This must be the place

Before I write about one of my favourite places on the planet, I must describe the piles of laundry, clean and unclean that are in strange, chaotic piles throughout the house. There is also IKEA packaging strewn about after a shopping expedition. And not to forget, all kinds of hasty namesday accoutrements for my daughter, Margarita, (July 17/30 - Saint Marina). She insisted on a 'blue' velvet cake with an Elsa doll sticking out of it, which turned out more like absinthe green, but remarkably tasty.


Coming home from holidays is rough. Winter is rough. Going straight back to work after holidays gave me nightmares that my legs no longer worked (this is a side-effect of skiing for a week but in my dreams I gave up on moving forward).

In short, trying to 'have it all' – and a holiday to boot, is an express lane to domestic disorder.

Happier times – running free in the thousands of acres of land at the monastery at sunset. 

I want to go back to the monastery, by monastery I mean the Holy Transfiguration Monastery, a male monastic community in rural New South Wales in the rugged hills of southern Australia. Located in a rain shadow, and on the other, dryer, dustier side of the Dividing Range and the temperate sea – it is in many ways a desert church.

The church building at the Holy Transfiguration Monastery, it is winter in Australia so the gardens are having a little bit of down time. 

The monastery was founded in 1982, just a year before I was born. One of my earliest childhood memories is of being driven along the dried out river bed of the MacLaughlin and being told – part jocular part warning – about all the snakes there. The land was all ochre and olive, the eucalypts twisted and gnarled from drought. Photos from this trip show a strawberry blonde toddler, probably a year and a bit old in a blue knitted overall.

Walking to church  from the guest house on Sunday morning along a path of crumbling natural slate. The forest is around you, enveloping you in a spicy eucalyptus fragrance, the river is meandering below. 

(It is strange to think that my family was intwined with the monastery since an early age, in many ways, and that my husband is related to the Abbot, yet we didn't meet until we were young adults.)

So to backtrack, after the above-mentioned ski trip, we drove home from the alps, and literally passed the road to the monastery. We were tired, bedraggled, and spiritually hungry. We had lived communally at a ski lodge, I don't do well with feelings of being an outsider – outside in the cold, separate, excluded. This probably runs a lot deeper back to childhood trauma, of not speaking English when I went to school, of being culturally distinct.

Of course, we chose a week where we were lumped with a group called The Wombats, a raucous bunch of Canberrans who took over the kitchen every night and tried to outdo each other when on dinner duty. They ate together on large tables that they joined leaving us on a little floating island table. One guy was a dyed in the wool Russophobe and I sat there enduring his diatribes, quietly fuming, and silent, at my husband's insistence that we should just ignore the man.

On a dirt road past the monastery, my husband slowed the car. "Should we stop there for the night?" Ahhh, yes. Please.

The rest I will describe in photographs.

Father Alexis delivering his sermon.

Except to recap, briefly, one note from Father Alexis's sermon about Saint Peter's doubt that nearly drowned him when Christ walked on the water. Saint Peter was a fisherman and could swim of course, as is mentioned earlier in the scriptures.

We are all complex beings and we all doubt and falter.

What we need to remember is, as in Saint Peter's case, is that Christ's hand is always outstretched to us, to lift us back up. Prayer, quiet prayer, full of grace, is the way to keep moving forward.

The road out of the monastery, back to modern city life and overcast skies!