Knowing our place

One of the things that first attracted me to the Cedar Tree Institute [http://cedartreeinstitute.org/] is its commitment to helping us to “know our place.” Over the years, I’ve helped to lead several Spirit of Place events with Jon Magnuson on Lake Superior and the lower Columbia River. For those who have yet to experience one of these events, they are multi-day immersions in the natural and cultural history of a patch of earth, sky and water – a place in other words – that invite participants not only to experience life in a new way (from a kayak of all places!) but also to learn and reflect about place from a spiritual perspective. Since the pilgrims who honor us by their presence at these events come from all over the country, part of our hope is that they will take their new-found spirit of curiosity and reflection with them to the places where they live and work. An unspoken but guiding premise of the work of the Institute is that all places have spiritual significance and that one key to a meaningful life is to bring ourselves into relationship and perhaps even harmony with the spirit of the places where we live. “If you don’t know where you are,” the poet and farmer, Wendell Berry, once quipped, “you don’t know who you are.”

All that being said, I’ve often marveled at what a “tough sell” the idea of “knowing our place” is in our own spiritual traditions, especially the institutional church. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this but my suspicion is that our “dis-placed” spirituality is closely related to our centuries old tendency to devalue our primary means of experiencing place – our bodies. I also suspect that our difficulties in making the care of creation a more central part of our religious practice is related to our tendency to discount the importance and sacred nature of the places in which we live and work and raise our families. If all the major theological, moral, and institutional decisions are made in the ballrooms of airport hotels or downtown convention centers – which is where my denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, makes most of its decisions, it’s not hard to see why the spirit of place plays such a small role in our decision-making. The reality is that once you’re inside the ballroom or convention hall, you could be anywhere – or nowhere. It’s not surprising that under such circumstances, we sometimes forget not only where we are but who we are.

Perhaps one response might be to listen more closely to the people my bishop once referred to as “local poets” – the writers and artists, the historians and musicians who celebrate the places where we live. Writing about the importance of a sense of place, Wallace Stegner reflects on Berry’s observation that if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are:

"[Berry]is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in. It is only a step from his pronouncement to another: that no place is a place until it has had a poet."[1]

I don’t know who your “local poets” might be, but I invite you to do some exploring. If your place is really a place, then they’re out there, doubtlessly working in relative obscurity to understand and know the place in which you both find yourselves. In discovering them, you may also meet some unknown allies and friends.
11/18/09

[1] Wallace Stegner, “The Sense of Place” in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, Penguin, 1992, p.205