There’s no place like home?
A few weeks ago while I was recovering from surgery my youngest son suggested we try to see how far I could walk down the street. He and I both love to walk. Together we walked, or perhaps more accurately, crept down the street - I was barely able to put one foot in front of the other. It had been a long time since the two of us have walked this particular road together. His streets are in the city now, with cracked sidewalks or the occasional ancient cobblestone. After we covered a couple hundred yards or so he said, "This street is exactly as I remember it." Same cracks; same potholes; same piles of pollen gathering along the edges of the blacktop road that he learned to ride his bike on or ran down to get to his friend Ryan's house. This is the same kid who once said, upon hearing that his dad and I were thinking about downsizing, "Who's going to pack up my childhood memories if you move?" He has a sense of PLACE.
I get it. I have a keen sense of place. Forever my place will be deeply rooted in the smell of my grandmother's home (mothballs), the sound of an air conditioner window unit (blessed relief after years of no air conditioning, the snap, crackle pop of bacon sizzling in the cast iron skillet, the squeak of a glider and the cracks on her concrete driveway. It was a house that held onto its quiet jealously and did not change with the whims of fashion. For me it was shelter from the storm of a home that housed lots of conflict and regularly tried to solve problems with geographic cures.
Place is important in the Bible too. Before God made his creatures, he made a place for them to reside that would encourage thriving. He created the heavens and the earth; he made light and dark. He created oceans for the sea creatures and dry land for the elephants and kangaroos. He called the earth to bring forth vegetation through the process of photosynthesis - which my granddaughter can explain to you in great detail. He made a perfectly lovely eco-system that mere mortals have been trying their best to mess up ever since.
PLACE is as important in the scriptures as the characters that inhabit it. Adam and Eve have a short term rental in the garden of Eden but are evicted because they cannot keep their hands off the apples. Abraham is told to leave his family and go to a new place - what a wild ride that road trip turned out to be. Moses leads his people out of captivity but can't quite get them to the promised land. I could go on and on. But it's not just the Old Testament. Jesus was FROM an actual place. He was born in an actual PLACE. Paul wrote letters to actual places: Galatia, Ephesis, Colossae, Philippi, Corinth. These were actual places with people living real lives. They struggled with floods and famine and sickness and health. They had babies and lost them. They got into fights about who is right and who is wrong about all manner of topics. Can we or can we not eat meat? What are the sexual mores of a church community? Circumcised...or not?
I wonder how many of us are paying attention to our place in this world. It's so easy to get distracted with the Facebook scroll and all the alluring beauty of the world found in places we can only long for. It's easy, I think, to be so distracted that we fail to notice our place in this world and stand firmly in it. Maybe we're busy wishing for our place to be different. Better housing - or housing at all. More abundance, less drudgery. The future...new possibilities....what can and might happen. How things can and should improve.
Every generation seems to suffer the opinion that the subsequent ones are going to mess up the works. This is laughable on so many, many levels but it remains true. It is indeed hard for a leopard to change its spots. When might we be willing to stop? Stand still. Pay attention. We get one shot at showing up and making a difference in the place we are born into. I've heard so many, many stories of place squandered through inattention and judgment.
Those that make a difference in the world are not the Instagram influencers. That's about something else. True influencers are those that encourage, support and create safe places for the hurting among us. I doubt that anyone looked at me as a youngster and said, "Man, that girl needs some extra support." But I got it in a place that feels as if it was carved out for me by the hands of God himself. It was a small red brick house that would never make it onto Snapchat. But it provided a shelter from a storm that was mostly hidden behind closed doors that went by the confusing name of "home."
Place matters, and it matters in the moment. Where we plant our feet on the soil that God prepared for us to stand on, under the sun that warms the earth and causes flowers and trees to break into bloom, our presence in PLACE MATTERS. We all gather around place in a very specific timeframe. Each generation has its own fights and feuds. It all feels very repetitive and petty. But among the ashes of vitriol and judgment, there are opportunities to do it differently.
In Cole Arthur Riley's book, This Here Flesh, she writes, "We train our focus on beauty here or there - this poem, that architecture - because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. Wonder requires a person not to forget themselves but to feel themselves so acutely that their connectedness to every created things comes into focus. In sacred awe, we are part of the story." p.37. Oh how I long for a world where it is hard to make snap judgments and live in a cocoon of illusory certainty. What a wonderful world it will be when we cannot judge, blame and accuse anyone because we experience the connectedness we have to every other created thing.
In the meantime, while we wait, I think of the alumni from The Healing Place (a local treatment program in our community) and how I love hearing their stories. It's always about place, the humble brick building where so many men, and now women, are finding their way to recovery. Without the place, there would be no central gathering spot for the people. The stories are always about the people who made a difference in this particular place. When a guy gets sober, he never talks about his story so much as he talks about THEIR story in that place. He names names and they are specific. Al. Justin. Stephen. Names who helped him move from darkness back into the light.
I can call to mind all the things I loved about 606 Ruby Street. I can ride by the house when I am traveling through town and even though that home has been neglected in recent decades, it still stands. Like my own son, I know this place, because it is more than bricks and mortar. Place matters because it serves as a hub for where people gather and what they do with their time while gathered. Place changes outcomes. I'm not sure what my own outcome would have been without the grounding I was given every summer, returning to what I considered my true home, although I could not have articulated this reality back then.
I want to leave you with this challenge...and opportunity. Where will your feet take you today or this week? What places do you inhabit? What about those places - humble though they may be - provides you with the opportunity to become part of a bigger story? Who occupies the space? What might they need? How can your relationship bring a little light, a bit of hope, to those who gather in those places with you?
God certainly knows that PLACE matters - after all, he started there with the creation story. I would ask you to consider how you could make a difference in the place you reside, if you stopped looking for the magnificent - this poem, this architecture, and instead considered the fact that your face and the body it is attached to has its own beauty, its own worth, and makes it possible for you to make a difference. Look, you can be that guy, the one who spends his time telling the next generation what they are getting wrong, or you can be the human who sees how we are all connected. And we all matter.
