We moderns are defined by constant motion rather than by sitting still. We can be anywhere in a second, but rarely stay somewhere longer than that. We have developed an aversion to fixing things—and to fixed things. We would rather discard and replace than care for and renew.
It is more and more difficult for us to imagine making Odysseus’s choice to forsake eternity for home. Liberalism’s ideas have consequences—from widespread divorce to mass marketing to spaghetti interchanges—but those consequences also shape ideas, reinforcing the frame of mind that gave birth to them. They break our ties to imagination, to craft, to the land, and to the shop, so that our cities and pastures alike are blighted. Because we have repeatedly bowed at the altar of convenience, we are isolated from the very things that would feed and nourish our imagination. It should be no wonder that civil society has largely lost its ability to mediate between the individual and society at large. It should be no wonder that people live with a vague sense of lostness. We have become a people without a place.
~ Caleb Stegall, Practicing the Discipline of Place
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Thanks for that link Travis.
What Stegall does for politics, Eugene Peterson did for pastoral theology. Both of them see recapturing what is essentially a biblical understanding of place as fundamental in shaping society and the church. And both of them use agricultural images to explain it: be connected to a place, not for what you can get out of it, but for what it is. It means being connected to a community or church because that is where you are. It’s not driving miles to another church because it suits you better. It’s being connected to your community, for better and worse. It stops me seeing a church as a voluntary association of people like myself, but more like a family (which it is). Even with the embarrassing uncles and ratty kids.
Mobility means I am free to leave a church for even trivial reasons rather than stay and work the issue out, as messy as that can be or as long as it might take. And so we drift, delighting in our freedom to determine our destiny but losing any hard-won sense of belonging. For many Christians my age and younger ‘we have become a people without a place.’
I couldn’t agree more. Very well said.
The more I read and study the scriptures and the more I live, I find myself as a person “on pilgrimage” rather than someone belonging to a particular place. We are told early on about a “man leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife” which St. Paul and the Fathers applied to the Son of God leaving the Heavenly home to travel the Earth with “no place to lay his head”. We see the attempt to establish an earthly place of unity and strength in the tower of Babel which is thwarted by God. Contrasted with this behavior, our father in faith is Abraham “goes forth from his country” when asked to by God. Even the Promised Land is symbolic of mankind’s true home, and the refusal on the part of the Jews to grasp this leads to their demise over and over again. Every missionary from St. Paul to Mother Teresa heard the call to leave their own place to serve a greater calling.
A woman I knew who sold her family homestead after her mother moved into a neighboring town told me that home was wherever her mother lived, not a place of brick and mortar. I remember thinking “That sounds like Heaven, our ‘true native land’”. A home is not a bad thing, on the contrary it is good, but a disordered attachment to a place is not good. We’re all really exiles, like Tolkien’s Elves whose disordered attachment to Middle Earth brought mostly sorrow upon themselves. In a sense, the reason we take care of our domiciles is for those who come after us, whether they be our kin or others. Whenever I’ve read Caleb Stegall’s material with regard to this discipline of place concept, I notice that a balance with detachment is entirely missing, as well as it being a bit disdainful for those whose vocation has not to remain in one place, but perhaps to labor in many places within the Lord’s vast vineyard.
I see the opposite, the more I read, study the Scriptures, and live. Abraham was certainly called to get up and leave, but it was, quite obviously, for the purpose of settling his people down permanently in Canaan. The Promised Land is, indeed, symbolic of our true home, but our true home isn’t some disembodied, drifting-on-clouds, no-location. It’s here. The New Jerusalem comes here in the end. We don’t go “up there” somewhere. “Heaven” as somewhere other than here is not our “true native land.” When heaven and earth again meet and are not separated anymore, redemption will have come in full. But we’ll still be here.
We were created and put into a place. It was sin that banished us from a permanent place. If salvation encompasses the redemption of all things, including the earth (Romans 8), then salvation is the recovery of rootedness in a place where peaceful lives are lived out in the presence of God. All those who are called to be mobile are workers in God’s kingdom, to further it all over the earth, and should never be treated with disdain. But it’s quite a different thing to so disdain place that the “truly successful” people are the ones who grow up and move on to something bigger and better. (I’ve not yet read anything from Stegall which demonstrates the disdain you mention, but there’s a whole lot more Stegall I haven’t read than what I have.)
We take care of our homes because we were meant to live in a place, cultivate the land, and because the redemption of all things, heaven and earth, is coming, and we are working toward that end. It can only be finally and fully accomplished by Christ in His return – but then, so can my sanctification, and I must still be at work toward that end as well.
Perhaps sheding addtional insight:
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=3404