Cultivating A Sense of Presence

In the distant arcane past, in the dark expanse of ages before the ubiquity of reliable turn-by-turn navigation, people were obliged to use confoundedly confusable tools to pre-determine their travel plans. In fact, so backward were the days of yore, that to use one of these so-called “maps” most effectively, a person greatly benefited from studying the names of roads and landmarks of a new area in order to better acclimate and find his way.

What a sharp contrast our present age presents! Most of us know the local areas so poorly that without a GPS we very easily get lost in our towns – and these are places we’ve lived in for years! How many are the creeks and hills, rivers and valleys that our ancestors used to demarcate distance and give them a sense of home and familiarity, which we speed past in cars hardly realizing they are there at all?

Fundamental Shift

Recently, I helped a friend move some furniture into his new home, which was not far from his old house. As we crossed a small bridge, we passed a sign denoting the name of a shallow, bubbling creek which bore a familiar name, and he remarked that it was the same creek that snaked behind his old neighborhood as well. I marveled at how often I had seen the sign or the name of the creek referenced in the area and yet had no memory of the pattern it made as it sliced across the hills of our suburban sprawl.  I was ashamed of my ignorance.

I wondered about the land my family had owned for generations, and the familiar names of creeks and swamps, of little neighboring towns filled with family names which had long since passed into obscurity.  I wondered about the pervasive tenacity of names to linger while their story had escaped memory. I began to think that something fundamental is wrong with the way we experience the places we inhabit especially in the peculiar way we no longer know anything about them.

With the obscenity of tools before us, as a widely literate and allegedly educated populace, we should know all the more about our little homeland and of the people who have carved out resting places against the ravages of nature and foe alike over the generations.  Instead, we listen absently to the gentle, vaguely digital voice of a machine which assures us the most direct and efficient route.

Maps to Somewhere

I remember the stages this developed in my own life. As a young boy, I used to study maps and trace roads, following the curious meanderings of old highways and the sweeping arcs and straight lines of interstates.  When I began driving, most of the roads were familiar to me, but I had so little need to pay attention when being carted around beyond a small circle of roads and highways, I could lose myself easily.

On the family land I mentioned earlier, where I spent many blissful days as a boy, it was different. Because I walked the trails and fields where my ancestors had farmed and hunted for generations, I grew to know the contours of the earth and the shape of this place which, for me, had a kind of poetic and mythic proportion. The land of my father’s fathers was a sort of personification of the generations which had toiled and poured themselves into the soil beneath their feet.

Through the accidents of time, I can no longer physically walk along the old pasture lines where woven wire had become eaten by sweet gum and scraggly pine trees as the thin copses had encroached closer year by year. In my mind, I can still walk the long path from the front porch across the main field and through the tree-tunnel, and pass the old barn on my left with its precariously covered well, and through the next tunnel until I spill into an open field last used to grow soybeans.

Places We Know and Don’t Know

That was a place I knew. That was a land I had grown to appreciate and value and respect.  I longed to learn the secret memories of derelict buildings in the Old Forest of virgin timber and the dappled light filtered through a high hardwood canopy.  I rummaged through artifacts like discarded sewing machines and broken tools and came to see those who lived there before me, and I knew they were people like me, tormented by doubts and cares and crop failures – people who knew the bliss of childbirth and the relief of wars’ end. Most of all, I learned on those acres to be present and know where I was.

How few of us have ever had an experience like that, or perhaps more tragically, have forgotten it as I had? To live in a town without knowing the veins of water coursing through it or the names of hills which give shape to the givenness of the place where we live is hardly to live there at all.  For most of us, the physical spaces where we live, even our homes, are little more than interchangeable geometric shapes which might just as well be in one place as another.

The food we eat rarely comes from the land around us, and the raw materials of our homes are even more rarely found close at hand. I can say little about the reality of our global supply chain except to lament the sense of place which we have sacrificed in a million ways to become modern people.

Cultural Presence

Rare is the society which preserves a sense of cultural identity down to the textiles and garments which clothe them. Rare too is the city which does not strive for a greater conformity with the expectations that a given metropolis ought to have a string of familiar stores and commodities which are the same from New York to Seoul.

I don’t mean to suggest that the great cities of the world have no history or defining features. Most of these beautiful things, however, are hidden beneath a chrome veneer of steel and brand names. Wendell Berry, in his powerful book, The Unsettling of America, described the single most important resource on a farm, far and away more valuable than any infrastructure or animal breed: the farmer.  It is the man or woman who takes the time to walk their land, to know its virtues and vices, who more than anything determines its success or its failure.

It is no different for those in towns, suburbs, and cities.  We who wander amidst the pavement and abandoned shopping centers are the critical component for the future of our communities.  The way we use, abuse, or simply ignore the geography around us determines the shape of our little societies, from the small, single-family homes to the tottering skyscrapers staring down disinterestedly on harried pedestrians.

The Way It Ought to Be

I imagine the difference it would make in our commitment to the future of our towns and cities if we invested the same deep knowing into the shape of the land as generations of farmers.  G.K. Chesterton, in his classic, What’s Wrong with the World, suggests that it is the mark of a real patriot, if you like, that a person does not look at the brokenness of a place and stupidly talk about either extreme we may be tempted to bewail.

The first thing to avoid is an insistence that this is just the way things are and we must accept them if we are to be reasonable adults. The second is to lament the loss of some past glory, ignoring the reality that there is no golden age as such.  Rather, in his typically prophetic fashion, he calls us to care only about the way a place ought to be.

If we walked with eyes open, accepting with mature honesty that we were given a space to inhabit which has reasonable limitations and strengths, we must not give into the foolish tendency to sigh and say this is the best we can do. Certainly not, or else our best is apparently much more pathetic than many other times in human history.

Instead, by learning to know and love the place where we live, claiming those old names for strange hills and thin streams, of copses of persistent little trees and the footpaths of our fathers’ fathers, we will grow to love by degrees the places we call home with a simple and loyal love which transcends the use we can make of it.

No Simple Solution

Of course, there is no simple solution to re-instilling a corporate sense of presence in our society. Large-scale solutions tend to create revolutionary issues, so I tend not to encourage top-down sledgehammer blows.  Rather, the quiet, often unseen reflections of a family leaving their own small footprint will do more to cause lasting and permanent ripples of beautiful care than any sort of large-scale policy.

If each of us took that kind of care, of growing in the knowledge of where we’ve been given to abide, there is no guessing at the lengths we will go for the good of those who live there with us. There is also, curiously, no limit to the gratitude we can show our Father, maker of all these good gifts, when we simply take the time to see them as they truly are. May we all learn day by day to know our Good God better, and to see His fingerprints in the face and shape of the places where we’ve made our pilgrim home.