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Q & A
Q&A: Being rooted in a culture of mobility Robin Russell, Jul 16, 2010
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an associate pastor of St. John’s Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., is a leader in the new monastic movement and co-founder of the Rutba House community.
In his new book, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture (Paraclete), he talks about the spiritual benefits of staying in a particular place. He spoke recently with managing editor Robin Russell.
You write that the most important thing we can do to grow spiritually is to stay where we are. Why is “place” so important? Many people have a sense of fragmentation in their lives between vocation and work and friendships. We have access to more mobility than humanity has ever known. You can hop on a plane and get about anywhere; you can get on a phone or on a computer and connect with someone almost anywhere. But our capacity for knowing where we most need to be hasn’t kept up with that. So stability, or having a place where you know you belong, might be as important for growth in the spiritual life as figuring out what you believe. The story of what God is doing takes root in relationship, between people and a place.
There seems to be a connection between constant change and an overall anxiety today. Oh, absolutely. I have no doubt that the anxiety and other psychological issues we struggle with is a result of our placelessness and the speed at which life moves. One of the things I learned is that a healthy life is connected to the rhythms of the place where you are: the seasons, the sun coming up and going down. There’s something about this that makes us sane. If you have an electric light that you can turn on at any time, you don’t have to pay attention to when the sun comes up or goes down. But if you don’t pay attention to it at all, I think it can drive you crazy.
Yet even Jesus commands us to “Go.” What’s up with that? This would be the major objection to the practice of stability for a Christian. When God calls Abraham, he says, “Leave the place where you are and go to a place I’ll show you,” and when Jesus sends his disciples, he says, “Go into all the world.” And yet I think that’s different than the mobility that most of us experience. Without a people to belong to, you can’t really be sent. If the disciples hadn’t spent time with Jesus, I don’t think there would be any real content to Jesus sending them out with a message.
The church always needs people who are sent, but we struggle with sending people well today because most people don’t know who they belong to, so they’re not sure who would send them. We have a vague sense of call that sends us in lots of different directions. There’s a real need to have stability to even engage in mission.
What does it look like when you have a place where you belong? Self-honesty. People who have belonged to a place have learned the truth about themselves: that all of us have limits, all of us are broken and in need of grace. They’re just refreshingly honest people. They don’t wear masks. One of the telltale signs of the modern world is everyone’s always trying to pretend we’re better than we are. It’s just refreshing to find people who aren’t. People who practice stability have stayed in a place long enough to face the stuff that most of us are running from. There’s a great story from [desert mother] Amma Theodora: A monk was leaving the community he’d been part of, and on his way out another brother says to him, “If it’s on my account that you’re leaving, then you should know that I go before you wherever you’re going.” You can’t really get away from me, because you can’t get away from yourself.
What else did you learn from the desert mothers and fathers? You have to face your own limitations. The desert has a tradition of saying, “Every night after you’ve said your prayers, you dig one shovel of your grave.” Benedictine says, “Keep death before you daily.” We’re a pretty death-denying society. We don’t even like to have the graveyard outside our megachurches anymore. It’s just not a pleasant thing to see when you’re coming to praise the Lord. But here’s a tradition that says, “No, remember that you’re going to die.” There’s something about that that keeps us human.
You also write about the dangers of stability. Give some examples. You’ll face temptations that you wouldn’t have faced otherwise. Once you’ve committed to a place, you get bored or you feel undervalued, and you say, “If I were only somewhere else, people would appreciate my gifts.” The desert calls that acedia, or a lack of care, which can lead us to despair or to get distracted or even to overwork. To not pay attention. To not care. To not be careful of the people around us because we’re so hyperinvolved in what we think is important or trying to prove we’re something more than we are.
The answer is to find a rhythm of spiritual and manual work that keeps your body and your spirit healthy. I’m a writer, but it’s real clear to me that you can’t just sit and write all day. It makes your writing bad! So having some time to write, and then I get up and there’s lots of stuff going on in the neighborhood: There’s community gardens, there’s a summer camp going on right now, there’s kids to play with. And just real basic things like meals to prepare, floors to clean. Some kind of rhythm, where you’re moving between prayer or writing or some contemplative act and these more active things, there’s wisdom to seeing that we need both of those.
How hard is it to stop moving, and where do we begin? The good news is you can begin where you are. I don’t think the only way to begin practicing stability is to say you’re never going to move again, you’re never going to be in another church, you’re never going to change jobs. Some kinds of instability are just involuntary. That’s why it’s important to recognize that stability really is a gift from God. I tell the story of Jacob on the run. While he’s fleeing from his home, worried about whether his brother’s going to strangle him, God meets him, and the ladder between heaven and Earth is there. I think Jacob is a picture of modern humanity. And I think God is offering stability where we are.
I’m delighted that the tradition of fixed hour of prayer is picking up steam in a lot of circles; that’s a tried-and-true rhythm that can give life some sanity. The movements toward community are a real sign of hope—less of a religious performance and more of a participatory engagement. But nobody can guarantee that they’re going to be able to stay. We can make promises, and God is able to sustain us in promises, but you know, we all die. Death is the ultimate instability. Ultimately, God is the firm foundation, and because Jesus is raised from the dead, there is hope that there’s even a stability beyond death.
As you know, Methodist ministers participate in an itinerant system where they move to wherever they are sent. Most do not have the opportunity to settle in for a long time. How might the itineracy affect their own spiritual journey? My reading of it is that itineracy comes out of Methodism being a revival movement out of the Anglican Church. And so the early ministers of Methodism—these itinerant circuit-rider preachers—were really missionaries. The notion of the annual conference—the fellowship of your fellow ministers as your actual community—is really important for missionaries, but I don’t know how much it exists anymore for pastors. So as an outsider, I feel like the Methodist Church is at a crisis: whether a practice that made sense when it was initiated still makes sense today.
As ministers, we’re called to love the people we serve as if we are not going to leave them. There’s that temptation to say, “Well I’m only here for three years; I’m really not going to give my whole self to it.” I think that would be a real failure of our vocation. So practices of stability could help, even if you’re going to be moved by your district superintendent, and knowing that it will really break your heart if you really do give yourself fully to people. But we’re called to love as if we’re going to stay.
The other thing is to invest in a vision for that community being a stable presence. One advantage of the itinerancy is that churches don’t get built so much around personalities, so you have to have some sense of who you are apart from your pastor. The community has to have a sense of its own identity and what it means to be shaped by that place. So that is a gift. That should make churches unique. A United Methodist church in say, rural North Carolina, ought to have a different flavor to it than a United Methodist church in downtown Dallas or here in Durham. I think that has everything to do with paying attention to the place where you are and to the rhythms of the people who make up your congregation.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
What does it look like when you have a place where you belong?
As you know, Methodist ministers participate in an itinerant system where they move to wherever they are sent. Most do not have the opportunity to settle in for a long time. How might the itineracy affect their own spiritual journey?
