A home in A Rocha
This is the first in a new series of blog posts from around the A Rocha family exploring how someone first found a home with A Rocha, their memories of hospitality here, and how this changed how they know God.
Jo Swinney is Director of Communications and has co written a book with her mother, Miranda Harris, “A Place at the Table: faith, hope & hospitality” which you can buy here. All royalties go towards the work of A Rocha around the world.
My first A Rocha memory was an exploratory trip to the Algarve taken off season, during which I discovered the delights of indoor puddles – the villa being a particularly leaky one and the rain heavy that winter. I was four and it was all a mysterious adventure to me. We made the move to Portugal several months later. The first chapter of the A Rocha story was all about study – of language, of birds, of local culture and politics and of threats to the environment. It all passed me by, my childish horizons reaching only as far as surviving the school bus and campaigning for ice cream at the beach. I didn’t feel at home in Portugal for some time and A Rocha was something that occupied my parents and little more. That changed when the first centre was bought a couple of years later and our family moved in, soon to be joined by a rotating household of wonderful and diverse volunteers, staff and visitors. The house, Cruzinha, was somewhere I felt I had a place. The community there at any given time were my people.
Although undoubtedly noisy and somewhat wild, the four of us Harris children were never excluded or talked down to. We joined in all night wader ringing on the marshes and got stuck into whatever project was on the go, from repainting the shutters, cleaning out the ponds, or watering native saplings. We were quite used to coming home from school to find five strangers in the house who may or may not be up for a board game. We were sometimes the givers of hospitality, sometimes receivers.
I have endless memories of A Rocha hospitality. Among my favourites would be Easter breakfast every year. Everyone would get up at dawn for a homemade church service at the end of the headland, celebrating the resurrection of Christ often with a mix of those who believed he had and those who didn’t. Then we’d come home to a table set with fresh bread, boiled eggs, fruit and chocolates. Mum would make a bookmark with a photo and a Bible verse for each person, and there were always flowers and beautiful pottery dishes. Another was the time a visitor from Greece took an entire day to roast a lamb over an open fire by way of thanking us for his visit. I squatted next to him for hours, asking when it would be ready at ten minute intervals.
Growing up in A Rocha formed my faith in ways too numerous to recount. Living among people who paid such careful attention to non-human living things, seeking to protect and tend them in the name of Jesus, gave me a big wide understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Watching gritty, sacrificial love in action in communal living was an – admittedly unconventional – introduction to church. The welcome of non-Christians into this community showed me the power of authentically lived faith to draw people towards God. Forming friendships across wide gaps of generation, culture and language showed me that all of us are made in God’s image and have more in common than we often realise. Perhaps most significantly of all was the amount of time I was able to spend outside with the freedom to roam, explore and play. Psalm 19:1 says, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands’ to which Romans 1:20 adds, ‘God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.’ Much of what I know most fully of God’s character I have learnt from immersion in the beautiful Portuguese landscape. Like everyone, I also experienced hurt and damage and imported false understandings of God. No childhood or community is perfect. But, in revisiting Cruzinha recently for the first time in many years, I was full of gratitude that I got to spend my formative years at the heart of A Rocha, on the headland of Quinta da Rocha, among kind and interesting people.
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About Jo Swinney
Jo Swinney is a writer, speaker and editor. She joined A Rocha International as Head of Communications on June 1st, 2020.
View all posts by Jo Swinney (5)
Dearest Jo,
Your ongoing commitment to reality is such a breath of fresh air. You are not pollyannish with the less stellar aspects of the Christian life. Nor are you triumphalistic with the redemptive themes.
Thanks for the post and another fresh reminder of the embryonic days of A Rocha.
Full of gratitude for your gift of articulating complexity and beauty. Thank you Jo!
This is lovely, Jo. Good to hear your reflections on the beginnings of Arocha. Xx