Writing About the Sensual and the Spiritual

I’ve been asked often how I decided to take on writing about the sensual and the spiritual. The answer is simply that both of them grew organically from the seed of the original image of a mermaid chair in the church. Of course, I researched the mermaid chair in Cornwall right away, and discovered that it sits in St. Senara Church in the village of Zennor and is probably around 600 years old. It’s made from two fifteenth century bench ends, one of which is carved with a mermaid. This mermaid is associated with the fabled Mermaid of Zennor, who fell in love with one of the church’s choristers, and then lured him into the sea. The point is that this is the kind of thing that mermaids do. They have long been symbols of seduction and the sensual urges that swim below the surface in humans. Mythically, they are first cousins to the sirens of ancient Greece. When I’d visited some of the great medieval cathedrals of Europe, I’d occasionally seen a mermaid carved on the capital of a column. One explanation was that she was there to warn parishioners about temptation.

The pairing of the mermaid and the church brought forth a whole spectrum of provocative dualities– the sensual and the spiritual; the above and the below; the pull of the divine and the pull of the body. So the basic motifs were really there from the very beginning.

As I thought about what sort of church to place The Mermaid Chair in, I thought right away about an abbey. I had visited monasteries on occasion and had read widely about monastic spirituality, so it made sense to me to use that. One thing that helped jumpstart the story was remembering a reference in my reading to a monk who had fallen in love with a woman and the intense crisis this had precipitated in him. It became an experience of his soul that he had to probe in order to find its internal meaning, and to become whole and complete. This notion of men falling in love as an experience of soul has long existed in literature. Think of Dr. Zhivago, in which a married man falls in love with Lara, who represents his own inner vision of an ideal feminine figure. His pursuit of Lara becomes a spiritual pursuit.

I wondered: What if there was a married woman, and she fell in love with a monk, who represented her ideal masculine figure? What sort of crisis would it precipitate? How would it be a crisis of soul? How would it summon her to her own wholeness, to an inner freedom, or completion of herself? I became intrigued with flipping the tables and writing about the experience from a woman’s perspective.