A Spirituality of Place :.

For years of I have known I am a person of place. Dwelling in a church culture for whom place and space was not important, I felt like a duck out of water. When I tried to ascribe meaning to the feelings deep down inside, I found myself sometimes misunderstood. It was as if I was speaking another language. Now being a person without place, I am desiring to find new words to desribe the interior tension and loss I am experiencing.

Last night I began reading a new book I have recently purchased for a class I am taking entitled Landscapes of the Sacred by Belden Lane. The book is full of the meaning of "placefulness" while unpacking the spiritual depth of "placelessness." Here are a few quotes I am ruminating on.

"In the empty spaces of our lives--in those apophatic moments of tragic loss--we too are invited to new possibilities never before imagined. There in the deserts of placelessness ("without form and void"), where we survive by denial and pretense, the Spirit of God moves like a wind over the dry arroyos of chaos, and the imagination constructs new places in which to dwell."

"The preeminence of placelessness in prophetic thought calls men and women to a God who stands alongside displaced peoples everywhere, a God who is known more clearly in exile than in the security of any given locale, a God who refuses ever to be pinned down."

And in the chapter entitled, "Liminal Places in the Evangelical Revival"....

"As I look back now, the threshold experience of the revival has formed me more than I knew. Its liminal places led me to openings that have been nurtured all my life. These include a deep appreciation for anti-structure, for the incapacity of any fixed place or institution fully to contain the holy. They involve the expectation of being found in God in the disconcerting moments of transition and movement in my life, as well as the discovery of the Holy Spirit on the margins of society, at those points where the people of God embrace the pain of others. I have willingly yielded to the impact of the revival on my manner-of-being. But I've learned also its limits. There was always, in my past, a sense of tentative transience even to the most exciting events of the tent and storefront--an awareness that even here the faithful had not fully caught the glory for which they grasped. They all harbored a fear that the power wouldn't last. And, indeed, it didn't...They were people who were touched by angels, but who finally were too frail to hold for long the power of God."

I am beginning to understand...

Comments

[jenell]

Great insights, Jan. I have one year of stay-at-home motherhood, before goign back to Bethel in the fall. I've thought of my time primarily in terms of social isolation, with both benefits and problems associated. Liminality is a better way of looking at it.

[Paul Fromont]

Jan, it's an outstanding book. I hope you enjoy it. Philip Sheldrake has some great theological reflections on teh importance of place - see especially his book, "Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity."

There is a review here:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3818/is_200307/ai_n9265027

Hope your weekend is going well. Thanks for your comment left on ProdigalKiwi(s)

[Nan]

Thank you for these quotes; I will need to pick up a copy of the book! I resonated with all but the last line.
I will need to ruminate on it a while. I wonder if it is more the Wind blowing where it will rather than the fraility of others? Finding and labeling the fraility of others seems as if we are moving away from loving one another deeply. I will keep pondering... .