There’s No Place Like Home

“There’s no place like home” says Dorothy. She says this line in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first printed in 1900 by L. Frank Baum, which is a whimsical and childish tale of voyage, courage, adventure, and ultimately, a return to a place like no other – home. How do you feel about your home? Where is home? What is home like? Is it the place you long to be when you’re away, or the place you can’t wait to leave when you’re there. What is the story behind the place? It might be a happy story of community cohesion, friendship, support and camaraderie. It might equally be a sad story of a heyday, followed by a slow decline, of stores shut, schools closed, pubs abandoned. Perhaps it has gone from ‘no place like home’ to being a home that is considered a ‘no place.’

The writer Wendell Berry has written evocatively about the communal, social, economic and familial decline of many rural and farming towns and villages – most often small – across America, to the extent that these places are no longer to be considered as valuable in the national perception. The sort of place the bypass can avoid, the airplanes can fly by, the rail tracks no longer run towards.

But places they still are, smaller perhaps, quieter perhaps, fractured and dented perhaps, aching and ageing perhaps. But places nonetheless, and home to those who live there. As such, it could be helpful to see that it is not simply people who make places, but places that make people. Places form or de-form people as water forms and deforms its own ways. As such, there is a reciprocity that needs to be considered in the formation, or de-formation of people, their places, their lives, the land upon which they exist and the stories they tell.

Today’s ironic malaise of hyper-connected-disconnectedness has led to disease, depression, despondency and detachment which all have become prevalent, if not predominant in every place. So perhaps we have a situation in which an attention to the place in which we live and move and have our being, could be conducive to settle not only our feet, but our minds, our hearts, and even our souls. And it could be that this is both more important and easier to do in small places or no places. But how so?

There has been a recent surge in attention paid to the land under our feet, ecological issues, and societal maladies, but the answers or strategies seem various and sometimes vacuous. But at least it’s a start. If we are to stop and think, which is something we are often being prevented from doing in our so-called connected world with every dancing red notification dot, or ping of a message, then perhaps we could reflect on the importance of the place in which we find ourselves.

In the Biblical book of Acts, Paul is speaking to the Athenians, and he tells them that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.”

He is saying that we can know that God has allotted not just the time that we live in, nor just the circumstances that surround us, but the boundaries of our garden fence. When we recognise or realise a divine and supernatural locating in our places, we can perhaps start to see the dignity, the design, the duties that come with places.

This means, that there are no places that should be considered ‘no places.’ Each place instead is part of an ongoing story, with a beginning, a middle, and beyond exceptional circumstances, no end yet. So how do we engage with the places within which we live?

Wendell Berry among others, would encourage us to make use of a sometimes-under-utilised muscle, our imagination. Having spent some time studying the art of Geography, one word that seemed a whimsical invention of that discipline, was the word of ‘imagineering’. At the time it produced something of a scoffing eye roll, and yet as the years have rolled by, I just wonder if actually there is some help to be found in this verb.

We do not see God’s name stamped into the lilies of the field, nor the birds of the air, yet we believe they are his. We do not see his hand pushing us down one road and not another, yet we trust in his presence and guiding by his Spirit and word. Even if sometimes only retrospectively.

Which means that we must use our imaginations as we look around, behind and ahead. Jesus so often encouraged this exercising of the imagination. In Mark 4:3, Jesus said “Listen! Behold a sower went out to sow…” Our imaginations are the muscle, the gateway, the tool with which to perceive, to meditate, to observe and to grow in an understanding of our place. Maybe it is the history of the place, maybe the families, maybe the economy, maybe the industry, maybe the agriculture, maybe the revival, maybe the exodus of the young, maybe the influx of the unknown.

Maybe the place we find ourselves in shapes us more than we realise and recognise. And maybe in a small-town and rural place we have some chance of wrapping our heads and hearts around the boundaries of our dwelling place. And maybe it is as we appreciate the ways in which the place we live will shape us and form the way we think that we can come to think more of the place in which we live.

And when we are curious about the place we live in, perhaps we can be hopeful about the place it could become. Some decline is far beyond the power of a small number of King Canutes to turn back, yet maybe other aspects of our places we call home could be changed, loved, improved, filled with hope. Have we let our imagination imagineer a better place?

Perhaps we have, and we come to a shuddering halt, eyes brimming with tears, chest heaving with sobs. Then we are not alone, Jesus did so in Matthew 11:21, as he lamented the heartfelt stubbornness of those who would reject our Lord.

Yet Jesus did not give up and go home. No, he left his home, to become one without a home, by making a stable his home, before even the grave became his temporary dwelling place, but it could not contain him, and so bursting through the cords of death, he ascended to life, life in his heavenly home.

And so as Christians, we are perhaps to be benefitted by considering our place, our home. But we are never to forget our two homes, one earthly and one heavenly. Phil 3:20 tells us our citizenship is in heaven. There is our heavenly and eternal home. Our home is in the Father’s house, where a room is prepared for us. Imagine that! So there is the ‘not yet’, but then again, there is still the now. We sojourn in two places, two ages. While we wait, in an age of dislocation, dis-ease and discontent with where we find ourselves, perhaps as we stop to think about the places we currently call home, we might benefit from an acknowledgement of the way our places are forming us, have formed us, and will form us. There is no such thing as a ‘no place’ despite some places being marginalised, forgotten or bypassed.

Instead, there is no place like home. Perhaps in rural and small-town places, we have an opportunity to contribute to that story, to witness to a better way. Our homes are where we hope, we love, we have faith, and we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). They are the places God has placed us, even if temporarily, while we wait to be brought home to that future home, where we will certainly be able to say ‘there’s no place like home!’

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