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Shrines
Sue Limb continued...
Bes had to preside over the sitting room to supervise the jollity and feasting (in our case, watching The Royle Family whilst devouring a take-away pizza.) However, Bes got a shelf all to himself, and I placed a couple of chunky gold candles just below him, on either side. I realised as I was doing this that in a modest, low-key way I was making a kind of shrine.
The Romans of course famously had household altars for their domestic gods, the Lares and Lemures. But the British are a bit more restrained. I think the Church of England prefers God to remain invisible as it seems more tasteful and tactful. Catholics are a bit more prepared to let rip. Indeed I once slept in an Irish Bed and Breakfast where a huge portrait of Christ presided over my bedroom, complete with fluorescent purple heart that glowed in the dark. But for Anglicans, the Christmas crib is probably the nearest they come to creating a shrine. And though the Christmas tree鈥檚 role is mostly ornamental, there is something mysterious about having a real pine tree indoors.
Perhaps we make shrines without knowing it, though. Often we place a bunch of flowers beside the photograph of a loved one who has died. Or something they possessed, which was a mundane object when they were alive, seems to acquire a symbolic power. The human imagination is the most mysterious force. Perhaps shrines and votive objects offer the imagination a starting point, a springboard, a place where the visible and the invisible meet.
After my father died last year we found among his possessions an old pair of running shoes - spikes, for sprinting, at which he won many prizes at the sports days of the Derbyshire coalfields in the 1930s. These shoes are on a shelf in what used to be his room, and I occasionally look at them and imagine that now he is sprinting over the clouds. I don鈥檛 suppose when he was lacing them up, back in 1930, eager for the race and his heart pounding with nerves, he ever suspected that seventy years later he would have a daughter for whom his old running shoes would have symbolic power, and that they would help to reconcile her to his death. And if that isn鈥檛 mysterious I don鈥檛 know what is.
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Which of your possessions do you feel has a special symbolism?
What is the object and how did it come to acquire such significance?
It what way does it remind you of, or help you to understand, an important relationship?
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