Finding Home #6: The Spiritual Practice of Staying Put

Well, hello there, friends. It's been a while hasn't it? An embarrassingly long while.

I'm tempted to do a ton of prefacing, but let's just say... summer was blessedly slow and somehow busy. There was a lot of job interviewing, waiting for job interview results, talk about moving, actually preparing to move (just a few miles down the street... a story for another time), and getting ready for Hutchmoot! We just got home from The Rabbit Room's Nashville conference a couple days ago, and it was, as always, a sweet, encouraging time. Some of you know because you were there. (It was good to see your faces!) And maybe some of you are going "Hutchwha? What is this strangeness!" (I would love to chat with you about it sometime. :))

But anyway. This year, a lot of my writing energy was going into preparing a talk. I got to lead a session called In Search of Home with my friends Matt Conner and Lanier Ivester, and whew, what a good hour and a half that was! A few folks asked me for the notes afterward, so I thought hey... why not share them with my TinyLetter people?

So, with no more rambling, I give you my reading, with very slight revisions. If you were there, thank you so much for listening to us, and for receiving our stories with grace, and for your thoughtful conversations after.

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“Nobody tells you when you get born here
how much you’ll come to love it
and how you’ll never belong.”
- Rich Mullins, “Land of My Sojourn”

If you knew me just 5 years ago, you'd probably think I was the poster child for staying put. I spent the first 30 years of my life in Fruitland Park, a little “blink-and-you-miss-it” town in Central Florida. Now usually, if I say I grew up in Florida, people think white beach paradise or Disney World. Thanks to the Internet’s love for wacky news stories, they might just think life was one long interesting string of machete wielding weirdos and alligators wandering through my backyard.

It was hardly that exciting. My hometown is small in the most quiet and normal sense. North of us is the Ocala National Forest, thick, scrubby woods where the brave folks (unlike me) could go hiking and camping. Just across the town line a is large, meticulously groomed retirement community that seemed to spring up overnight, spreading faux Hacienda architecture, shopping complexes, and golf cart roads closer and closer to my neighborhood.

My quiet street became a major traffic route once Super Walmart opened a mile from my front door. Before then, we were an ordinary little community -- mostly 70s block houses with the same floor plan. Over time, small businesses appeared in those houses, and in my last years living in my family home I woke every morning to the yappy clients at the dog groomer next door.

To get to anything resembling a city (other than the retirement park), you drove southeast until you hit Orlando, directly south if you wanted to visit the pseudo-city Walt built on the remains of orange groves.

As I grew up, life grew away from my roots. I began living the commute life, first to college in east Orlando, then to a job an hour away. That’s when the wanderlust hit... my town wasn't good enough, my goals too big, my friendships too far away, and the 10 or more hours a week on the road drained my energy. I fantasized about moving, though every attempt to do that was thwarted by financial reality. And I remember during some particularly angst-filled years writing in my journal, "I want to move. Anywhere. Somewhere. There has to be more than this."

Does this sound familiar? I wish I had known then what a gift roots are, how precious it is to truly know a place. I wish I'd appreciated the funny nuances of this life more while I was living it.

A disclaimer before I continue: we aren’t here to only extol the virtues of staying in one place forever and tell you a perfect world is where everyone sticks to their hometown. That’s impossible, and I cannot in good conscience fully advocate that kind of life, because moving to New England two years ago has been, in many ways, one of the best adventures of my life.

But in the past two years, as I've gone from the thrill of discovering a new home to late nights struggling through deep homesickness, If I try to decide what is better, movement or staying put, I find there are no simple answers. I know some people who grew up moving from year to year, never given the chance to put down roots and build relationships, and for them staying in one place for a lifetime can feel like a beautiful ideal. For those who keep missing attempts to escape a dead end town, the freedom to choose your place is the American Dream.

There are healthy kinds of wanderlust... the acknowledgement that in some sense, we live our lives in perpetual longing. Displacement began in Eden, when the restlessly rooted were given the thing they most wanted: freedom, knowledge, autonomy. And now we all find ourselves living through a sort of holy discontent.

But what if really we are all supposed to be home - makers wherever we are? I’m not talking about lives that revolve around cooking and cleaning and such… merely maintaining a residence. That’s vital too, but in a deeper, creative way. There’s something beautiful about making home a central place in your life, even if — especially if — the world outside feels like a foreign land.

You can be a student, a commuter, a full-time worker, but still make home. You could be a nomad and embrace hospitality wherever you go. You could be between places, knowing a move is imminent. But make home anyway. This is how we do the work of renewal.

Professor and writer Scott Russell Sanders has this to say in his book Staying Put: “In our national mythology, the worst fate is to be trapped on a farm, in a village, in the sticks, in some dead-end job or unglamourous marriage or played-out game. Stand still, we are warned, and you die.”

When you look at it that way, the act of staying put feels deeply counter-cultural. In 1956, President Eisenhower authorized the funding and construction of the Interstate Highway system, connecting all corners of the United States and revolutionizing American life. In the 1990s, the Internet came into its own, enabling worldwide communication in the minutes it takes to write and send an email. And it was less than a decade ago that the iPhone’s arrival turned smartphones — mini-pocket computers — into first a hip luxury, and now, a near necessity.

Technology continues to close our distances and expand our horizons, and I’ll be the first to say this is not an evil thing. Technology, from the innovations of road and air travel to the online networks that make this community’s existence possible, is the reason we’re even in this room together!

But this freedom comes with a price. In Florida, I lived in my hometown, but drove an hour each way to find full time work in the career I wanted. Now I live in one city, work from home for companies in other parts of Massachusetts, and joined a church across my state line. Sometimes having little roots in so many places feels downright disorienting.

In her book on stillness and creativity, World Enough and Time, Christian McEwan quotes the poet Robert Hass: “‘Longing,’ we say, ‘because desire is full of endless distances,’” Then she makes the observation that “the distances are being erased now, and the longing too, as all seasons merge into one long triumph of consumption.”

Does anyone really, truly live in one place? Is it even possible anymore? I’m honestly not convinced it is. How can you, without cutting off all contact from anyone outside your physical place? Family and friends scatter, jobs or love make us move… not to mention that, as Christians, we follow an itinerant preacher whose final command was to take his message “to the ends of the earth.”

But for all our sometimes necessary wandering, maybe what we need is some spiritual grounding…

Tucked into a chapter of the book Slow Church by Chris Smith and John Pattison is an interesting bit about Stability as a spiritual practice, a literal vow taken by monks following The Rule of St. Benedict. This is a vow to stay in one place for a lifetime, to sink roots deep and forsake the possibility of all the other places of the world. One line from a particular monastery's vow struck me as I thought about my own tendency toward wanderlust:

“We give up the temptation to move from place to place in search of an ideal situation. Ultimately there is no escape from oneself…”

Our culture is indeed marked by that chase for the ideal, that dream for improvement, that sense that there is something else “out there.” What can a sixth century monk have to do with 21st century America? Plenty, it seems.

St. Benedict was a young, educated Christian from Rome, who, disgusted with the decadence of the failing empire, left to live as a hermit and pray, but over time, he found he wasn’t alone. Gathering like-minded men, he formed monasteries and wrote a famous rule that would guide many monastic orders through much of the Middle Ages. This rule wasn’t just a nice ideal for a bunch of people to hide from the world. Eventually, these monasteries, despite apparent isolation, became outposts of beauty, culture, and evangelizing to a darkening world.

So here are these premodern hermits that turn staying put into a hard discipline of the soul, a means to grow closer to God and, rather than isolate, actually promote human flourishing. I am thankful for technology that lets me leap the distance from Boston to Nashville in hours, and for the possibilities the Internet has given me to do work I believe in. But still, how easily this can distract me from everything right outside my door.

Let’s face it: Though physically staying where you are is easy, spiritually it’s hard to be fully rooted and present in a place. In her book Acedia & Me, Kathleen Norris, writing about the even earlier monastic orders of desert fathers, reflects on the struggle for monks to keep this vow:

“…acedia [the old name for sloth and boredom] mocked their good intentions by reminding them of the comforts they had forsaken and urging them to abandon their hard way of life. One abba said, ‘If some temptation arises in the place where you dwell in the desert, do not leave that place… for if you leave it then, no matter where you go you will find the same temptation waiting for you.’”

There was a time when I wanted to push against the idea of rooting as an ideal. After all, moving worked out for me, and I thought I could use Abraham, Moses, and Jesus to back me up, because those guys definitely didn’t stay in one spot for their whole lives.

And yet… here I am. Still barely out of my hometown, still struggling with both planting myself in a new home and feeling terribly out of place. How do we practice stability in a shifting, interconnected world? What do we do when we hear a clear call to move on for the betterment of the world? How can I practice presence where I am, without neglecting my roots, without forgetting where I came from? How can you, when you’re a college student in an unfamiliar city, a military family waiting for the next orders, an apartment-dweller weighing your options when the lease runs out?

There’s a physicality to stability, to cultivating home and hospitality. But perhaps too, it’s a mindset. It’s a determination to say, this is not my home, but it can be a home. Finding those places that are only yours, where you know what time to look for that perfect slant of light, that corner where you can pray and read, that cafe where you don’t even have to read the menu. Seeking community in an imperfectly beautiful church, even if it doesn’t meet every ideal. Seeking opportunities for hospitality and welcoming strangers, because you know that you’re just a stranger here too.

And I think too that loving a place, calling it home, is an ongoing process of rediscovery. Richard Rohr in Falling Upward observes the disillusionment of our age: “For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the ‘enchanting’ ourselves.”

And enchantment is easy when you’re new to a place. The first time I saw snow, it was pure magic. And then… I lived through my first winter. Four blizzards. A broken arm. Days where I just sat at home looking outside and it was gray… and gloomy… and oh my gosh, I missed the color green.

I missed green! For 30 years, I saw green every day!

Sometimes, I realize I don’t see beauty anymore. This is deadly to the soul. This is the heart of acedia, of restlessness, of the boredom that St. Benedict had to caution his community against. This is the reason we need stability more than ever.

There was a time I felt like I lived “in the sticks," embarrassed by my small town. And then, on the cusp of moving, I would pull into my yard after the long day of work and driving, and look through the Spanish moss, trying to memorize the way moonlight shone on the front yard of my youth.

Next month, my husband and I are moving out of our first apartment. And once again, I’m trying to memorize the angles of light, trying to re-enchant this familiar place so I’ll never forget it.

This is stability. Honoring what is, learning to see what could be, envisioning a flourishing patch of land, then digging into the dirt and loving it back to life.

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Thanks for sticking with this to the end! A recording of this and a host of other wonderful talks will be available soon at The Rabbit Room!

If you'd like, you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr for updates and general social mediaing. Until next time... hopefully not 3 months from now! :)