What Living Inside a Spiritual House Actually Feels Like.

 

What Living Inside a Spiritual House Actually Feels Like

A reflection by Sister Bridget Corfield, House of the Nine Mysteries

I did not know our house was different for a very long time. That is the thing about growing up inside something — it simply feels like life. The candles, the altars, the quiet acknowledgment of presences that most people cannot see and many are afraid to think about — all of it was just Tuesday to me. Just home.

The moment I started to understand that we were different came gradually, the way most important realizations do. I was young, and the children around me were frightened of ghosts. Really frightened — the kind of fear that made them pull covers over their heads and sleep with lights on and dare each other to say certain names three times in front of mirrors. I watched all of that with genuine curiosity, because in our house, the spirits were not something to be afraid of. They were welcomed. They were part of the family in a very real and literal sense. While my friends were terrified of what might be lurking in the dark, we were setting a place at the table.

That is not a metaphor. That is just how it was.

What I did not fully appreciate until much later was the texture of what that created — the atmosphere of a home where spirit is welcome rather than feared. The word that comes closest to describing it is peaceful. Not dramatic, not electric, not constantly charged with visible magic. Mostly just peaceful. A quiet hum underneath everything, like a note held so steadily for so long that you stop hearing it as separate from the silence. It is simply the sound the house makes.

I will be honest with you — there were years when I thought that peace was boring. When I was young and away at school, or early in my working life spending time in environments that had no spiritual foundation to speak of, I did not immediately miss the peace of home. I missed other things first — the people, the familiarity, the food. But after a while, something else began to make itself known. A kind of flatness in the air. A restlessness I could not quite name. Spaces that felt hollow in a way I had never noticed spaces could feel until I knew what the alternative was.

Coming home from those stretches away was when I finally understood what I had been living inside all along. Walking back through the door of a house where spirit is welcome feels different in your body than walking into a space where it is not. The air is different. The quality of the quiet is different. Something settles in you almost immediately, the way your shoulders drop when you finally sit down after a very long day on your feet. I had taken that settling for granted my entire childhood. I never took it for granted again after that.

The other thing I did not fully see until I had some distance from it was the support. Growing up in a spiritual house means growing up held. Not in a sheltered or naive way — life in our house was as real and complicated and sometimes difficult as life anywhere else. But there was always a sense that we were not navigating any of it alone. The spirits were present, the ancestors were present, and Mambo Sam's steady, practiced relationship with all of them meant that when something hard came, there was somewhere to bring it. There was always someone — or something — to consult, to pray to, to sit with in the dark until things became clearer.

Most people I have met outside of this tradition spend a great deal of energy feeling alone with their problems. I do not say that to sound boastful about what I was given — I say it because it makes me deeply grateful, and because I think it is the thing I most want people who are drawn to this path to understand. This is not a tradition you come to for the aesthetic, or the mystery, or even the magic, though all of those things are real and present. You come to it — or it comes to you, which is more often how it works — because something in you recognizes that you were not meant to move through this life without support. Without relationship. Without the company of something larger than what you can see.

That is what living inside a spiritual house actually feels like, at its core. Not dramatic. Not frightening. Not the thing you see in movies or read about in sensationalized accounts that have very little to do with the real thing.

Mostly it feels like being held. Mostly it feels like coming home.

And after all these years, it still does.

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Sister Bridget Corfield is an initiated Voodoo Priestess of Ogoun and a founding member of the House of the Nine Mysteries, in the house of Mambo Samantha Corfield.