Not far from Trapani, a small town on the western coast of Sicily that sits nearer to Africa than Rome, stands the Temple of Segesta. The temple is perched on the side of a green hill with a view that dominates the valley stretching out to the distant blue of the Gulf of Castellamare.
The temple is constructed in the Doric style of Greek architecture, despite the local inhabitants at the time, around 420BC, not being Greek. Nobody knows with any certainty who built it, or even why. And though the temple is considered the most complete Doric temple in all of Europe, it is not in fact complete. The Temple of Segesta is a temple built for an unknown purpose by unknown men and abandoned for an unknown reason.
I clearly recall the night in Trapani when I dreamed of my father for the first time after his death. As his health deteriorated, I had often dreamt of him. Always the same dream. In it he was young again, vital, energetic. In an inversion of reality, I would wake to a sense of relief, that his failing health was actually the dream. For a slither of a second, everything was alright. Then a savage wave of consciousness would break over me.
This dreaming of an impossible recovery was mirrored in real life. On some afternoons when I would visit him, I would see him from a distance, seated in his chair on the veranda, cap pulled down low against the setting sun. For all the damage that was being wrought on his brain, his exterior was in excellent condition. And to see him there, seated quietly among the lengthening shadows, it was impossible to believe that he would not rise to receive me, to shadow box a greeting in a way that he always had. Sitting there he looked complete, untouched by years or worries. But he never could get up out of that chair.
In Trapani, I dreamed my father back to perfect health. He was sitting in the sun with an old friend, shirt off, smiling and laughing. Suddenly he stood, the way you do when it is time to get going, and said to his friend, ‘I guess I’m next.’
In the early evening the citizens of Trapani, take their passeggiata, the evening stroll through the narrow stone streets. One evening I followed a group of people into a 14th century Church. I may have been lured in by its age or maybe it just reminded me of a line about a poet from a Bob Dylan song. Inside, a priest was holding mass. Behind me, another man slipped into the church. By his attire and attitude, I assumed he was a beggar.
I applauded the man’s business sense. Here among God’s disciples, he was sure to do well. Who could refuse him charity inside God’s house? Well, as it turns out everyone. And not only did the congregation deny him their charity, they rewarded his supplications with horror and distaste when he gently tapped each one on the elbow and they turned to find next to them, not a loved one or a fellow believer, but this man, filthy and desperate. He eventually exited the church empty handed, leaving the devout to their pious contemplation.
In the age of cancel culture it is difficult to believe that the Church has survived in any form. Genocide, slavery, massacres, paedophilia, torture, sexual abuse, money laundering. There is not much in the way of nefarious activity or atrocity that they haven’t been accused of at some point in time. The last census in Australia showed that we are turning our backs on organised religion. But in turning away from religion, I fear we risk throwing baby Jesus out with the bathwater.
For I wonder if we are not also turning our back on spirituality, something separate from, but often confused with, religion. In humanity’s quest to know, science has become the dominant paradigm. Under this paradigm, if we cannot name it, number it, measure it, weigh it, prove it or disprove it then it does not exist, it is not true. We allow no room for the unknowns, for the doubt, for the unprovable alternatives. It’s a reductive way to view the world. When something is known entirely, when no mystery remains, somehow it is dead. While a thing remains unknown, it can be anything, its possibilities endless.
This quest to quantify is borne from a deep insecurity. If we cannot prove it, others will not believe it, or we ourselves will not believe it. How different a world, and how different a relationship to that world, if we gave ourselves permission to believe in that which can’t be proven.
The Temple of Segesta stands magnificently complete and incomplete on the Sicilian hillside. Knowing its origins and history, explaining its story in measurements and years and weights and numbers would add nothing to its beauty. We cannot explain it and we do not need to.
Death has led me back to spirituality, forced me back to it. Science tells me dad is gone. That his body is now decomposing beneath the ground. If I believe only that, then all connection is lost. So, I don’t. I choose to believe in dreams and visions and memory.
Now, when he comes in dreams and I wake in the morning, I’m no longer sad. I’m happy that he has come to visit. That a connection exists. That he was smiling. He was with friends, he was well. What tangible difference is there, between remembering a dream, and remembering an experience? There is no difference. They are simply two memories, one borne of a dream, one of a moment lived. I can’t explain that, and I no longer need to.
A Series of Dreams