The Importance of Place

The events of this past year – the pandemic, devastating fires, the January 6th insurrection, my change in employment – all have made me more aware of the importance of place. As human beings we need a place not only to be, but to grow and thrive. “Foxes have holes, birds have nests,” says Jesus, “but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58) Understanding “Son of Man” not as a circumlocution for Jesus, but as a reference to humanity, John Dominic Crossan says, in other words, “there is something cosmically unjust in the fact that only human beings can be homeless.” And as we all know from the Gospel according to Oz, “There is no place like home.”

In each of our lives there are certain places that hold special meaning, places where we feel more at home or closer to God. Celtic spirituality speaks of a “thin place” where the boundary between this world and the spiritual world is more easily crossed. The pandemic has kept us away from some of those places. Meanwhile, working with those in our community who are unsheltered, I am all the more aware of how fortunate most of us are in this time to have a place to call home.

A good friend now deceased, Dr. Jan Stafl, once took me to one of his special places high in the Cascades, a cave used by the Kalapuya people of this area for spirit quests. I did not feel quite the same presence that he felt, but I could see the specialness of that place in the way it spoke to him. I lost one such place in my life when I stepped down from the church. After 29 years worshipping in the same place, worship by Zoom somehow just doesn’t touch me in the same way, especially if I have no connection with the leaders. God bless those who work so hard to keep people connected online while keeping us safe from the pandemic! I must confess while I wouldn’t choose online worship if I had a choice, there is something about being able to work in your yard or camp at the coast while also participating in a Sunday service any where you like that almost makes me think I could worship this way every Sunday. Almost. Of course I miss the people, but the loss of that special place has also left a void that is not easily replaced, especially in this time.

I wrote earlier about the loss in our family from the fires, especially for my sister who lost just about everything save her animals and what she could pack in her truck. The specialness of that place on a bend of the Little North Fork of the Santiam River – where family celebrated countless birthdays, hiked miles of trails, swam the cool waters of the Santiam on hot summer days, taught the grandchildren how to ride horses, and cast Mom’s ashes into the water that would carry her to the boundless ocean – cannot be described, it can only be felt. The river still flows as clear as ever, but all else is changed and likely will never be the same in my lifetime, though signs of new life are already abundant. Will the feeling of specialness return amidst the scars of the fire? Time will tell.

Then there was the insurrection. What made January 6th so horrendous was not just the violence or even the interruption of the vote certification, what made it horrendous was the desecration of what many refer to as our “temple of democracy.” The specialness of that place was particularly seen in the actions of Congressman Andy Kim, a descendant of immigrants, who got down on his hands and knees in the early hours of January 7th to help staff pick up the trash left behind. Observing a plaque which marked the cornerstone laid by President George Washington, Kim commented, “A moment like that really reminds me that this building is bigger than all of us, a democracy is bigger than all of us and it deserves and demands our respect.” He added, “If someone feels the ability to desecrate our Capitol, to bring a Confederate flag into that building and proudly wave it around, this is someone, these are people, that do not respect government. …. These are people that are not inspired by this building, and do not understand what went into building it, what went into preserving it.”

I’ve only been in that building once, and that was 50 years ago this summer, and yet it easy for me to see what a special place it is and how important it is to our country. In his closing argument in the impeachment trial, House Manager Joseph Neguse, also the son of immigrants, spoke of the actions taken on the floor of the Senate that make our democracy so special – the approval of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, the decision to enter WWII, the passing of the Civil Rights Act – and then he said, “This floor is sacred. It is one of the reasons why I, like so many of you, was so offended to see it desecrated by that mob.”

It is a special building, more hallowed than any other in this country for what it represents. I have travelled much of Europe and the Mediterranean to experience other such buildings, some magnificent ruins that still speak of past glories, others like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem or St Peter’s in Rome steeped in centuries of ritual that continue to this day. The prayer-filled crevasses of the Western Wall with the Dome of the Rock high above is a most holy place unlike any other with such a mixture of traditions and an ever moving sea of people from all parts of the world. Perhaps the most sacred place I have ever been may also seem the most unlikely, outside the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Our devotion leader that cold morning in the early spring of 1980 told me and my 30 German friends with whom I had spent the last week reading SS files, visiting with two survivors and working on exhibits in the camp, that the ground where we stood was the final resting place of more than a million people. Their lives and their ashes, he said, made the very ground on which we stood sacred. It is both an eerie place and a holy place.

Of the many books I was required to read in seminary, one that stuck with me more than most was “God is Red” by Vine Deloria, Jr. Deloria’s thesis was that Christianity is based on time. The first words of Genesis are, “In the beginning…” The central events of Judaism (Passover) and Christianity (Easter) are events from the past we mark on our calendars. The birth of Jesus marks the beginning of a new era. We speak of his “Second Coming”, etc. Native American traditions are more about place than time and hence the importance of sacred places that are so prominent in native traditions. In Christian faith we speak of what happened then, Native American traditions speak of what happened there.

A classic example is Blue Lake in northern New Mexico, taken from the Taos people in 1906. When a commission ruled nearly 60 years later that the lake was wrongly taken by the government, the solution was to pay the Taos a substantial sum of money as compensation. A small tribe, the payment would have been very significant for each member. Members of the commission could not understand, therefore, why the Taos people refused to accept the money. After years of lobbying and with support of Senators Frank Church and Barry Goldwater, normally political opponents, a bill was passed and signed into law by President Nixon in December 1970 to return Blue Lake to the Taos people, the first such return of native land in the history of the U.S.

Why would a small group of people fight so hard for 65 years for a lake that they visited only twice a year for religious ceremonies? In the West, Deloria writes, “Revelation has generally been considered as a specific body of truth related to a particular individual at a specific time.” When one thinks in spatial rather than temporal terms, however, “revelation becomes a particular experience at a particular place, no universal truth emerging but an awareness arising that certain places have a qualitative holiness over and above other places.” For the Taos, Blue Lake was their “church”, the place from which their ancestors came. Without it, the people would die.

For Deloria, the difference between a temporal and a spatial spirituality is not academic. Much of the problems we face today – keep in mind this was written in 1973 – comes from our failure to listen to the land. “The planet itself calls to the other living species for relief. … (It) calls for the integration of lands and peoples in harmonious unity. … The peculiar genius of each continent, each river valley, the rugged mountains, the placid lakes, all call for relief from the constant burden of exploitation.” Calling us to pay close attention to the place where we each are, Deloria appeals to the wisdom of the native traditions:

Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land. As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meanings of the lands of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is Red.

Such is the importance of place. The Christian Bible begins “In the beginning” and ends with a vision of a New Jerusalem descending on earth. Christians typically view those final chapters as the realization of the escaton, the end of time. But take note, that final vision is not so much about time as it is about place, a re-imagined holy city where all humanity can dwell in peace and harmony. Indeed, it is the mistaken reading of the book of Revelation as the prediction of future events which results in some of the most horrendous religious beliefs ever imagined. If John’s Revelation is in fact not about a time but a place where “the home of God is among mortals … and God will be with them. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more…” (Rev 21:3-4) then it becomes not a dream of a distant ideal, by a prophetic word of judgement on present reality far removed from such a place.

Perhaps, if we pay more attention to place, if we listen to the land, if we honor our sacred spaces and revere those thin places, then we may discover the Holy in our midst and a place where “all can sit under there own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” (Micah 4:4) In other words, a place for all people to call home.

Photo: St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican. Photo by Dan Bryant