April 17, 2008
Place
Easter 5A Jn 14.1-14
Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (Jn 14.2)
Wendell Berry lives in Kentucky, but he is everybody’s neighbor. He wrote that if we don’t know where we are, we don’t know who we are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign.
He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge and sense of place that comes from working it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it.
He is talking about a sense of place. Fewer and fewer of us enjoy a sense of place in that sense in this day and time. Not because we are not farmers, although awareness of the land is essential for our good health, but because we are so mobile, so restless, so displaced. Berry is talking not only about the sense of place that land gives us, but even more so, the sense of place in which our poets specialize.
It takes not much stretch for me to imagine that this is the kind of knowing, the kind of sense of oneself that the poet Jesus specialized in. He said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” It is not only there, in that house of many rooms, where Jesus prepares a place for us that one day we may occupy, but it is also from that house that Jesus reaches out to us and prepares a place for us that we can now in this day and this time occupy.
Perhaps one of the major causes of our social malaise is that we have become indifferent to, even contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better. We seem as hooked on change as we are afraid of change. A lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it.
In our displaced condition we are not unlike the mythless person that Carl Jung wrote about, who lives “like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He… lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.”
It is only a step from this to another: that no place is a place until it has had a myth, until it has a story, a spiritual genealogy. No place, not even a wild place, not even a place where all of Maurice Sendak’s wild things are, is a place for us until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we can call poetry.
What Frost did for New Hampshire and Vermont, what Faulkner did for Mississippi and Steinbeck for the Salinas Valley, Wendell Berry is doing for his family corner of Kentucky, and hundreds of other place-loving people, gifted or not, are doing for places they were born in, or reared in, or have adopted and made their own.
I doubt that we will ever get the motion out of us, for everything in our culture of opportunity and abundance has, up to now, urged motion on us as a form of virtue. The way we drive our roads makes it seem that even vengeance has become a virtue. Our tradition of restlessness will not be outgrown in a generation or two, even if the motives for restlessness are withdrawn.
Our frontiers have been explored and crossed, at least in geographic terms. It is probably time we settled down. It is probably time we looked around us instead of looking ahead. We have no business any longer in being impatient with history. We need to know our history in much greater depth, we even need to know our geology, for our geology is only our history projected a little ways back from our founding fathers and mothers.
History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Why else would our present administration speak of “old Europe” with such disregard and disdain? Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history for us and defiling the natives who were here already and had their own history, we did not only them, but both the country and ourselves considerable harm. Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging.
“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” says Robert Frost’s poem. Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established.
The place Jesus makes for us is uniquely ours, a gift of grace from which we can grow and become the human beings he intends for us to become. It is our story. It is our myth. He is our vanguard, but as well, he is our shepherd in the here and now. With him, as T S Eliot reminds us, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
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