I’ve just finished reading a lovely book by Rod Dreher entitled The Little way of Ruthie Leming. It tells the story of his sister’s struggle with and eventual death from cancer – but the book offers so much more besides. It is above all a story about place and belonging, and a reflection on what it means to be at home, to stay at home, to leave home, or to return home.
Rod Dreher’s sister Ruthie was the one who stayed home, in small-town Louisiana. He was the one who left home and then (following her death) returned home. The book is also a plea that we acknowledge and rediscover the gifts of deep community – the kind of community that can only be built over generations and only by way of a commitment to life in a particular place. His story and reflections are a plea for the humanizing of our lives, a humanizing that he discovers in Ruthie herself.
Dreher’s book gets me thinking, in the first instance, about my identity as the son of a minister. Being a preacher’s kid has made it hard or impossible for me to establish the local roots described by Dreher. I spent formative years as a child in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and then in the towns of Beaverton and Hagersville in Ontario. When my dad as minister was called to a new congregation, it meant a call for me and my sisters to a new town and school and to new relationships. While I have some sense of attachment to the towns in which we lived, that attachment and identification do not go very deep. Thus, in my youth I never had the experience of needing to run away from the suffocating life of a particular small town (in the way that Dreher did). Rather, it is that I never had the opportunity to put down roots in any such place.
My wife’s experience has been altogether difference. Becky was raised her whole life on one street in Scarborough. Her family moved only once, during her university years – and then moved only 15 houses down the street!
This is not to suggest that my experience growing up was somehow unique – military families tell similar stories. Also, we live in a cultural context where migration defines many individuals and families. My own parents, in their teenage years, were uprooted from home and language and family and place in the Netherlands to start a new life in Canada. For a great number of Canadians, the possibility of belonging and of deep community are only something we reach toward – they are not something we have necessarily experienced. The isolating nature of modern, urban life only exacerbates the problem.
The church in our time and context can be part of the answer to the search for an experience and reality of community that is deep and broad – an answer both for those within the church and for those around us. In many places, in fact, Presbyterian congregations (whether urban or rural) have put down the deep roots of community and have the connection to place that Dreher describes, and thus can provide a substantive haven for searching, migrating populations. And where our congregations lack such roots and such a connection to place (or have lost track of them) we perhaps have a unique ability reclaim this communal dimension. What is the church, after all, but a community of friends who invite others to share the way with Christ with us, through every experience and season of life.
Perhaps one word of caution in all of this. Our very modern and protestant tendency to conceive of the spiritual life in individual and deistic terms (God is out there somewhere) has created in us a tendency to reduce community to its strictly human dimensions – or at least to vastly overemphasize this aspect. The result is that while we reach longingly toward community, we have diminished our own capacity to achieve it.
In our modern context, we tend to conceive of community as something we create and shape and manage. Our language and practices often reflect our conviction that the church is simply a collection of individuals who happen to find something interesting and intriguing and hopeful in the church, or in this person called Jesus. This approach also often means that our mission and service to the wider community will only ever be add-on to the life we live together, if we happen to decide it should be.
Unfortunately, when such an approach to community comes to define our congregations, then we lose the depth of our shared life in Christ and in the Spirit, a life that is expressed in the language of “the body of Christ.”
The church is not simply a collection of individuals – one community among many. It is the Body of Christ, mysteriously and powerfully uniting those who belong to Christ – past, present future – near and far – in one life. This reality, and the truth of this mystery, must, in turn, shape our prayers, our language around the Lord’s table, our mission to our neighbourhoods, our openness to one another in our homes, and our commitment to put down roots in each other’s lives and in our particular towns and neighbourhoods.
What a beautiful and shared life we have – shared not only with one another, but with the risen Christ who draws us all to himself.
