Grieving change, finding a place

We’ve begun a series in our church called “on the move with God.” We started by looking at the life of Abraham, beginning with Genesis 12’s story of God’s call for Abram to leave Haran and move to (eventually) Canaan. Our pastor has chosen this because we are preparing to move into our new building/sanctuary, and that physical move is a visual manifestation of the cultural and social moves we are undergoing right now, both in our church and in the community of Valley Springs. The congregation needs to be brought along, encouraged, and exhorted to recognize, heed, and respond Christianly to the changes we’re facing.

In July I will share in this series, preaching three sermons based on Genesis 32 (Jacob wrestling with God), Luke 10 (The Good Samaritan), and John 20 (Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus in the garden post-Resurrection). As I prepare for this, I am mindful of my own fitful bouts with resisting change in my life. There is a desire to cling to the past, because of all the chaotic things in life the past seems to be the most concrete. The past, frozen in time as it were, it is more seemingly clear-defined. It is manageable. It is easy to access. These are my perceptions, though I know that once one begins really to examine one’s past, the edges are far from sharp, the angles far from right, and the facts anything but cold and hard. Nevertheless, there is something comforting about knowing where you’ve been, even if it’s just where you think you’ve been.

My compulsion is to look back at the past so much that I avoid the present. When I was in Chicago, I spent a lot of time wishing I was back in Portland. Now that I’m in Valley Springs, I catch myself longing for Chicago (and Portland). Perhaps I am much more a purveyor of the “good ol’ days” mentality than I would care to admit.

While still in Chicago, facing the Call Process to Pastoral Ministry for the Evangelical Covenant Church, and the prospect of going literally anywhere for my first pastorate, I finally came to grips and realized I could potentially never return to my “homeland,” Portland and Oregon. Facing this reality, I discovered that I was grieving—grieving the loss of a life changed by circumstances, grieving the loss of a familiar place, mourning the knowledge that my life was inconsequential to the life of the place I’d left behind. Portland would endure and change without me. If I stayed away long enough it could become unrecognizable.

For me, attending to this grief has been difficult but in the long run very healthy. It has forced me back into the moment instead of looking back longingly at a time in my life that was probably not as rosy as I remember it. Acknowledging my grief and living in it has helped me to look forward rather than backward. It may seem a bit ridiculous, all this grief over a state, but if I am willing to go deeper, I discover that Oregon is not the real object of my grief. My life in Oregon was the set, not the play itself. The deeper longing was for familiarity, belonging, and identity. I suppose I look back at my life in Oregon as a time where, in spite of all my angst and frustration and wrestling matches with God, there were things around me that stayed relatively the same. I could count on going up to NW 23rd for a walk and a coffee. I could count on going to a McMenamin’s for a beer and a second-run movie. I could count on going for a run in Forest Park. And most importantly, I could count on spending time with friends and family who also counted all this as their place.

God’s words to Abram in Genesis 12:1 are harsh and violent: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Of course, this statement is also a promise: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (NRSV). Anyone who has spent any time with the writings of Wendell Berry knows that the theme of “place” is predominate. In our quests to understand who we are, we often look externally and supra-geographically: we look to other people to find ways of living, and/or we look to books, television, movies, and other media to aid in our self-understanding. Berry would say that our self-understanding comes by an attentiveness to one’s particularity—one’s family, neighborhood/community, work—things filled with the ordinary. In light of this, Abram’s call seems even more violent, except that in this case God wished for him to be in a place where God’s promises could flourish.

God calls us out of our self and into the body of Christ. We are all a part of the ekklesia, the “called-out community.” This is the place God would have for us—different ekklesias for different people and places, but all ekklesias as part of the Great Ekklesia, the Church Universal. There is a violence in conversion, just as Jesus’ violent death precedes resurrection. The church—the land to which God calls us (like Abram)—is the place where God’s promises flourish because the bedrock of it all is Jesus. It is to this land, this community, that we are called take root.

But this land is foreign to us. It is anything but familiar. It is less desirable because its deeper resources have yet to be discovered. How do we faithfully follow where God is leading when so much security seems stripped away, so much identity lost, so much familiarity gone? Listen to Berry’s words from “People, Land, and Community”:

“When one buys a farm and moves there to live, something different begins. Thoughts begin to be translated into acts. Truth begins to intrude with its matter-of-fact. One’s work may be defined in part by one’s visions, but it is defined in part too by problems, which the work leads to and reveals. And daily life, work, and problems gradually alter the visions. It invariably turns out, I think, that one’s first vision of one’s place was to some extent an imposition on it. But if one’s sight is clear and if one stays on and works well, one’s love gradually responds to the place as it really is, and one’s visions gradually image possibilities that are really in it. Vision, possibility, work, and life—all have changed by mutual correction. Correct discipline, given enough time, gradually removes one’s self from one’s line of sight. One works to better purpose then and makes fewer mistakes, because at last one sees where one is. Two human possibilities of the highest order thus come within reach: what one wants can become the same as what one has, and one’s knowledge can cause respect for what one knows” (in The Art of the Commonplace, pg. 187).

In the final analysis, becoming a Christian means donning a different identity, a different family, a different place, a different geography, a different hope, a different way of life. It means being clothed with Christ, being part of Christ’s Body. We are all called from our personal Harans and Portlands into the promised land: the Kingdom of God. This is the life-long Christian sojourn, our spiritual pilgrimage of conversion and sanctification. It is not self-created, controlled, or owned. It is an obedient response to the call of God. May God give us all the grace to respond, act, go, and live.