#snactuary

BEHOLD!! I'm 45,000+ words into This Still Happens, have just titled my first Ffion-centric chapter, and in doing so have invented an excellent new word which I shall certainly be putting into a lot of use very often!

Snactuary (noun): a safe place to hide one's food, a safe place where good comfort food is available, a sanctuary for your snacks.

‘Churches that stay open unclose themselves to the sorrows of humanity and alchemise them into consolation. And not a cheap consolation. Just as artists reconcile us to our ills by the way they notice and record them, so open churches console us by the way they accept the unreconciled aspects of our natures. This is a mystery the godless poet Philip Larkin acknowledged in his poem, Church Going. Almost in spite of himself, he recognised that ‘the ghostly silt’ of a church can exercise a strange power over those who visit it. Silt is the perfect word. It suggests the slow silent accumulation of pain and regret, and their distillation into memory and mercy. Because they have heard it all, these serious houses on serious earth. Into their ‘blent air’ generations of the wretched have whispered their compulsions, and not always in hope of having them removed, but simply to experience the relief of naming them. Churches not only bear the memory of our dyings, they also carry the knowledge of the helplessness of our failings. They are a haven for the homeless woman whose destitution is obvious, muttering to herself over there in the back pew; but they also accept the moral destitution of the confident man sitting in the dark chapel. gazing at the white star of the sanctuary light, heavy with the knowledge of the compulsions that have dominated his life and refuse to leave him. Here both are accepted in their helplessness. There is no reproach. Churches do not speak; they listen. Clergy speak, unstoppably. They are ‘randy’ to change, challenge or shame people into successful living. Church buildings that stay open know better. They understand helplessness and the weariness of failure, and have for centuries absorbed them into the mercy of their silence. This is grace. Unearned undeserved unconditional acceptance of unchanging failure, including biological failure, our last failure, our dying. The unclosed church is the home of the destitute and the dead. And since we will go on failing and dying, some of us will go on gravitating to these places that do not shut themselves against our needs.’