Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos Book

"When BBC documentarian Peter France and his wife, Felicia, first came to Patmos, he had no intention of surrendering to these enchantments: his career had hardened him into a committed skeptic. But as he learned more about his fellow Patmians - their urgent embrace of the moment, their selfless rejection of materialism - he was inexplicably drawn to their Orthodox Christianity. To learn how to be "normal," he found himself turning to Patmos's religious eccentrics: hermits, ascetics, monks, and nuns." A Place of Healing for the Soul tells how France came to change his life perspective, eventually trading his mansion for a shepherd's cottage and his Mercedes for sunset mountain walks. Hilariously, he describes the alternately therapeutic and bewildering effects of settling into a new home in a land where foreigners can't own property and plumbers refuse to submit to the tyranny of time. It took France three years to have his telephone installed, but by then he had already discovered the pleasure and security of living simply and doing without, in a timeless realm where history, myth, and spirituality are endlessly alive.