First of all, welcome to all you new subscribers! Thank you for reading! I hope you will enjoy the lavish helpings of content around here.
Second of all, the Significance of the Passage of Time absolutely escaped me. After celebrating the birthday child I was swept up in the business of traveling home, and, once home, the fury of cleaning and trying to evade a looming sense of chaos. One of my deepest and most abiding frustrations about having older children is that though they like living with me, for which I am grateful, they will only take responsibility up to a certain point. Though I plead with tears in my eyes, they won’t embrace a sense of material ownership. It is like they are all gnostic. Their whole lives are of the mind—or the technology—and not of the material burdens that make physical life comfortable and gracious. They will walk over many heaps of junk without noticing, on their way to more heady pursuits.
Why, I keep asking myself, can’t the kitchen belong to all of us? I’m not territorial. I don’t mind if you wash your own dishes and put them away. I am not the least bit injured if you do it in a different way than I would. In fact, if you want to rearrange all the books in the whole house, I am totally down with that. Whatever you think best—as long as it’s basically clean.
Well, suddenly, before I had time to unzip my suitcase and lose the house keys again, they decided, as a pack, that the best thing would be to swap the living with the dining room. Yesterday, even though literally nothing was put away, they drug the dining room table into the living room, and all the living room furniture in here where I’m sitting this very moment. It is excessively disorienting. I am, as they say, almost too old for this. At this point in my life, though, if it buys a community spirit of doing the dishes and the laundry everyone themself,* they can put up a bouncy castle in the garden for all I care. Just please, I beg you, please keep putting all your stuff away—or throwing it away forever.
That is my long way of saying Sorry! I didn’t mean to take so many days off, especially as the Old Testament lection on Sunday was my very favorite, and I thought a lot of things along the way, and also meant to do a Reading the Comments pod. Please forgive me, and devote yourself to prayer that I will be able to acquire, by the grace of God, some order and peace in these confusing times.
One thing I thought a lot about while I was away, and on the long drive home, is the ongoing conversation about where people *should* live. Apparently, there was a book written, recently, giving people in blue states an invitation, or perhaps the sort of spiritual and emotional permission they need to pick up and move to red states. I haven’t read the book, and don’t really think I’ll have time (I’m in the middle of Women and the Gender of God right now, and a fascinating book called What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?) but I am interested in the way people think about where they live and why. In the long decades of my sojourning in America, especially in the aftermath of Covid, I’ve discovered that many Americans nurture fascinating and charmingly contradictory feelings and thoughts about the places they make their homes. As the states sped by and southern humidity gave way to northern, I gathered several thoughts to myself.
First, it seems like a lot of us, in the era of Covid, learned that our families are, as it turns out, necessary to our lives and our happiness. Living close to the people who have a substantial claim on your affections and time is preferable, strangely enough, to living far away from them. The scent of isolation still hangs redolent in the air. What happens if suddenly everyone has to stay at home again? Do you really want to endure that by yourself? The sum of the real people whom one knows and needs is suddenly of a higher estimable value than it was before.
Second, for a lot of people, the question of church became ever more crucial. Is the place you go to church an actual church “home?” As in, are you bound to the people in your church? Do they know you and do you know them? If something bad happened, would they be there for you? Ideology certainly took center stage for many churches around the country, but so did the question of people’s actual commitments of time, prayer, and love. Some people woke up one morning feeling like aliens and strangers among their worshipping communities (just to embrace the jargon) and others found themselves able to carry on only because it was the church that emerged as “essential.”
Unfortunately, these two points of insight appear to me to be at odds with the way all older (I’ll call myself old, I’m Gen X) people were invited in our misspent youths to consider our lives. Getting away from your family was the golden American dream. Not being tied down by home and family was something good people aspired to attain. There were no consequences, indeed, only gains, associated with leaving your hometown and your church and going to find some other group of people who could then be left behind again when yet another job or situation revealed itself. In terms of the church, one was invited to remember that all Christians are part of Christ’s body, and isn’t it sort of idolatrous to prefer one group of particular people over all others? You should—and can—be “at home” in any “good church.” Church, in fact, isn’t in a separate category from Walmart or Applebees. You’ll be able to find what you need—you’ll be “fed”—in one place as well as another.
This sort of attitude towards one’s natal place could always be seen by the way that people who left their hometowns looked down, be it ever so benevolently, on the people who stayed—especially in smaller places. Like, if you were born and raised in Boring, Oregon, that’s where you told people in Seattle you were “from.” Certainly, there were some important exceptions to this rule. If you were born in New York City you could stay, but still, you’d be an even better person if you went and lived in Paris for ten years before coming back to settle down. Of course, a lot of people who once considered themselves life-long city-dwellers, in the fire of Covid, fled and came here to where I live, inflating the property prices in their desperate efforts to get a breath of air. And apparently everyone and their cousins and their aunts whom they reckon up by dozens are moving to Nashville and Texas. “Everyone” is self-sorting, trying to go to the place they want to be. This is the obvious solution that presents itself if you are of the generation of people who think that one place is as good as another. But the problem itself is the consequence of living in a society that thinks that way. Both the problem and the solution flow from the same thought.
It’s just that, in many cases—of course not all—a lot of people have discovered and are discovering that places and churches are not interchangeable. If you have to move away from where you have lived, you are going to leave some things and people behind. You won’t find exactly the same thing wherever you go, notwithstanding the preponderance of Applebys and Walmarts. If all the people you love best can’t go with you, you will be far away from them—just to state something blindingly obvious. They won’t be able to help you with the difficulties and tragedies that are the property of being human. You might find yourself wandering from church to church, looking for “home” and not being able to find it.
One reason for this, I think—and this is just my own private hypothesis that I’ve been working out for myself—is that even though all Christians are part of the invisible, and hopefully, visible Church, who they are as individual people is essential to the very nature of the “Body,” which is the word the New Testament uses to describe what is going on. There is a mystical union that God himself establishes between real, living, breathing Christians. It’s not just that you go and hear a sermon and get what you need for the week. It is that as you worship with particular people in Spirit and in Truth, God knits you together in ways you can’t possibly apprehend or anticipate until it’s almost too late and you want to try to go away.
Which is to say, of course, God can do that to and for you anywhere you go, because he is present everywhere. But if he has done it to you in one particular place with one particular group of people, you might find the business of uprooting a lot more complicated than you first imagined. And this is what I don’t quite love about the people who are telling all blue-state “conservatives” to flee to red states. Because it does happen to be that there are faithful and true churches in these kinds of bluer places. Indeed, there are a lot of conservative people, both theologically and politically, who live here. They are still working and having children and worshipping God, though in smaller numbers of course. And those people are bound to each other by ties both spiritual and material. The uncomfortable sensation, then, of being both at home and in exile prevails. The solution isn’t just to make them all move to Alabama—or Paris. That is how we got into this trouble in the first place.
And now I’ve come to the end of only half my thought. I might try to pick it up tomorrow if I can find an uncluttered place to sit down. Have a nice day!
*I’m on a mission to scramble Grammarly on the subject of pronouns.
As a gen x I too was told to leave and I did for four years. The whole time was spent trying to figure out how to get back home. Anne’s post reinforces everything I have come to hold dear in my life: My church, my family and my home.
But, as you know, the Blue State totalitarians will not leave the Normals alone. If only they would! But then they wouldn't be totalitarians, would they?
For example, is your child mixed up about his/her identity? If you don't "affirm" that mixed up view, the QT totalitarians want to take that child away from you and probably the rest of your children, too.
A lot of people are fleeing Blue States in self-defense. They don't have much choice.