What is sanctuary for you?

Home, church, a place of protection, a Scottish hamlet, a Jewish castle, a snow cave, a basket of cereals, a hotel, a beekeeper’s farm, a mountain refuge, all have been sanctuaries of different characters, both fictional as real.

Deborah, a leasing agent, said her sanctuary is her home. “Home is a place where you carry your faith, where you have your retirement. It is peace, comfort, security and protection,” he said.

An apartment resident, a former Chicagoan, did not hesitate in his choice: the Church and the cult. He stood firm in his rejection of any other connotation.

Another resident, a young and talkative Indian wife named Sumi, defines sanctuary as “any place that makes me feel good: a waterfall, a swimming pool, a place with people I feel safe with.”

For a retired minister and his organist-wife, the sanctuary is in their religious faith, practiced not only in various churches, but also in their day-to-day generosity, as exemplified in their volunteer work and in providing transportation to people without means of transportation. .

For my father it was escaping to a freshwater fishing camp where he could retreat from the worries of business and family. It was not in the capture of a quantity of fish, but in the tranquility, the closeness to nature,

the hypnotic aura of a flat-bottomed boat gently bobbing in the current of a river or on the undulating surface of a lake.

In one of his literary works, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, British satirical playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote that a hotel is a kind of sanctuary from the incessant demands of home life, as opposed to recognizing the home as a sanctuary by from the leasing agent.

Hamish Macbeth, the lovable and unambitious Scottish bobby from MC Beaton’s crime-solving mystery series, finds refuge in the serene Highland village of Lochdubh and, more specifically, in his humble police station and simple shed. .

For the Jewish boy Reuven and his little sister Rachel in Kathryn Lasky’s Broken Song, a novel set in tsarist Russia, the sanctuary is found, in turn, in violin music, especially in Dvorak’s classics; in a basket of grains; and a snow cave. After their beloved schtel, a small town, is destroyed by brutal Cossack troops, the brother and sister escape alone.

Poet Emily Dickinson found her sanctuary, so to speak, as a recluse in her own home, from which she created some of the world’s concise and immortal poetic masterpieces on subjects ranging from heaven, death, and hope to nature, wine and art. .

For 14-year-old Lily Owens, in Sue Monk Kidd’s bestseller The Secret Lives of Bees, the sanctuary of an abusive father turns into a bee farm in Tuburon, South Carolina, with three black sisters, each with names based on them. In the months of the year. Lily and her runaway black nanny find refuge and a new life by learning beekeeping and honey making and immersing themselves in the goodness and wisdom of August, the eldest of the three hard-working sisters. Lily also learns of her deceased mother’s past in this same shrine.

All creatures seek some kind of sanctuary. Not everyone finds it. A mother found such a refuge forever eluding her desperate grasp. For 92 years she spent her long and tumultuous life trying to reconcile so many disparities involving her parents, breastfeeding a sick spouse, controlling the overly jealous behavior of two children, struggling with her own ailments, running a business, always struggling to balance her needs and the needs of others. If he found some kind of refuge, it was doubtful: drugs prescribed by the doctor for physical and mental illnesses. He passed away in a nursing home. The bipolar drugs that would have moderated the extremes of his mood swings were still waiting for him.