Place

A few years ago, struggling with God's call on my life to leave western Colorado and move to Kansas City, I shared the lack of peace because of "place" with a colleague. To which he immediately replied, "It's a good thing you came to KC, because otherwise you would be guilty of geographical idolatry." What he meant, I believe, was that love of a place can never be more important than one's love for God.

I agree. . . but. . .

The Celtic Christians, so many of whom were called by God as monks to abandon their beloved Ireland/Scotland and to travel to lands where, as one author named it, the "saved civilization," never got over missing their "place." They had a term for the separation: the white martyrdom. That sounds like place can be ominously important.

The Jews in exile, held captive in Babylon, never got over it. From the day they were hauled off to that foreign land, the Psalm that tells the story is Psalm 137, in which, when they remembered their "place," they wept. In fact, as N.T.Wright so marvelously unveils in The New Testament and the People of God, coming home was the only way they would ever know that their sins had been forgiven, so important to the Jews is the land they call "holy."

The question is, "What is the importance of place?"

I believe that one can never "get" the Age to Come, what awaits us, our true home, without falling in love with "place" on earth. It is always and only in the context of community, culture, and yes, geography, that we ever have the raw material to see beyond. We can't even envision the "homeland" of which the author of Hebrews 11 speaks without having been given the category by living in, and being removed from, a homeland on earth. The "place" of our life awakens in us the desire for its fulfillment. Our "place" teaches us what home could possibly begin to mean. It is all important that we are passionate about "place," or else we seek some disembodied spirit world that only the Gnostics could love.

For me, God used the ecosystem above treeline in the western U.S. to teach me about place. For every time I ever have walked there, I have the unnerving sense that that place is where I belong, where I am truly who I was made to be. And, I believe, it is there best of all, where I am invited into a place in the heart and mind and reality of the Trinity that adores that part of creation, and where God assures me that I was not only made for that place, but will drink deeply of it in the Age to Come.

Where is your "place"? I am back in mine.