Pilgrimage and Renewal

          In that open field

If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music 

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing around the bonfire…

-T.S. Eliot, East Coker

I spent much of last week at a very peculiar place. It is peculiar in innumerable ways, most of which would be incomprehensible to the uninitiated, so here I will begin with its architecture––a miniature Tuscan fortress seated comfortably in small-town central Michigan.

Also, one can’t but mention its inhabitants, permanent and otherwise––a rotating cast of all types: aged men of learning, itinerant students, cooing infants, prolific mothers, musicians, writers, cooks, diplomats, pilgrims young and old––all anchored by the unified purpose and effective love of the house’s lord and lady.

To the unfamiliar visitor (one who had no inkling of whither he was traveling), it may indeed take more than a few minutes to realize that the master of the house has been buried these twenty years, so enthusiastically and powerfully does his widow bear his torch and carry on the work he began.

Unlike the homes of so many other prominent public figures, Piety Hill, the ancestral home of the late Russell Kirk, is neither museum nor mausoleum; rather, it is a living, functioning, home. It is not some dusty, plastic-wrapped, two-story coffin in which the grieving and the curious can get a glimpse of a writer’s inner life for two bucks a pop until all interest fades and it is razed to make an overflow parking lot for the neighborhood boondoggle. Instead, it, and he, have lived on.

For two thousand years the Church has been shielded in times of war, fed in times of famine, and guided in times of darkness in large part through the devotion of all manner of faithful who built houses, monasteries, and cathedrals as places of true labor, true prayer. In a more modest manner, the only way that the best lights of our civilization can be conserved through these times of leveling innovation is by building and conserving those places where the life of the moral imagination, the sacramental life, can be lived by unbroken generations.

Last week I saw in person, I felt, I understood, what Eliot meant by “significant soil,” and I saw the dead communicate in flame and rose. Or something like that:

          You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.