Relocating To Elfland

Churchgoers who lack the patient commitment required to cultivate lifetime bonds with their people and place tend to prefer the endless buzz of pseudo-community in hip church programs and activities.

“The best writers on place speak of the need for attentiveness, familiarity, silence, slowness, stability, repetition, particularity, hope, respect, love. These are all characteristics and the fruit of Christian spirituality, but rare in our speed-driven, consumerist Western culture. If placemaking is part of our journey out into the world, then it needs to be funded by a deep journey in – engagement with God, engagement with ourselves, and engagement with one another.

“In the Western church in which so many pastors have exchanged their calling for that of shopkeepers, ecclesial life often fails to nurture the inner journey fundamental to placemaking, and even where it does, congregational life must be complemented by personal spirituality. And place plays an important part in personal spirituality as well as spirituality providing the attentiveness requisite for placemaking.” (Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, pp. 320–21)

Working on this week’s sermon in Genesis 2:4–9, I’ve been exploring the importance in scripture of place and place-making. One fairly obvious objection to the idea that God’s people should be rooted to place – that they should be planted trees, lovers of the local, self-consciously embracing not only embodiment but also emplacement – is that our Lord had no place to lay His head (Matthew 8:20). Jesus was a wanderer; isn’t this a pattern for us to follow? Shouldn’t we be ready and willing to leave any place at any moment and follow Him we know not where?

I think a careful look through the Bible will reveal that its call to gospel adventure and its call to domestic stability are ultimately not at odds. The kingdom of God on earth embraces both a missional impulse and a cultural impulse. The kingdom seeks globally, and it settles locally. It advances militantly (albeit not with carnal weapons) even as it calls and commands its citizens to occupy, to cultivate, to build, to lead a peaceful and quiet life as saints in a particular place.

The work of Jesus and His apostles was predominantly missional, but they affirmed the cultural life of those to whom they ministered (e.g., by staying so often in homes, attending weddings, enjoying meals, etc.); indeed, they commanded that the structures of cultural life be honored (e.g., the marriage bed, parent-child relations, king-subject relations, lawful vocation, etc.). Their missional work was for the purpose of settling churches to be salt and light in their local places.

Some Christians today are gifted for, and called to, predominantly missional labors; they are the vanguard of the kingdom, so to speak. Most of us who follow Jesus, however, are gifted and called to be the cultural laborers of the kingdom: to live and learn, love and laugh, be faithful and raise up faithful generations, all in a local context. It’s important not to pit one of these against the other; both lie within the bounds of true discipleship.

“Just as the presence of the Holy One among the Israelites was to permeate every aspect of their lives, so now this is how it is to be throughout the creation, as groups of followers live the life of the kingdom in their particular places.” (Craig G. Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today, p. 117)

The possibility or impossibility of a thing is determined by the parameters set for what is possible. Many divine activities described in scripture simply can’t be fit into the laboratory of uniformitarian science, let alone analyzed there. And so when a uniformitarian scientist says something described in scripture couldn’t have happened, he should be told he needs a bigger laboratory.

A minister of the gospel in himself has no authority to forgive sins; but he is authorized authoritatively to proclaim and pronounce to God’s people the forgiveness their God has already proclaimed and pronounced in the gospel.

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

(John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” October 1816)

Reading Esolen’s work, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, has made me step back for a fresh look at my own parenting and the parenting of others in various Christian circles. It’s not always a pretty sight.

What’s unsettling is not that we’re all struggling to train, instruct, discipline, guide, inspire, occupy, and in some cases even control our children. That struggle is normal. Parents have been struggling for centuries to get children to sit still for, say, an hour of worship, or thirty minutes of family dinner. Or to play outside for more than 30 seconds without pounding on the door. Or to finish a page of multiplication problems, or read a book. Or to stay by Mommy’s side at the store. Or to be quiet (in appropriate situations) the first time they’re told. What’s unsettling is how many options our modern world has supplied us for short-circuiting this struggle, and how many of us have bought into the options wholesale.

There are, of course, drugs. Not usually the first line of defense in Christian circles, but lots of parents do seem to have bought the lie that their children suffer from a sort of pathology that can only be treated by an expert. I’m not saying that’s never the case. I am saying there’s a fair bet that in most cases pathology is the fruit of parenting.

Then there’s the automobile. We can now be all over the place seeing all sorts of people and all sorts of stuff all the time. We don’t need to walk; we can drive. We can drive far and fast, and get our children involved in interminable social activities wherein they, for extended periods of time, become (more or less) someone else’s problem.

There’s also digital entertainment. The cloak: “my kids need to live in the 21st century.” The reality: Marie Winn’s “plug-in drug” is now handheld. It’s absolutely amazing. A child who’s bouncing off walls one minute can be reduced the next to a silent, unblinking, motionless bit of furniture, totally intimate with the thing in her hand, totally oblivious to everything else. It’s not fun that her “buzz” is even worse whenever she reenters the land of the living, but it’s the price we pay for a few minutes of peace. Some children will still sit and watch a feature length movie, but that drug is so yesterday.

How did parents (and kids) survive before all of these options, when all we had was face-to-face time, books, and dirt in the yard? And please. Don’t tell me the kids are happier now.

A short while ago, I walked upstairs to find my 21-month-old playing with the colored beads of an abacus. First words out of her mouth when she saw me (with enormous enthusiasm): “Shee, Duddy?” I do see it, girl. Fine work, even if your toy is seriously out of date. Long may your imagination prosper.

“I would rather have a boy of mine stand high in his studies than high in athletics, but I could a great deal rather have him show true manliness of character than show either intellectual or physical prowess.” (Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to his son Kermit)

“Preaching safety to the child, safety above all, safety always, world without end, has the considerable advantage of instilling in him the expectation that life should be provided with boardwalks and handrails.” (Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child)