Out Walking

Finding Your Place

When my daughter was in first grade, one of the things we did as a part of a merit badge was to catalogue all the trees and flowers in our backyard. Before then I was vaguely aware that we had pines and hardwoods, but I couldn't have told you anything else. I didn't know them. But when we finished our walk around the yard, armed with an Audubon Guide to Trees, I felt like I was more at home, like I better knew my place.

In speaking about our new life in Christ, Oswald Chambers says that "The first thing God will do is force the interests of the whole world through our hearts. The love of God, and even His very nature, is introduced into us. And we see the very nature of Almighty God focused in John 3:16 --- 'For God so loved the world. . . .'" The breadth of this claim, which is not anthropocentric, is clear from the Greek for world, kosmos, that is, the human and non-human universe. So this astonishing claim means the love of God for the entire creation, the universe, is poured through our hearts.

Yet the universe is an abstraction, too big for even the large-hearted Mother Teresas of the world to love, much less the small-hearted like me. Start with a tree. Start with the place where you find yourself. Walk around the neighborhood, or just next door, and ask God to help you love your place and people. Be mentored by a book like Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by her deep attention to a mountain and stream by which she lived. Slow down. Drive to work with the windows down (or, if you're lucky, the top down) so that you hear and feel the place around you, so you can let life in your four-wheeled world. Cultivate Dillard's attention to the peopled places we inhabit. I am so poor at this, so near-sighted.

This is a precursor to the "faithful presence" the authors write about in The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship, and Community," a book which seeks to root ecclesial life within the mutual concerns of the neighborhood, within "the new commons." They propose that the myth of individualism and "living above place" have fragmented the church. They call us back to what Chambers speaks of, the channeled love of Christ for the world, starting in our place. One of the ways the authors of The New Parish suggest doing this is by "learning to listen to what it is, not what you have assumed it to be or even what you want it to become." So we might ask who are we, and what is this place? To know the answers to those questions will likely reveal potentialities, as in who are we in this place, what could we in this place become?

That gives new eyes to someone out walking. And indeed the authors of The New Parish counsel a prayerful walking in the neighborhood, an attention to what is there, a gratefulness, and a lifting up of the place and people to God. I confess that in all my walking I have done too little of this, having been more on a pilgrimage of the mind than developing a love for my place, more intent on getting somewhere, both literally and mindfully, than in taking the time to stop and talk to my neighbor, to listen to the stream under the bridge, to pay attention to the mockingbird.

We have schooled ourselves in living above our place, flitting about in a virtual space of social media, not landing in the dirt of human experience. And for Christians, this has not been of much concern, at least not in its placelessness. Isn't our home, our place, up there in Heaven? Not exactly. As Len Hjalmarson reminds us in a new book, No Home Like Place: A Christian Theology of Place, "the Biblical story is not about going to heaven when we die: it's about heaven and earth becoming one: God's purposes in creation being fulfilled. The final great image in the bible is of that planet-sized garden city descending to (and merging with) earth, accompanied by the words, 'God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them' (Rev. 21:13 TNIV)."

So, while out walking, we better be mindful. The place to which we go will bear in it all the true and good and beautiful of this place in which we dwell. If I won't stop for the trees, won't take time to know them, it's doubtful I'll stop for my human neighbors either. God help me be mindful, and not only for a merit badge, this time.

When the Walls Come Down

Whenever I read the story of Joshua — the marching silently around the city seven times, the blowing of the horns, the shouts, the walls falling down — I can’t help but think of that Eighties rock classic, “The Walls Came Down,” by The Call, a song written by the late Michael Been. Musically, the song enacts the sense of impending destruction, the falling of walls. And while Been may have been taking predictable (and perhaps simplistic) pot shots at the military-industrial complex as the genesis of wars, I suspect there’s more to it than that; it, after all, just a three and one-half minute song.

While written before the Berlin Wall came down, it seems to fit that event so well. More than that, it points to an apt metaphor for divine agency: Jericho’s walls, which excavations indicate may have been as much as four and a half feet in thickness, fell not because of soldiers, horns, or shouts, but because God willed it. Just so, He makes other declarations, knocks down other walls, as Julie Miller once sang, “Walls of fear and walls of doubt/ Walls of pride can’t keep Him out/ He walks through walls/ He walk through walls” (from “He Walks Through Walls, 1991). God is on the move. Nothing can stand in the face of divine agency.

The shout given by the Israelites was one of faith. God had already declared victory. They only gave voice to it. That God gave them victory was pure grace, a fortified city given into their hands. It would be a false reading to say that their shout caused the wall to fall flat. God did not say “I will give” but “I have given.” But perhaps the military analogy puts you off, or the destruction that happened afterward. So, focus here: What is our shout of faith? What is it that God has declared about our lives? Somehow it’s here I am compelled to get it wrong, to think that God is saying “I will give if you (fill in the blank), not “It is finished.

There are many such declarations like that which God made to the Israelites. But one that I hear in my head repeatedly is that of Colossians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” Not becoming new or new if I do the right things, but “is new.” I have to remind myself of that because the face in the mirror is still the same. I often can’t see the new me, but I have to take it on faith. Maybe shout.  Remind myself that I have been transferred from the dominion of darkness to the kingdom of light (Col. 1:13).  Done.

Maybe that’s what the Israelites were doing: they were preaching to themselves, reminding themselves of what God had said, that He “had given” the land to them. So too has he taken dominion over me.

There’s a another great Michael Been penned song by The Call, entitled “Let the Day Begin.” It’s a reminder of newness, of life that begins again every day: “Here's to you my little loves/ with blessings from above/ Now let the day begin/ Here's to you my little loves with blessings from above/ Let the day begin, let the day begin, let the day start.” So maybe, when you find the stultifying wall of works-righteousness facing you, or some other personal demon, take a walk around it. Circle it six times. Blow the horn. Shout the truth to yourself: I am a new creation. And wait for the sound of walls coming down. Let a new day begin.