The Holy Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist is in Fira on Santorini. It’s a still, bewitching hour on a Thursday. Our final night on this striking island before we fly to Sicily. We’ve stolen up and across along the bumpy, twisting alleys from our apartment to this church. Sunset imminent.

It’s been decades since I regularly visited St Roses in Kapunda. We’re not going to mass. Claire leads me in. We’re just going to quietly sit and think.

Claire gathers and lights three candles. They glow with warmth and with faith. A candle for her dad, one for her mum, one for her sister Fran. They offer much beyond light.

Despite my Catholic childhood, at first I feel like an intruder. Church was only for set times, otherwise the door’s shut. Claire leans over and whispers, ‘In Turkey I was told that Muslims have no ceremony or mass when in a mosque. They simply pray.’ In the darkening pews, I nod. She continues. ‘There’s no assistance from a priest or religious person. It’s a singular, private time.’ Claire’s always teaching me things like this.

Is that what we’re doing now? Using this church for reflection, for gratitude, for remembrance. If churches can be for spirituality and not formal religion, then I think so. I’ve not sat in a church like this before, and it’s peaceful. I wonder if I could cultivate a new, informal relationship with the Catholic church. This might be the gift Greece gives me.

We stroll around to the Three Bells of Fira. We peer down on the Mediterranean, way below on the bluish, deepening Caldera. The cloudy skies mean there’s few people here on what feels like the brink of the world. On clear summer evenings in a month or two, it’ll be heaving like a music festival. Again, we speak little. There is no need.

Up and down laneways on the cliffside, we then arrive at Volkan on the Rocks. The resort has an open-air theatre, and the audience is at their tables with headphones on. Six nights a week it screens the Abba-inspired film Mamma Mia. We look down at them. In this location that’s neither day nor night, but both land and sea, it could be diverting. We walk on.

A moored cruise ship hovers below, a colossal modern wonder, all steel and sleek lines. From it dance music erupts up and into the Greek heavens. We imagine those on the decks, clutching drinks, milling about. Then, a smaller wooden vessel, a ketch, glides into view, pop melodies also bellowing up from the silent sea. It slides beneath us to the cliff and disappears into the velvety night.

Dusk approaches. In amongst the endless, squealing wheels of travel, the stillness of our church visit now feels as an instructive lingering, a wonder of rapt silence.