...the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
― Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge
I have lived a large part of my life thus far believing that I was, at heart, a nomad. Every time I had been been in a particular place, community, or job for a year and a half, I would begin to feel unsettled. When I was younger I attributed this dis-ease to an adventurous spirit. I wanted to see explore new places, meet new people, and find out what I was missing out on in the world. But as I grew older, I became aware of another motivation for my uneasiness or restlessness. See, eighteen months into a new situation seems to be just the right amount of time for the shine to really rub off – after eighteen months, the place in which I found myself would seem suddenly dull, and the “perfect self” that I had imagined I would be in that place would turn dingy as well. After eighteen months I would feel a sense of failure. [1]
Maybe what I need, I used to think, is a do-over of sorts. In a new place I can start over, give it all a much better try. In my next job, maybe I can to live in a state of zen at the office; maybe my administrative assistant won’t have cause to invite me to join the Facebook group I Love Jesus But I Cuss a Little; maybe on my next attempt I will finally be the perfect trifecta of TV moms – maternal rockstar June Cleaver (Leave It To Beaver), political powerhouse Elizabeth McCord (Madame Secretary), and the eternally self-giving, humanitarian-minded medicine woman Dr. Quinn. Maybe in my next place I will find God in a way that will calm my heart and focus my mind, in a way I haven’t been able to where I am.
But in the second half of my thirties I stumbled upon the Benedictine way of life. I realized that underlying my tendency to look at the next shiny thing to come was not a problem with where I was; the issue was with me. Like in all of us, there was a part of me – more like several parts of me – that needed to grow and to learn and to change. That kind of change happens for most of us when we make a commitment to be fully present to a particular place and to a particular group people. By wanting to get go to a new place every couple of years, I was running from the hard work of conversion.
Benedictine monastics make vows of obedience, stability, and conversatio morum – a phrase that is translated many different ways but at its root implies fidelity to the monastic life such that one is changed, fidelity to the monastic life such that one dies and is resurrected on a daily basis. It is openness to change, or conversion. All three of these monastic vowa are intertwined, and each one leads us to the others. But let’s start with start with stability.
Stability can take place on multiple levels – geographically (commitment to a place), personally (commitment to certain persons, to a set of relationships), and ultimately spiritually (a stability of heart, a commitment of focus and purpose). For most of us, these things are interrelated. Certain people are tied to certain places; the people we brush up against will be mostly those with whom we share out day-to-day spaces. And it is in these places and within these relationships that our stability of heart – our commitment to the way of Jesus – will either grow or peter out.
Isn’t there is a place in the spiritual life for pilgrimage and acute conversion experiences and abrupt life changes? Yes, but these are meant to be the exception and not the rule. God isn’t waiting for us in another town or another type landscape or even with other people. God may call us to other places, but God is also always right where we are. That’s the promise that is at the root of the practice of stability.
Anthony Bloom was a monk and metropolitan bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church who is known for his books on prayer. He said: “You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere, that you do not need to seek Him elsewhere, that He is here, and if you do not find Him here it is useless to go and search for Him elsewhere because it is not Him who is absent from us, it is we who are absent from Him … It is important to recognize that it is useless to search for God somewhere else. If you cannot find Him here you will not find Him anywhere else.” When we recognize this, Bloom says, then we finally “be able to say: ‘So then I shall stay where I am.’” [2]
In other words, I believe that God is everywhere, including in this very place. So I trust that – if I am faithful, attentive, and open – then this place and these people will shape me into the person God created me to be. The practice of stability and the practice of conversion go hand-in-hand. Places shape who we become.
Growing up in a town of two thousand in rural North Carolina – practicing a stability I wouldn’t practice again until after the age of forty – I learned what it is to feel ownership of a place. With a bike and a best friend as my fearless companions, nothing seemed off limits. I lived just half a block off main street with its three stop lights (the only ones in town). On lazy summer days, we bounced into the police station. Once when I got a new bike, they engraved a serial number into its tires to protect it from theft (even though not much got stolen in Nashville, North Carolina). Then they sent us on our way with the command to ride on the sidewalk to keep down the population. When the volunteer fire department had its monthly meeting, we made cupcakes for them. When it was incredibly hot outside, I took refuge in the stores on main street – the furniture store, the dime store, and my dad’s drug store. My sister and our friends relived the opening scene of Little House on the Prairie on a hill in the town cemetery.
Could it be that my sense of belonging in that small town led me to feel always out of place in larger places? On the other hand, was it what compelled me to travel? There is no keeping “family secrets” in a small town. Was it this realization what made me reluctant to let anyone see beneath the veneer of my own life in the other places I’ve lived? Is this why I wanted to move on each time the veneer became too thin? Each of us has a spiritual geography.
In Kathleen Norris’ book called Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, she describes how moving to her grandparents’ home in South Dakota after their death ended up shaping her spiritual journey, teaching her about life, and creating her into the person she has become. She writes:
In the small town on the Plains, as in the monastery, there are so few people for so many jobs that we tend to call on whoever seems the most likely to do the job well. This has its bad side, as capable people can find that they are doing too much. It can also lead to mediocrity. Many local events have made me think of what Minnesota writer Carol Bly has suggested as a motto for small towns: “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”
But sometimes miracles occur. Sometimes people rise to the occasion and do well more than they believe they can do at all. The radical hope we must place in others on the Plains reminds me of Jesus, who called disciples from their ordinary work to change the world without once consulting a personnel manager to determine if they had the aptitude or credentials for the job.
When the pastor of our Presbyterian church in Lemmon moved away a few years ago, we were left with the task of filling the pulpit for an indeterminate period. The chair of the worship committee immediately commandeered me to preach, saying simply, “You’re a writer, you can do it.” And, to my surprise, I did. I had to confront some family ghosts, among them the fierce Methodist preachers in my blood. I had to contend with my own uncertain Christian faith. But the need was there, and I was able to answer it, preaching well enough so that in effect I became our half-time pastor for eight months, until other duties called me away.
There were other surprises in store for the congregation; we found that one of our elders, a housewife and proud of it, could lead a very dignified communion service. She also preached several fine devotional sermons, one on the subject of housework. What good is a desert [like the plains of South Dakota]? Well, I believe a desert is where such gifts appear. In a larger urban church with well-credentialed clergy, that woman and I would not have been asked to preach. We would never have discovered that we could preach. But on the Plains, as in the desert, book learning and training matters less than one’s ability to draw from the well of one’s experience, to learn by doing.
The aging congregations in small towns on the Plains may be an endangered species. But so are the family farmers of Dakota, and Benedictine monks, for that matter. All are generally viewed by the rest of the world as irrelevant or anachronistic. And yet we may find important lessons in these overlooked and undervalued lives. Despite their dwindling numbers, and despite the fact that they, like the rest of us, so often fail at caring for one another as they should, churchgoers are trying to keep alive both hope and community values. Small-town churchgoers are often labeled hypocrites, and sometimes they are. But maybe they are also people who have learned to live with imperfection, what Archbishop Rembert Weakland, a Benedictine, recently described as “the new asceticism.” Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking. [3]
Not only has living in South Dakota taught Norris to make peace with imperfection, it has also taught her to love that which is dying, that which is fleeting. She writes:
… Benedict instructs his monks to remind themselves every day that they are going to die, and in Dakota death has an undeniable day-to-day reality. The brutal massacres of Wounded Knee and the Killdeer Mountains (misnamed a “battle” to this day) are too recent to be comfortably relegated to history; they’re still a living memory for the Native American community. And for white settlers, the period since the end of the “Indian Wars” has been marked by the slow death of their towns, churches, schools, and way of life.
We learn to live with a hard reality: nothing lasts. As a pastor friend who has served in the Dakotas for nearly thirty years recently wrote to me, “Dakota civilization does not support the idea that institutions will live on and we with them . . . quite possibly what we value so highly might not even outlast us.”
Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that bring us back to love. Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others. [4]
Kathleen Norris’ experiences of how place and spirituality are interwoven in her own life will not be each of ours. Our story is unique to us; it’s shaped by our experience of God in own community. We don’t need to move to South Dakota to have an experience of God. God is everywhere; we don’t have to go any farther than own community, our own backyard.
What is your spiritual geography? How has place – where you grew up, where you live now – shaped your own spirituality?
FOR FURTHER REFLECTION
- How has the physical landscape of your town/city/immediate surrounding shaped the person you have become?
- Who are the people with whom you share daily life? Do many of them go unnoticed for you?
- How do things in your daily surroundings – the landscape, the economy, and the people – influence how you experience the presence of God in your life?
- Are there places you have failed to notice God’s presence? Reflect now on where God might be found in those places.
[1] This series of blogs comes from an Episcopal Church Women Quiet Day Retreat that I led at Camp Mitchell in Morrilton, Arkansas, in June 2018.
[2] As quoted in Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2001) 65.
[3] Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) 118-120.
[4] Ibid, 120-121.
An Honest Hope 