What If You Treated Your Life Like It Was Someone You Love?
I have been thinking about devotion. In fact, it was a strong contender for my word of the year, being just pipped at the post eventually (a decision that feels like six weeks, not six months, ago). After its second place finish it dropped off my radar for a little while, as my actual word of the year did during a tricky winter, but lately it’s been coming back to me on the wind: devotion. It feels like something I want, something I could use, yet I haven’t been quite able to fully crack it yet - or have I?
Devotion filtered through to me last year via Americans talking about devotional practices - I cannot for the life of me remember the context of this or how that came into my algorithm but there we go. I was not raised in Christianity, or in any religion at all; I can count on my fingers the number of church services I have been to, and all of them are funerals and weddings. However, I actually know a lot about devotion.
What some of you may know is that I have a Masters in History of Art, but I actually specialised in Medieval and Renaissance religious art. I have spent hours studying devotional practices from the large scale and public demonstrations of cathedrals through to the tiny and personal illuminations in Books of Hours. I am rusty, but I can read the symbolic messaging in altarpieces and walk into a church and understand how the services ran 800 years ago from the structure of the building.
Of course, I know devotion only in an academic way, but that interest was piqued by something. I have always felt awed by the effort made to create beauty in the name of faith; for something to be so important, so beloved that gold became paint and stone became stories. Of course most religious art also has a secular function as a signifier of power and status, but here I must haul myself back to the point, because I could drone on about this all day. What I will say is that the most touching pieces are the ones created for personal faith. The tiny prayer books where the owner chose the saints and stories most significant to them, the small travelling altarpieces so that one may worship on long journeys - all of these made only for the eyes of one person, for their personal devotional practice.
Given that my understanding of Christian practices is about five centuries out of date, I hadn’t really been aware that similar private practices still existed. There was, as there always has been, something about it I was drawn to - the time, effort, art, energy expended to just loving something every day, and the groundedness that that brought to the individual. I longed for a secular version of this devotional practice, but in spite of googling various iterations of “secular devotional practice” this didn’t seem to really be a thing. So I forgot about it for a little while. Until now.
When I was first thinking about the thing that would become The Cabin, I wrote “what makes a fulfilled life?” in the middle of a piece of paper and then around the outside I wrote every word that came to mind. One of those words was “devotion”.
Devotion will be our fourth monthly theme and it’s shaping up to be the one I’m most excited about, because it’s the one with the most room inside it for us all to make something unique and personal. What if your life were a church? What if your creativity were a religion? What would you do every day or every week? I haven’t the space to go into all the other types of devotion here: romantic, familial, devotion to craft, etc etc. What would you do if your life were someone you loved? How would you behave differently? What would stay the same? Who would you be?
