, but a general rule, found from top to bottom and left to right, across social spectra and up and down hierarchies.

Ultimately, it came down to the simplest of characterisations—and such crude reductions of complexity can often be useful: Protestants worshipped bare walls, on which they inscribed their rules of commerce and exchange. (One recalls the whitewashing of the frescoes in English churches during the sixteenth-century religious persecutions, that damn trampling of flowers.) A holy person was industrious, severe, committed to profit. Catholics meanwhile worshipped at the feet of a beautiful woman, on whom they inscribed their dreams and fears. The very idea of devotion meant the heart was prepared to give itself to something larger than self-interest, something deeper than material acquisition, something that turned on a commonality of purpose.