Abstract
This paper examines theologically how the concept of place – particularly the dialectics of place – might shape pastoral ministry of the church. It firstly surveys a body of literature that argues that the church and its pastors ought to be committed to emplacement, a politics of inhabitation (Inge; Rumsey; Berry; Kemmis; Hauerwas; Quash; Williams). Secondly, it engages other interlocutors (O’Donovan; Lacoste; Nausner; Friedman; Gill) to demonstrate that this sound emphasis on emplacement of church ministers nevertheless risks neglecting the dialectics of place: staying and leaving, roots and routes, are also crucial elements of place. Finally, the essay offers its own contribution to the literature by proposing how the concept of the dialectics of place might be better accounted for in ministry through an emphasis on pilgrimage in the pastorate that does not neglect emplacement.
Introduction
As a minister of the gospel I have often experienced two powerful intuitions pulling in seemingly different directions. First, that to be useful in ministering word and sacrament and loving my neighbour I ought to commit to the one place – my local neighbourhood – for the long-haul and ‘aspire to live quietly’ (1 Thess. 4:11 nrsv). Second – and prima facie contradictorily – that to be useful in ministering the gospel I should be open to leaving the place I am in to experience the formation that comes through living elsewhere or even to go and make disciples in other places. I thus perpetually wrestle with the question: should I stay or should I go? This paper somewhat selfishly devotes attention to this rather personal question in a hope it is also of benefit to others – a question I have since come to see as fundamentally about place. I shall leverage both philosophical and theological resources concerning place – and more particularly the dialectics of place – to make some practical suggestions for pastoral ministry. This set of questions does not amount to a new discourse. The concept of place and the corresponding phenomenon of a loss of a sense of place has been the subject of increasing attention in practical theology and ecclesiology (as this essay will demonstrate). But this paper develops the conversation by better accounting for the dialectical nature of place which is often delineated in more theoretical literature but thus far has been neglected in practical theological engagements. In short, much has been rightly said about staying but too little about the role of leaving in the life of the presbyter. I will develop this argument in three movements: the first section surveys some existing literature on the loss of a sense of place and its implications for ministry practice; the second section introduces the concept of the dialectics of place; the third and final section attempts to account for this dialectic with some theologically shaped suggestions for pastoral practice.
The Loss of a Sense of Place and Ministry Practice
John Inge and Others on Practical Proposals for the Church
The concluding chapter of Bishop John Inge’s A Christian Theology of Place contains a subsection that examines some of the ‘constructive practical propositions [that] have been mooted’ in response to what Inge calls the loss of a sense of place in Western culture (my emphasis).1 The first practical proposal that Inge cites is Wendell Berry’s advocacy of a ‘community economy’ that resists modern national and global economies by being grounded in local relations, communities that ‘will always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual support of neighbours’.2
Inge thinks that Berry’s suggestions are too ‘radical’ and therefore are unlikely to make a significant impression on most people.3 He thus turns to Daniel Kemmis to refract these ideas through an apparently more liveable lens, because Kemmis is sympathetic to Berry but offers some more measured suggestions.4 He argues that the displacing impacts of our economic climate cannot be solely attributed to large-scale corporations and their industrialised economies; corporations themselves are not problematic because the public also has a role to play. The public must gain clarity about their identity: ‘until corporations are presented with a public which understands and practices citizenship, their own capacity for citizenship will never be fully brought into play’.5
To inhabit a place is to dwell there in a practiced way, in a way which relies upon certain regular, trusted, habits of behaviour. Our prevailing, individualistic frame of mind has led us to forget this root sense of the concept of ‘inhabitation’…We have largely lost the sense that our capacity to live well in a place might depend on our ability to relate to neighbours …In fact, no real public life is possible except among people who are engaged in the project of inhabiting a place.7
Kemmis is persuaded that to resist displacement we must embrace deliberate emplacement – inhabitation. This exhortation might also be called the discipline of ‘neighbourliness,’ a lifestyle that is in its essence about accepting ‘responsibility for making community happen in a particular place’.8 And Inge is right to note that ‘[n]eighbourliness of this sort is something which is central to what being a Christian is all about, and as such Christians should be able to give a lead in its recovery in order to assist what Kemmis terms “inhabitation”’.9
If members of Christian communities could learn to be good neighbours to one another and to the large communities of which they are a part, they would have something infinitely worthwhile to offer to the world. And it would be the very best form of evangelization.10
Inge is persuaded that the ‘placement’ of church communities must ‘be part of the ‘unavoidable witness’ of the Christian community.’11
This concept is further developed in Andrew Rumsey’s Parish: An Anglican theology of Place.12 Rumsey offers an incisive analysis of the theological nexus between place and parish. In the spirit of Inge he proposes a Christologically grounded ecclesiology that prizes geographical inhabitation and an ethic of settlement, or in his terms ‘local monogamy’.13 He likewise cites Berry approvingly: communities must be ‘irreconcilably opposed to “mobility” as a social norm’.14 For the task of the church is to use ‘micro-space as a means of growing a Christian neighbourhood’.15
Hauerwas: Place, Parish, and Priests
How might these general suggestions concerning the church shape the ministry of its pastors in particular? Although both Inge and Rumsey primarily address the church, Rumsey does gesture towards the priestly implications of this ecclesiology. The priest is to embody the ‘neighbourly ethics of the parish’ by acting ‘parochially’ as it were.16 Rumsey cites the example of parish priest Kenneth Leech who across forty years of ministry in the East End of London embraced being ‘wedded to sheer geography’ for the sake of the gospel.17
The chapter ‘A Particular Place: The Future of Parish Ministry’ in Hauerwas’ War and the American Difference – cited by Rumsey throughout Parish – addresses this question more directly. Hauerwas also begins with the ecclesia, stressing that the ‘the church is necessarily local’.18 He adds: ‘The very phrase “local parish” I assume is redundant because by its very nature a parish is local. The parish is the ecclesial form that has tied the church to place’ (emphasis mine).19 He is confident ‘that the parish system can be a form of resistance to the false universals’ of globalization and a standardized, placeless modernity.20 He argues that resistance to tyrannical universals cannot be found in mere resistance, but rather in an alternative commitment to ‘locality and place’.21 Only at the local level is the church ‘able to engage in the discernment necessary to be prophetic’.22
The church is thus called to ‘take up space in the world, to inhabit a place, where Jesus’s priesthood can be exercised’.23 Hauerwas does qualify: appeals to place can be equally destructive and demonic. Nevertheless, he points out that ‘you do not avoid the perversities of place by escaping to some alleged universal. You can only avoid the perversities of place by being the church of Jesus Christ.’24 Thus, as Inge and Kemmis also argue, it is by a politics of inhabitation – the church embedding itself in locality and place – that it can participate in a counter resistance to our culture’s place-denial.
Hauerwas then adds, ‘I believe the work of parish ministry [i.e. the work of priests] is crucial for sustaining the visibility of the church in a culture that has no time for time and place.’25 He is indebted here to the work of Ben Quash in ‘The Anglican Church as a Polity of Presence’. Summarizing Quash’s argument, Hauerwas writes that ‘the very presence of a priest, a presence that often has no use other than to be present, has everything to do with place’.26 Quash himself writes that ‘the parish priest is often in the very privileged position of being able to describe what the truth of everyday life is in a particular locality’.27 For Hauerwas the priest is defined by their presence in and ability to describe a place.
This work of ministry is something like farming, Hauerwas continues. He also cites Wendell Berry, who records farming a section of land until eventually the bare ontology of the place dawned upon him, saying ‘at last one sees where one is’.28 Hauerwas takes this to be ‘as good a description as any of the challenge of parish ministry’,29 to truly know and describe the place of one’s congregation, to see where one is. The pastor achieves this ‘by living through the problems’ that inevitably arise – like a farmer.30 And this concept – ’living through’ – inherently implies time.
Herein lies an important feature of the pastor’s resistance to placelessness: presence across time. Hauerwas concludes his essay: ‘The work of the parish, like work on Berry’s farm, is slow, hard, rewarding work. We can take the time such work requires because we believe we have been given all the time we need through Jesus’s cross and resurrection to listen to as well as care for one another.’31 The implicit assumption here is that the priesthood includes remaining – it ‘is slow, hard, rewarding work’.32 Berry’s experience of finally seeing ‘where one is’ took ‘seventeen years’ – a ‘long time’.33 It is doubtful whether this epiphany could have occurred without an elongated devotion to one place – if, say, Berry was an itinerant farmer; it required farming on an appropriate scale for an appropriate time, an attention and presence properly narrowed and sustained.
By employing this agrarian metaphor Hauerwas illustrates the need for elongated presence in pastoral work. The priest who moves parishes too often, for instance, risks only contributing to our contemporary place-denial. Indeed, some have criticized Christian theology for producing precisely this kind of behaviour, ‘pilgrimage and dislocation rather than placement’.34 But Hauerwas resists this in naming the work of a pastor as ‘slow’35 – a word that surely implies long-term commitment to a place.
Rowan Williams: Priesthood and Place
Influential in Hauerwas’ reflections on the priesthood and place is the thought of Rowan Williams in the epilogue to Praying for England: Priestly Presence in Contemporary Culture.36 Williams’ position on priestly ministry is born out of his Christological conviction that the cross is where a ‘place has been cleared’ where God and humanity can belong together:37 ‘[The] place where human competition means nothing; a place where the desperate anxiety to please God means nothing; a place where the admission of failure is not the end but the beginning; a place from which no one is excluded in advance.’38 This is, Williams’ argues, ‘the place where Jesus is’.39 ‘The role of the [church] community in the world is to inhabit the place where Jesus’ priesthood has been exercised’, making it ‘real and accessible in the world’.40
The teaching, like the leadership, happens only as and when the priest has learned what it is to inhabit a place and to speak from that place into the community’s life – the believing community but also the wider human community. The lifelong commitment that has been regarded as a necessary aspect of priestliness in the Catholic and most of the mainstream Protestant tradition is to do with this awareness of being called first of all to live somewhere and to become a native of this place.41
Williams argues that a priest is called to be committed to a place. This priestly call ‘to live somewhere and to become a native of this place’ might not exclude meaningful transitions – a point I shall return to – but it must at the very least oppose flimsy transience. For proper embeddedness in a place is a necessary feature of the priestly vocation of inhabitation – the ‘itinerant priest’ is an oxymoron. This call for elongated commitment to a place might even amount to a ‘lifelong commitment’.42
The Dialectics of Place
The literature’s emphasis on long-term presence in ministry is valuable. But it nevertheless risks neglecting something crucial: the dialectics of place. Both theological and philosophical scholarship has typically highlighted that both staying and leaving, settlement and mobility, roots and routes, are crucial to a sense of place.
It was not the romantic wanderer, nor his modern successors, who actually lost their sense of place, for if they had, how could they have thought so much about wandering? Wandering is simply one pole of the sense of place, the dialectical opposite to homecoming, and it is hardly strange that the romantic poets brought the two themes to consciousness at the same time.44
Movement teaches us something fundamental about place that we might otherwise miss. As O’Donovan summarises elsewhere: ‘Homing, as well as exploring, is an aspect of our topical relations.’45
It is not merely a possibility but an absolute certainty that the man [sic] who feels himself to have an eschatological vocation will find himself confined in the world, and refuse to dwell on his native earth without first acknowledging the transitory nature of every dwelling place. [emphasis added]47
Lacoste argues that to understand place requires concepts like pilgrimage and transition. For the pilgrim monk inhabits earth only after appreciating the transience of all dwellings. Indeed all those that are eschatologically mindful recognise that their relation to place – even if including conscious inhabitation – remains inescapably shaped by their identity as ‘foreigners and exiles’ (1 Pet. 2:11) on pilgrimage to where our true citizenship rests (cf. Phil. 3:20).
I invoke this nomadic way of inhabiting the land, because I think that it speaks more to the situation of a growing number of traveling cosmopolitan people in metropolitan areas all over the world than to the modern notion of the nation state. Furthermore, it resonates with Jesus’ dynamic relation to the land and his nomadic lifestyle.50
Nausner suggests Christians ‘would do well to pay attention’ to these ‘spatial practices’ when considering our increasingly globalized and mobile world. Christian thought might consider, as Thomas Tweed argues, a ‘spatial practice that take itinerancy as its guiding theme.’51
This is not to fan into flame a loss of a sense of place. Susan Friendman argues that ‘[i]dentity often requires some form of displacement – literal or figurative – to come to consciousness’; human identity, and thus a sense of place of home and place, is bound to routes and mobility.52 But Friedman never opposes routes to roots. For Friedman argues that the two are in a ‘dialogic relationship’: ‘roots signifying identity based on stable cores and continuities [and] routes suggesting identity based on travel, change, and disruption’.53
Rumsey in Parish also names these complexities. He raises towards the conclusion of his book a ‘vital’ question: ‘is it more authentically Christian to be rooted rather than mobile in spatial terms?’54 Even among a strong reaffirmation of inhabitation and settlement Rumsey offers some qualifications. He first recognises that place is inherently dynamic: ‘all forms of place are (and always were) characterize by flow and interrelation’.55 He secondly suggests that an ecclesiological conception of place can never become too settlement-oriented because of both our origin-story and eschatological horizon: ‘according to the Book of Deuteronomy, our Father was a wandering Aramean and the spiritual descendants of Abraham are reckoned to be a pilgrim people, on their way to a better place.’56
Rumsey’s intimation of a more textured concept of place in Scripture is teased out further in O’Donovan. O’Donovan notes that ‘[t]he election of Israel’s holy places had a background in a general sensibility to the phenomena of migration and settlement’.57 Israel looked to Abraham as their figurehead, ‘the wanderer of faith, who leaves the settled alienation of the city in search of a permanent home.’58 His legacy is one of passage and movement towards home: ‘In Abraham Israel appreciated the bi-polar character of any sense of place.’59 This legacy ultimately shaped Israel’s own narrative, whose migrations under Moses and Joshua are set against the background not only of Abraham but of ‘migration and settlement as a general phenomenon’.60 This is continued in the ‘diaspora experience’ of the Jewish people and the renewed emphasis on pilgrimage, which ‘repeated the wandering and migration of the ancient tribes’.61
It is of course in this context that Jesus of Nazareth lived as a travelling preacher and a participant in regular pilgrimages to Jerusalem.62 By having no place to lay his head the Son of Man bore witness to a place beyond our immediate horizon in the Father’s house (cf. Luke 9:58; John 14:1-6). Indeed Augustine – exegeting this thematic thread in Scripture – famously imagined the church as ‘the pilgrim city of King Christ’ that whilst sojourning on earth gathers from all nations a society of ‘pilgrims of all languages’ en route to our final heavenly home.63
The Dialectics of Place and Ministry Practice
To respond meaningfully to an apparent loss of a sense of place the church must recognise this dialectical nature that is inherent to place. But there is along these lines a clear shortcoming in the ministry literature surveyed above. The emphasis typically falls upon the importance of staying and has said little about the role of leaving. It has neglected the dialectics of place. I now intend to address this shortcoming by returning to some of the literature examined thus far. Then I will provide my own constructive suggestions about how this dialectic might be integrated into pastoral ministry.
An explanation of the episcopal office depends, then, on an adequate dialectics of place. A place must be understood not only in terms of its boundaries, which limit the local society to what lies geographically within them, but in terms of its horizons, which relate the local society to all that lies geographically beyond them. [emphasis mine]64
O’Donovan argues that central to the ministry of a bishop is knowing something of other places. The attention given to their diocese ought to be complemented by an awareness of places outside their diocese too. Their ministry depends on ‘the dialectics of place’.
But what about the ministry of the presbyter, the vocation that this essay has been concerned with? First, O’Donovan argues – in a way reminiscent of Hauerwas and Williams – that the presbyterate is ‘to confess the authority of God’s word in the context of its place’, ensuring that the surrounding political society has ‘a continual stimulus to reflect on the meaning of its local traditions’.65 The presbyter is committed to gospel ministry in a locality. But this is not naïvely to endorse local traditions. For their ‘sense of local identity will be self-questioning, expressed in well-focussed attention to prevailing local forms of idolatrous and worldly communication’.66
If a political society has in its midst a church that is taught by an episcopate to not confine its deliberation to the local, national, linguistic, or racial spheres, but to explore contested issues in a catholic manner, not only attending to Christians from every present source, but also from every past age, it must have a profound effect.67
The church and its leaders are to be cognizant of catholicity. But this is something that is fundamentally taught by an episcopate. It is the bishop who fosters attention to other places and times, protecting the church from distorted devotion to a place.
O’Donovan’s reflections are a valuable starting point. But the role afforded to the dialectics of place in ministry here is reductive; O’Donovan’s depiction of ecclesial ministry reduces its relevance to primarily to the episcopate. The dialectics of place is also relevant to the presbyterate, but only indirectly. The treasures illumined by the dialectics of place are but a gift bestowed to the presbyter by the episcopate; it is the bishop who attends to the dialectics of place, not the presbyter.
But is there not something that the presbyter themselves can do? The minister of the gospel that desires to ‘confess the authority of God’s word in the context of [their] place’ must also appreciate the dialectics of a place for themselves.68 For as we have established, to know a locality or place is to know something of other places too. This is unavoidable because O’Donovan is correct: ‘[w]andering is simply one pole of the sense of place, the dialectical opposite to homecoming.’69 The pastor is equally subject to this reality: to be at home in their place they must somehow embrace ‘wandering’ too.
Pilgrimage and Ministry
How might a pastor embrace mobility appropriately then? I now intend to make some of my own suggestions. But I aim to do so without undermining the earlier observations of this essay: the importance of commitment to a place. For this essay is about the dialectics of place – not an endorsement of contradiction. I remain persuaded that truly knowing a place is important, embeddedness in locality is a dire need, and that the option of an itinerant priest is an oxymoron. I aim to affirm all this whilst also acknowledging the role that wandering might have in the ministry of the pastor.
The theological concept of pilgrimage is fruitful here. The importance of sojourn and place in O’Donovan’s work has already been outlined. But pilgrimage also features prominently in Inge’s A Christian Theology of Place. He has an entire chapter titled ‘Place and the Christian Tradition: Pilgrimage and Holy Places’, arguing that ‘the phenomenon which has demonstrated the appreciation of place in the Christian tradition more than any other is that of pilgrimage’.70 He argues that the ‘landscape of the Christian world is dotted with places which have been recognized as holy’ [emphasis mine] and that for generations Christians have made a tradition of sojourn to them.71 Christianity’s emphasis on pilgrimage has therefore sanctified and elevated the concept of place.
Here Inge essentially affirms the dialectics of place without using the term. He recognises that the centrality of mobility or ‘journey’ in pilgrimage is ultimately an affirmation of ‘roots’.72 He likewise argues that ‘Pilgrimage is a very powerful model which links people, places, and God together in a way which has great potential because it is dynamic and yet it also roots people.’73 He even recognises that the concept eschatologically foregrounds ‘place and placelessness’ [emphasis added] in reminding us that this earthly dwelling is not our final home.74
Yet where Inge’s insightful treatment falls short is in its neglect of how pilgrimage and place might also appear in tension. For instance – although making a persuasive and constructive case for pilgrimage, reinforcing place rather than abolishing it – Inge nevertheless fails to forestall rebuttals from those like Sennet who alternatively interpret Christianity ‘unequivocally as a religion of pilgrimage and dislocation rather than placement’.75 This shortcoming is clearest in the section from A Christian Theology of Place that I surveyed above concerning the practical implications of place for the church. How Inge’s practical suggestion of a ‘politics of inhabitation’ might coexist with the theme of pilgrimage emphasised earlier in the book is left unexamined.
I now intend to build upon Inge’s account by proposing two ways whereby pilgrimage might coexist with inhabitation and thereby be integrated into the pastorate. Here I use the term pilgrimage as an imprecise shorthand for a constellation of themes discussed throughout this paper: mobility, wandering, leaving, routes, nomadic, migration – which all descriptively orbit the opposite pole or dialectic of rootedness and emplacement.76 But in keeping with Inge’s own emphasis on ‘destination’ as central to pilgrimage, I emphasise a homecoming telos as integral to the concept. This is to protect against the dialectical opposite of rootedness unravelling into a mere wandering or aimless or untethered mobility.77
Pilgrimage Before Placement
First, pilgrimage before placement. The pastor ought to consider embracing a chapter of movement before transitioning into a chapter of rootedness. This concept has featured subtly in the background of literature already examined in this essay. For example, O’Donovan concludes his essay ‘The Loss of a Sense of place’: ‘Perhaps only compassion can draw the gifted and the able back from the great world capitals and universities to the regional and local communities from which they sprang, to put the gifts and skills which they possess at the service of their neighbours.’78 He does not suggest that the gifted should never have travelled to these cities in the first place. He merely suggests that having travelled they should consider returning home, because the people whom O’Donovan is imagining ought to go to these great world capitals to become increasingly gifted and able. It is only by fanning ‘into flame the gift of God’ (2 Tim. 1:6) that they are best prepared to return and ‘put the gifts and skills which they possess at the service of their neighbours’.79 O’Donovan is not anti-sojourn; he opposes permanent sojourn. Those who leave their regional communities to go to capital cities should consider this as a journey with a destination, a formative pilgrimage with a use-by-date, book-ended by a homecoming compassion.
The same idea emerges in closer attention to Wendell Berry. Hauerwas is right to highlight his commitment to a place. But recall: Berry had to arrive there. Hauerwas quotes Berry’s own account, which notably begins, ‘When one buys the farm and moves there to live, something different begins’ [emphasis mine].80 Berry had to travel from elsewhere to begin inhabitation.
This observation is more than wordplay or symbolism. For Berry can rightly be called one of those whom O’Donovan writes about: the ‘gifted and the able’ who were brought back from ‘the great world capitals and universities to the regional and local communities’.81 It was only after Berry studied at Stanford University and taught at New York University that he settled into farm-life at the age of thirty.82 He sojourned before being drawn back to place and locality. It seems both Berry’s example and O’Donovan’s reflections serve as illuminating analogies to pastoral ministry. In both cases their primary emphasis is on placement. But also they both have a central place for pilgrimage before placement.
In one of my own places – the Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn, Australia – exists an example of how this concept might be brought to bear on the presbyterate: the Lucas-Tooth Scholarship. ‘In 1909, businessman, grazier, politician and philanthropist, Sir Robert Lucas-Tooth, with £6,000 endowed a scholarship for Anglican theological students and recently ordained clergymen to attend Oxford or Cambridge University.’83 The scholarship has since been revised to allow both clergymen and clergywomen to attend any university in the United Kingdom. This is under the condition that upon ‘completion of their degree, the Scholar is required to serve for at least two years in the Diocese of the nominating Bishop or in a Diocese recommended to the Trustees by the nominating Bishop.’84 The candidate is expected to ‘have potential for future leadership in the Anglican Church of Australia.’85 This is merely an example of the dual emphasis I have in mind here: both a recognition of the importance of pilgrimage for the pastor through funding the scholarship and an emphasis on the importance of place in anticipating the return of the beneficiaries. The scholarship presumes that, as O’Donovan puts it, candidates would return and ‘put the gifts and skills which they possess at the service of their neighbours’ in Australia and their nominated diocese.86 It is a good example of accounting for the dialectics of place in pastoral ministry, a model of pilgrimage before placement worth replicating.
Pilgrimage Throughout Placement
Sabbatical years are the biblically based provision for restoration. When the farmer’s field is depleted, it is given a sabbatical – after six years of planting and harvesting, it is left alone for a year so that the nutrients can build up in it. When people in ministry are depleted, they also are given a sabbatical – time apart for the recovery of spiritual and creative energies.
For Peterson the sabbatical was a necessary process of spiritual recuperation.
These reflections can also be understood in relation to place. It was not merely ‘time apart’ from pastoral work that Peterson needed. He explicitly stated: ‘The obvious solution was to accept a call to another congregation.’88 That the same work in a new place might have sufficed indicates that it was not pastoral work itself that Peterson needed a sabbatical from. He needed margin not from farming, generally, but his particular farm. He wrote: ‘For thirty years we had lived a hundred or so feet down in the ocean of parish life.’89 It was from this parish life, this place and people, that Peterson needed distance. But this was not a permanent sojourn. Peterson’s goal was not to ‘escape’ or be ‘off doing their own thing’ but to ‘remain committed to this congregation’.90 He articulated the telos of this sabbatical: ‘We arrived at the idea of sabbatical, a year way for prayer and writing so that we would be able to return to this place and this people and do our very best in ministry with you’ [emphasis mine].91 His sabbatical was shaped by rootedness and commitment, a journey always book-ended by renewed inhabitation.
Here, then, is another replicable model that accounts for the dialectics of place in ministry: pilgrimage throughout placement. It has perhaps become especially crucial in our age of place-denial that a sabbatical is not construed as merely a break or study-leave – it is a sojourn from a place to other places before homecoming. This rhythm of leaving and returning, much like pilgrimage before placement, finds a way to embody the tension of the dialectics of place in ministry. It makes space for a pastor journeying without betraying their commitment to rootedness.
The Value of Pilgrimage
I have demonstrated two ways in which pilgrimage might be compatible with a politics of inhabitation. But this says too little: pilgrimage is not merely compatible with rootedness but indeed beneficial or crucial. There is a nameable value to pilgrimage in pastoral ministry. O’Donovan argues that increasing homogeneity across the globe ‘numbs our sense of how one place differs from another, and so weakens our connection with the place we belong to, our “home”’.92 The assumption here is that I discern the particularities of my place in contrast to other places. Hauerwas states as such explicitly: ‘That Western Christianity names a “locality” is a nice reminder that all claims to place depend on contrast with another place’ [emphasis mine].93 I know that the rain in Canberra is cold only because I once lived in Brisbane where it is warm; I know the sound of a raven in England is distinct from the sound of ravens in Australia. I know here better because I know elsewheres.
It has taken me nearly 15 years living in the United States – a country so variously and luxuriously and even worryingly ‘religious’ – to comprehend the special quality of this low-key English connection of prayerful ‘presence’, ‘place’, and ministry to the ‘poor’. Had I not lived for all these University years in North America (returning to Oxford, and latterly to my parish assignment in Littlemore, only in the summer months), I would not have thought, either, to braid these three particular features of Anglican tradition together as distinctive and precious.95
This testimony points to the value of placement: it took Coakley fifteen years’ to discern this, which is reminiscent of Berry’s experience on the farm. But Coakley’s account equally illumines the necessity of pilgrimage. Coakley would have remained blind to the ‘distinctive and precious’ features of her Anglican tradition without the contrastive experiences afforded through pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is not simply compatible with but beneficial to ministry in a place. It affords an illuminating point of contrast. Not only does this improve the pastor’s knowledge of a place, it also helps them to practise the ‘self-questioning’ that O’Donovan thinks is crucial to the vocation of the presbyterate. It is perhaps those formed by contrastive pilgrimage – like Coakley – that are best equipped to be ‘a continual stimulus to reflect on the meaning of … local traditions’ and to challenge the ‘prevailing local forms of idolatrous and worldly communication’.96
Conclusion
This essay has itself traversed significant terrain and visited many places. I have examined practical suggestions for how the church and its leaders might respond through inhabitation; articulated the dialectics of place; and finally I have explored the role that pilgrimage might have in accounting for this dialectic in pastoral ministry. But it is now time for this essay’s own homecoming, to return to the place it began – should I stay or should I go?
This paper has demonstrated that this is, as it turns out, is a somewhat of a false dilemma: staying and going are not mutually exclusive but exist in dialectical relationship. My two intuitions regarding ministry outlined at this start of this paper – that I ought to commit to a place and leave this same place – are the phenomenological correlate of this dialectic. For they are both true. As a minister of the gospel committed to the recovery of a sense of place, one ought to go and stay, travel and settle, go on pilgrimage and emplace.
In J.R.R Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring Bilbo recites a poem about the aptly named Strider. He writes of this travelling ranger: ‘Not all those who wander are lost.’97 This poem from Bilbo – himself a character familiar with adventure and homecoming – proves perceptive. For the wandering Strider is the same Aragorn that eventually finds his place as King of Gondor. This wandering pilgrim comes home. Here – as so often the case – fiction testifies to reality. Not all those who wander are lost. For as the Psalmist discerns of God, ‘I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! (Ps. 139:7 nlt). God is the God of all places. He is with the travelling pilgrim and the settled inhabitant – present ‘when I travel and when I rest at home’ (Ps. 139:3). For indeed this is that is the pilgrim God that – in creedal terms – came down from heaven for us and for our salvation. But neither did this salvific sojourn circumvent place. It was Jesus of Nazareth crucified under Pontius Pilate at Golgotha – the place of the skull (Luke 9:51) – that God raised from the dead. The pilgrim God – incarnate and emplaced in Christ – journeyed to even the most cursed of places to prepare for us earthly-sojourners a final place in the Father’s house (cf. John 14:1-6).
John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, Explorations in Practical, Pastoral, and Empirical Theology (Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 129–39.
Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank (Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 1995), pp. 19, 21.
Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p. 129.
Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).
Ibid., p. 137.
Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p. 131.
Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place, p. 79.
Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p. 132.
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid., p. 136.
Ibid., p. 137.
Andrew Rumsey, Parish: An Anglican Theology of Place (London: scm Press, an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd, 2017).
This concept is developed particularly in Chapter 3: Ibid., pp. 65–87.
Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance (Washington: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), p. 79.
Rumsey, Parish, p. 74.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 66.
Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity. (Grand Rapids: Baker Pub. Group, 2011), p. 151, http://www.SLQ.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=776337.
Ibid., p. 154.
Ibid., pp. 155–56.
Stanley Hauerwas, The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God, Illuminations-Theory and Religion (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2007), pp. 66–72, pp. 170–73.
Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, p. 157.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 157–58.
Ibid., p. 161.
Ibid.
Duncan Dormor, Jack McDonald, and Jeremy Caddick, eds., Anglicanism: The Answer to Modernity (London; New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 47.
Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Washington, D.C: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002).
Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, p. 162.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 167.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 162–63.
Philip Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 149; Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. xii.
Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, p. 167.
Rowan Williams, Praying for England: Priestly Presence in Contemporary Culture, ed. Samuel Wells and Sarah Coakley (London; New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 170–82.
Ibid., p. 175.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 181.
Ibid.
Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans Pub, 2004), p. 296.
Ibid., p. 300.
Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans Pub Co., 2008), p. 255.
Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, 1. ed, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy 40 (New York, NY: Fordham Univ. Press, 2004), p. 29.
Ibid., p. 32.
Michael Nausner, “Homeland as Borderland: Territories of Christian Subjectivity,” in Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, ed. Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera (St. Louis, Mo: Chalice Press, 2004), p. 127.
Sam Gill, “Territory,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 299.
Nausner, “Homeland as Borderland: Territories of Christian Subjectivity,” p. 127.
Thomas Tweed, “On Moving Across: Translocative Religion and the Interpreter’s Position,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70, no. 2 (June 2002): p. 262.
Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 151.
Ibid., p. 153–54.
Rumsey, Parish, p. 185.
Ibid., p. 187.
Ibid., p. 186.
O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection, p. 311.
Ibid., p. 312.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 314.
Ibid., p. 315.
Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo: A New Translation. (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1871), p. 46 i.35; p. 327 xix.17.
O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment, p. 288.
Ibid., p. 291.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection, p. 300.
Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p. 91.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 92.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 92.
Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred, p. 149.
Neither am I referring to the historically particular practice of pilgrimages to shrines or holy places as surveyed by Inge.
Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p. 92.
O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection, p. 319.
Ibid.
Berry, The Art of the Commonplace, p. 187.
O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection, p. 391.
Andrew J. Angyal, Wendell Berry, Twayne’s United States Authors Series, tusas 654 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995).
Anglican News, “Lucas-Tooth Scholarship Trust Deed Revised,” Anglican News: A Newspaper For The Canberra & Goulburn Diocesan Community, July 2014, Volume 31, No.4 edition, https://stphilipsoconnor.org.au/news/anglicannews/angnews2014_04.pdf.
Ibid.
Ibid.
O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection, p. 319.
Eugene H. Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub, 1993), p. 144.
Ibid., p. 147.
Ibid., p. 143.
Ibid., p. 147–48.
Ibid., p. 147.
O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection, pp. 296–97.
Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, p. 159.
Ibid., p. 161.
Sarah Coakley, Praying for England: Priestly Presence in Contemporary Culture, ed. Samuel Wells and Sarah Coakley (London; New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 5–6.
O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection, p. 291.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings, pt. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. 171.
