Places, People!

I guess it's not surprising that I should love a place like Pagosa Springs, CO, where I am this week. I married into this place, for my wife always vacationed here when she was little, and our family now does the same, staying with my parents-in-law who now live here. So of course my soul would be at home here, because of the beauty, the trout, the deep powder at Wolf Creek.The human soul is made for place. We are not just for ourselves, and we are not just for each other; we are for a land, a topography, a local.In this under-exposited lacuna (sorry, I've been drinking a lot of coffee) of the human soul, I see the hand of God. The God who made our souls also made our bodies to which they are attached, and the physical world in which our bodies exist, and this world is varied and variegated, a patchwork of many different homes for many different souls.The Christian Scriptures speak of this repeatedly. Adam and Eve are created not just to be in the world, but to be in a particular place, a place called Eden. A man named Jacob has a dream of heaven being connected to earth through a ladder (see here, and, relatedly, here), but this dream happens in a particular place, a nuance that is not lost on the patriarch, who remarks, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it" (Genesis 28.16). Jacob's wonder is not that God has shown up anywhere and everywhere, but that God has shown up in a particular place. And of course, when God steps onto the world stage, God does not do so generally or globally, but precisely, in a little-known place called Bethlehem.The author Wendell Berry writes of this repeatedly, celebrating place, and lamenting the (post)modern divorce of people from place (if you haven't read him, start with Jayber Crow and then keep going). For Berry, there is no person or people without place, and no place without a people devoted to and intoxicated by that place.So, where are you? This question of where you are is intricately linked to the more common question of who you are. If you have been asking questions about identity, and calling, and meaning (as I have been recently), do not neglect this dimension of location. In five days I will leave this valley, and travel back to Boulder valley, where I live. That place has a particular people, and that people has a particular place. As I continue to wonder about who God has made me to be, and what God wants me to do, I find comfort and challenge to know that these existential questions are grounded in an existence that has a zip code. Surely the Lord is in this place!