Learning Where We Are
On learning to know where we are so that we might love God and neighbor.
On Tuesday, as I do most Tuesdays, I spent a few hours meandering through Jackson Park. Its proximity to Lake Michigan, its savannas and lagoon, and its small meadow offer a sanctuary to many species of birds, some, like the chickadees and downy woodpeckers, which remain throughout the year and many others who migrate briefly through or decamp for the summer. On Tuesday I hung out with yellow warblers, herons, wood ducks, northern flickers, some vocal house wrens, and many others I certainly walked beneath, oblivious.
I also hung out with Wendell Berry, whose new book I've been enjoying and occasionally arguing with this summer. Berry's interest in The Need to Be Whole is on the nature of race prejudice but unsurprisingly given his lifelong exploration of agrarianism, he returns to his theme via observations about land: how Americans treat and mistreat our country and what this might say about how we (mis)treat each other.
Toward the end he imagines the university of his dreams, the University of the End of Nowhere, whose task it would be to help people once again see their places and respond to them with care. The courses, he writes, "would intend to turn American minds outward to where they are, the localities where they find themselves perhaps by chance of birth or where they have chosen to be." The focus "would be directed to looking out and looking around, to examining the relationship between habitat and inhabitant."
You'd rightly surmise that Berry understands inattentiveness to be one of the longstanding problem shared by most Americans. We don't know where we are so, if we think about it all, we misunderstand our relationships with our places and the other people and creatures they sustain.
For Berry, we are made for attentive care, something that cannot happen quickly. "Only people who know their land can effectively love it, and only by loving it for a long time can they competently (though never completely) know it."
I don't know if anyone will ever attempt Berry's Nowhere University, but the idea got me thinking about the church. Might our local congregations become communities in which people learn where they are so that they might learn to competently and carefully love it?
I suppose there's a question prior to this one about whether our churches should want to become these sorts of communities. Most of us understand church as the place where we are formed to love God and to love others. There's more, of course, but never less than that.
For many reasons, we are prone to love our neighbors without accounting for the placed histories and dynamics which have impacted them. Our approach to God is similar. It's like we've forgotten that God created the material stuff which gives our lives form and food. Our expressions of love are directed at autonomy and spirit. The wonderful and surprising particularities of place are mostly irrelevant to our attempts at love.
But Scripture reveals a God who, though being beyond creation's constraints, is conversant with valleys and mountaintops, streams and pastures, family genealogies and priestly lineages. To love this God is to love not with our heads in the formless void but with our feet planted firmly, knowingly, and affectionately on solid ground.
Our neighbors are also to be understood and loved from our shared soil and stories. Knowing our neighbors requires, as Berry notes, that we first know where we are. That we understand the histories behind why that freeway was built here and not there, why those people live on that side of town and these people live on this side, why the group symbolized by that statue aren't around anymore. That we know which watershed is ours, which birds to expect next month, and which trees won't grow here anymore. Whether we know it consciously, knowing where we are is a requirement for knowing who we are and who our neighbors are. It is a prerequisite to love.
So yes, I think it's reasonable to think that our congregations would want to become the sorts of communities which help its members learn where they are, to notice their interconnectedness with the rest of the local Creation, and to grow in their love for God and neighbor, both whom can only be loved from the contexts of our place.
(I realize that it's also possible to notice how thoroughly we've been detached from our places, how completely contemporary life is built on transience and ignorance, and do our best to nurture faithful Christian witness from within these accommodations. But it's really hard for me to be content with a status quo that is so much worse than what God seems to want for us. You too?)
How might we go about this? I think we'd begin by acknowledging the necessity of knowing where we are. This would include coming to grips with the strangeness of contemporary lifestyles which obscure our earthly dependencies. We'd find in Scripture not easily discarded metaphors about Creation - illustrations whose real significance is "spiritual" - but assumptions about the ways God intends for his people to care for their communities, a word I intend here to include non-human creatures, plants, soil, and our human neighbors.
We might also model our pedagogy on Jesus' teaching style. He was, after all, regularly pointing to the immediate stuff of Creation to make his points. Of course, he could also assume that his listeners understood the significance of the places and creatures which populated his parables. We, on the other hand, probably have some necessary context to provide. What are the sparrows and lilies and treasure-hidden-fields in your community? Do your fellow members know their significance?
A final possibility and I'm curious what others you'd add. To learn and remember where we are, our congregations would become historians of our places. The mobility and transience which our society has portrayed as unblemished goods have distracted many of us from knowing much about what happened in our places before our recent arrivals. But knowing where we are requires knowing a few things about what has made our places the way they are.
There are names, largely forgotten, whose importance we could easily excavate. Preachers and teachers, having read some local history, can regularly ground sermons and studies in the proximity which only comes through the remembrance of local triumphs and tragedies. One of my current nightstand books is a hefty collection of the natural history of Chicago and I find myself trying to imagine what this place looked like to the generations preceding my own.
I've often wondered if a guest to our church's Sunday worship service, having entered and sat down with eyes closed, would be able to guess with any specificity about where they were. Would anything in our liturgy, prayers, songs, or announcements tell them something important about our place? If so, it may be that we have directed our love toward our actual neighbors, toward the God who inhabits this place.
(Photo: Yellow warbler from a walk through Jackson Park earlier this week.)
Thanks to everyone who donated to my fundraising efforts for New Community Outreach. You helped us surpass our $30K goal! The Race Against Gun violence was, once again, a success. It's always encouraging to see so many organizations and neighbors come together for the good of our city. Here's the photo evidence that Maggie and I both completed our races. Unsurprisingly, she looked much fresher than I did at the end of the race.