I am remembering a time when I needed shelter. I am remembering it with my mind. But, even more, I am remembering it with my body.

Where is it that we feel loneliness in the body? I feel it as a particular kind of hollow in the heart, I can feel an echo of my own heart in my own chest.

Once when I was sixteen, a man at a music festival laughed at something I said, and said that he liked me. It was the first time anyone had said to me they liked me. Another time, following a long week of work, friends came to my house and said they’d decided that we were going to a film so that we could laugh together. Another time, a friend knocked on my door, and before I knew it, he was crying in my kitchen. Sometimes we can’t even put a name to our loneliness, but we know that shelter is needed.

Once, in fact, for a long, long time, I was frightened – so frightened, I could not even be my own self, I could not show kindness, I had forgotten how to show love. I was a human in need of shelter.

When I remember these things, I remember with my body. I feel that lurch of exposed loneliness.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine.

Try as I have, I have not been able to find which part of Ireland this old saying comes from. It is possible it comes from the Islands off the West Coast. It means:

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.

The Lakewalker knew about shelter. He seemed to find it in a house in Bethany. And he gave it, when in the house of Simon, to a woman who feared, and because she was feared, she was judged. Even though the man of Nazareth’s sheltering meant that he too was judged, he still gave shelter.

Us people have often lived unsheletered and unsheltering lives. We feel raw, we feel fear, we expose and humiliate others in the hope of finding belonging and validation. We scapegoat the other in the hope that our own cowardice and fear will not be named.

And in the midst of it all, in the midst of the mosaic of human beings excluding other human beings, I am thinking of a woman I knew who did not consider herself a great person of words, learning or insight. She thought modestly of her talents, abilities and potential. When her neighbour’s mother died, the woman cooked a houseful of food. She gave the food, she offered care for the dog and for the plants. She brought her own self and she cooked and listened. She wrote a card after a month. She wrote another card the next month. The month after that, there was another dish of casserole.

She knew that grief is measured in years, not days.

She provided shelter.

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.

From the online essays  for Jars of Clay’s album Shelter.