Faith in place
We live in a society which does not appreciate the significance of place. The report Mission Shaped Church suggested that the Western world is best described as a ‘network society’ in which ‘the importance of place is secondary to the importance of flows’; where ‘locality, place and territory …are just one layer of the complex shape of society’1
.
This is not surprising, given how rootless most of us are. I am typical of my generation in that, if I am asked where I come from, I am thrown into confusion. I was born in Kent and spent my early years there but I have lived in eight places since then. This rootlessness produces problems: the psychologist Paul Tournier discovered that a recurring theme in the dreams of modern men and women is that of the seat that cannot be found.2
The philosopher Michel
Foucault went so far as to say that ‘the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space.’3
How has this development come about? I have tried to show in my A Christian Theology of Place that there has been an active suppression of a recognition of the significance of place during the past three centuries.4 However it has happened, late modernity has seen an
unprecedented loss of place. This is partly because of the unfettered market economy playing out its effects on the affluent but far from exclusively. Elie Weisel described the twentieth century as ‘the age of the expatriate, the refugee, the stateless – and the wanderer.’5
Millions of
people were forcibly uprooted during it and could anyone seriously suggest that this has been anything other than dehumanising?
in which the latter extols the virtues of the city by citing two of its major gifts as anonymity and mobility. Against Cox, Brueggemannn observes that ‘more sober reflection indicates that they are sources of anomie and the undoing of our common humanness.’7
In some circles freedom from placedness has certainly been celebrated. The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, one of a very small number of biblical scholars to acknowledge the importance of place, refers to Harvey Cox’s 1965 publication The Secular City6
It is, he goes
on, “rootlessness and not meaninglessness that characterises the current crisis. There are no meanings apart from roots.”8
Thus
the failure of the ‘urban promise’ is that it does not recognise that there is a human hunger for a sense of place which it cannot meet.
In colluding with an ignoring of the importance of place, Christians have often inadvertently capitulated to one of the most dehumanising effects of secular modernity. This is surprising in view of the fact that place is of considerable significance in the scriptures. One only needs to open the Bible at the beginning of Genesis to be left with the impression that place is important to the writer. The second creation account9
revolves
around place: the Garden of Eden is not just the location where the drama happens to unfold, it is central to the narrative. This image of Eden resonates with our deepest dis- placed selves within human consciousness – ‘the laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy’,10 T.S.Eliot would have it.
as
After the fall, God’s relationship with his chosen people is still bound to place, the Promised Land. The land for which Israel yearns and which it remembers is never unclaimed space: it is a place with memories as well as hopes, with a past as well as a future; it is, in other words, a storied place. The fact is that if God had to do with Israel in a special way, then he had also to do with this historical place in a special way. This insight might be expressed by positing a three-way relationship between God, people and place: Biblical faith as it is
16
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rural spirituality
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