The Sacredness of Place

We are being uprooted

Photo by Sandie Clarke on Unsplash

Raised abroad, I often tell people that I live in the tension of two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, I occasionally feel a restless urge to travel. I took trips often in my childhood. I have been around the world, experienced all manner of foreign cultures, and have been captivated by breathtaking sights abroad. I am keenly aware that the world is filled with wonders outside my local context, and that knowledge sometimes makes me eager to explore.

On the other hand, my international upbringing has made me road weary. I sometimes feel envious of my friends who have lived in the same town their whole lives, who know all the local spots, and who are attached to a particular place and community because of a job or other commitment. The people and places that I have invested in span the face of the earth. Consequently, I often experience a painful absence in the places I find myself. My heart is fragmented and scattered.

I bring up these difficulties because I think there is something about my international upbringing that mirrors globalization and helps to explain why, as my generation has entered adulthood, we have seen such a surge in mental health struggles. Despite the obvious benefits, the often-overlooked consequence of living in a rapidly globalizing world is that people are less inclined to invest deeply in their particular contexts. This is cause for concern because it leads so easily to the desecration of the earth and also because the places we inhabit nourish us even as we care for them.

It has never been easier to travel — today it is more affordable, reliable, and convenient than ever. An international upbringing like mine is becoming more common, and I anticipate this trend will continue as our world advances technologically. In fact, I believe that our world is undergoing a dramatic reversal: transience is becoming the new norm. Whereas in the past the world traveler was the exception, soon those who manage to stay put in one place will be regarded as the anomaly.

I will not paint in broad strokes and say that this is entirely a bad thing—I, for one, am grateful for my international upbringing and the privileges my many travels have granted me; I encourage everyone at some point in their lives to spend an extended period of time overseas in order to cultivate compassion for the foreigner, alien, and immigrant, and learn about the importance of hospitality.

The travel industry, like most industrial technology, has a way of upending everything in its path. Consider the highway, as Andy Crouch does in his book The Life We’re Looking For: these high-speed roads tend to make the places through which they run completely inhospitable for human life.¹ Highway roadsides are often littered with roadkill. Adjacent housing is undesirable because of the noise. And highways have created a social infrastructure that enables people to spread across the land, but physically isolates us and enslaves us to the car manufacturers. Another example is the tourist industry which tends to trample local populations, displacing culture with consumer-friendly parodies, all for the sake of an economic boost. I could go on, but the point is that while globalization has put more money in our pockets and granted us access to a wider array of experiences, particularly in the West, we need to consider what it has ultimately cost us.

When people begin to anticipate leaving a particular place, they start to uproot themselves. Their investments in local relationships, spaces, and communities become shallow as they prepare for their departure and begin to pack up. To a degree, this is healthy and good. But what will become of a society whose members are always on the go, arriving or departing and never truly settling down? Inevitably, it will lead to the neglect and malnourishment of its places; these places will become, in essence, like any of the major highways and tourist destinations—trampled, stripped of their resources, and ultimately inhospitable for human life and flourishing.

In such an environment the church must learn to embody a different posture, pace, and way of being in the world. We should resist the appeal of transience and instead endeavor to grow deep roots. We should seek to cultivate an awareness of God’s presence, consecrating as holy ground the particular places where we live. And in everything we should love wholeheartedly, defying the impulse to protect our hearts from the pain of departure by refusing to invest, since the heartbreak that comes with every goodbye does not compare with the remorse of realizing, having left a place, that we never truly loved it well.

So, join a church and commit to showing up every week. Plant a garden. Welcome neighbors into your home. Seek the prosperity of local businesses and government. Make your house beautiful. Refuse to pack up when local life gets difficult, when relationships become convoluted, when everyone else is leaving. Unplug from social media and the connections these platforms grant us with those who live elsewhere. Resist the easy escape. The Kingdom of God is at hand, but how will it bear fruit unless people dare to stop and tend the ground it grows in?

I have lived in Wilmore, a college and seminary town, for six years now. Students come and go as often as the train that runs through it. In truth, I do not know how long I will stay here since I am also a student. But while I am here, I intend to root myself as deeply into this place as I am able. I want to do what I can to make Wilmore beautiful, the kind of place you never want to leave.

1. Discussed in Chapter 6 of Crouch’s book, which I highly recommend.