Place: Saints and Shrines

The major focus in my sabbatical reflections was the way in which this sense of the sanctity of place, the “here” in which God might be encountered, has been and still is reinforced by the way communities tell the stories of saints to whom they have a particular devotion, especially to their local saints, or to saints which have been “localised”, for example, in the Roman Catholic tendency to dedicate churches to “Our Lady of X or Y” rather than just to St Mary.

Even before the Emperor Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the Empire, Christians had begun to regard certain places as particularly holy, especially the places where the martyrs had been buried. There is some debate about the reasons why Christians sometimes worshipped in catacombs, with some suggesting that it was for the sake of secrecy in times of persecution, but it seems also to have been because these were the places where the leaders whom they revered had been buried. Constantine’s championing of Christian faith, however, led to an explosion of interest in pilgrimage to sacred sites. His mother, St Helena, famously went to Jerusalem in search of the locations of the significant places in the story of Jesus death and resurrection and “discovered” the site of the “true cross” deep beneath what is now the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. According to early  legend, local Christians claimed to have had passed down to them the location of the site of Jesus crucifixion and resurrection. They may indeed have done so; local memories are often powerful and deep, especially in cultures which value the oral transmission of knowledge. Commanding the spot they indicated to be dug up, she found three crosses, and determined which one Jesus had been crucified on by holding each close to a woman who was dying. Two of them had no effect, but the third caused her to recover. The cross was displayed. Crowds flocked to it. Jerusalem had been put firmly on the map again. In fact it became such a powerful draw for the faithful that it had to be guarded by deacons so that pilgrims did not bite chunks out of it under the guise of kissing it. Eventually, apparently because of this, it was broken up and fragments circulated around the Christian world, rather more fragments, in the end, than seems entirely likely. Martin Luther is said to have commented that that there were so many fragments of it in the world that “it would be possible to build an entire house if we would have it all.”

The Chapel of the "Invention of the Holy Cross
 in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
The slab on the right marks the spot where
the "true cross" was found. 

Whether the relics which Christians venerated, and still venerate, are genuine or not, however, for those who venerate them, they serve as tangible reminders of the possibility that God might be at work in the real places in which they live or which they visit, not just in some distant heaven or in a world of incorporeal ideas. This has not just been true of major sites  of Christian pilgrimage like Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostella, or Canterbury,  but also, and perhaps particularly powerfully, of the local shrines which commemorate saints whose lives and stories were only really treasured and known by those who lived there, the saints whose lives, and after-lives as miracle workers and friends in heavenly places, reminded people that God could be at work in their own backyards, in the places they lived and worked, places which might otherwise have seemed entirely ordinary.

The Statue of St Efisio, in its gilded ox cart at the end of the procession.

Local saints, their shrines and festivals, are still very much alive and well in many parts of the world. During a trip to Cagliari, Sardinia, in early May this year, my husband and I witnessed the immense pride the people of Sardinia took in the festival of their local saint, Efisio, an early fourth century Roman soldier martyred there, whose intercession was believed to have averted the plague in the 1660s. The statue of Efisio was borne in a splendidly decorated ox-cart through the streets of the city, along rose-petal strewn streets, and then out to the place of his execution, some 30 km away. The statue was preceded by more ox-carts, thousands of local people from towns and villages across Sardinia, all singing the Rosary in Sardu, hundreds of horsemen and women, and a collection of the great and good of Sardinia. There was, of course, an element of people simply enjoying a good procession and the celebration that went with it, but the excitement and sheer affection which greeted the eventual appearance of the statue of the saint (not even the relics, which are in Pisa) spoke unmistakably of a sense, however unformed and unexplained, that something holy was happening, and had happened, in this place, through the life of this man. We discovered similar attachments in many other places in Sardinia and Sicily. In one hill town in Sicily, a church guide showed us the statue of St Sebastian, and with great pride told us that it took 80 men to carry it, on its float, through the streets. The fact that there were 80 men young enough and strong enough, who wanted – indeed considered it a privilege – to do this, is testimony to the draw of these rituals; young men are a very under-represented group in most church congregations, so perhaps there is something in this to be pondered!

When we visited Sardinia and Sicily in early May, we found that everywhere we turned, churches were either preparing to take “their” saint out on procession, or had just done so, so much so that we dubbed it the “taking-your-saint-for-a-walk” season. It was, of course, a good time of year for such processions – reliably dry and sunny, but not yet unbearably hot – but further research into Processional customs hinted at another possible reason for there being so many processions at this time of year.