On Being Where We Are
“. . . Americans seek the quick fix for spiritual as well as physical pain. That conversion is a lifelong process is the last thing we want to hear. . . . Fear is not a bad place to start a spiritual journey. If you know what makes you afraid, you can see more clearly that the way out is through the fear.”
– Kathleen Norris, Dakota
In Dakota, Kathleen Norris writes about moving into her maternal grandparents’ home in rural Lemmon, South Dakota after her grandmother died. This is not a move Norris anticipated, or even necessarily wanted, and moving into a place that held so much family history – and to a geography marked by so much silence and isolation and severe weather – compelled her to face ghosts in her family’s past and her own spiritual life.
But as Norris observes in Dakota, this context is the one in which she rediscovered and recommitted to a lapsed faith. It is where she became more deeply rooted in her history and in the spiritual legacy of her grandmothers; where she experienced healing in her marriage; where she became capable of maintaining hope and staying resilient in painful seasons of marital conflict, financial distress, and loss. It is also where she discovered Benedictine monasteries and became an oblate.
Repeatedly in the course of her book, Norris attributes significance to the geography of the Dakotas in facilitating these experiences of growth. In one place, she writes, “Both monasteries and the rural communities on the Plains are places where nothing much happens. Paradoxically, they are also places where being open to conversion is most necessary if community is to survive.” She writes of the place she is in as a reality that must be received even when it is unpleasant or seems impossible to manage due to poverty, bad weather, insular communities, or isolation. Over and over again, Norris insists that the seeming limitations of life on the Plains are ultimately gifts that have potential to evoke unexpected, redemptive depth in those who commit themselves to steadfastness as they receive who, what, and where they are.
This is a radically different mode of attention to place than most contemporary American individuals are accustomed to adopting. Usually, we think of it the other way around: What is the place I can be happiest? How can I get out of here to there as fast as possible? We assume the grass is always greener. All too often, rather than cultivating stillness, we willingly join a frantic rat race to find that greener grass and make our homes there. We believe that if we can do this, we’ll finally be happy.
However, Norris’s story, and the witness of countless monastics over the centuries, suggests otherwise. Absent a clear calling or necessity to leave the home or commitment or church we are in (something I am pretty well convinced God makes apparent when the time is right), maybe the holiest way to regard them is as gifts. Observing how this changes a person, Norris notes similarities between the humility it takes to commit to the constancy of the monastic life and the severities of life on the Plains when she writes:
“[Asceticism] is a way of surrendering to reduced circumstances in a manner that enhances the whole person. It is a radical way of knowing exactly who, what, and where you are, in defiance of those powerful forces in society – alcohol, drugs, television, shopping malls, motels – that aim to make us forget.”
If I receive this home (or commitment, or church, or even affliction, etc., etc.) as a generosity of some kind given to me by God – even if I don’t much like it to begin with, or if it is painful to consider abiding with it for a long time – and if I persist in my commitment to it through discomfort, regret, and fear, how might I change? How might my capacity for love be broken open, made wide and deep in ways I could not imagine when I began? What redemption might be made real in a personal, locational, or family history I would prefer to avoid, but which my commitment to people and place bids me to attend? What happens to us, what humility grows, when we choose to live out our days in the place where we will be buried?
What if all we really need to do is just . . . be, here?
We are by now well into Lent, and odds are each of us finds ourselves chafing against our fast. Forty days. This is how long we require ourselves to commit to a more intense asceticism than we do in the rest of the year. Forty days is long enough for us to go through a few stages of our experience of our fast:
Alright, I’ve got this! I’m giving up x, y, and z for Lent. Look at me go!
Goodness gracious, did I actually agree to give that up? Why would I do that?
Can’t I just have a little bit of [insert fast item here]?
Which can go one of two ways: “No, no, I gave it up! I won’t! Help me, Jesus.” Or, “Yeah it’s just a little bit . . . I’ll just sample . . . Oh, wait, I regret this. Help me, Jesus.”
But then we find at some point, often imperceptibly, we slide into a fourth “phase,” which doesn’t feel like a phase at all but is possibly the point of it all. Once we have submitted to the limits of our fast for long enough, our body, mind, and soul reset. New space opens up in our time and emotions.
We choose to fast because it’s something we can do. A simple asceticism, something small enough to hang onto when fear or discontentment overtakes us. We can keep a simple rule and ask God to do something with it. The miracle of any chosen limit, any chosen acknowledgement of our finitude, including a fast, is that in his grace God makes use of it to create a new openness in us. He meets us in our chosen lack and changes us there.
At one point, Norris tells a story about a friend that meant to visit her in the Dakotas for a couple of weeks. He was a city-dweller, and the vast expanses of the Plains made him so uncomfortable that after a few days he called his girlfriend from a pay phone, proposed to her, and declared he needed to leave – a week early. When he got back home, he and his fiancée amicably decided it wasn’t time for them to get married, and broke off the engagement in a matter of weeks. No matter – he had escaped from the Plains.
By contrast, she also describes how her sight changed after living on the Plains for some time:
“Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, ‘But what is there to see?’ The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light. . . . Here, the eye learns to appreciate slight variations, the possibilities inherent in emptiness. . . . A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky. The beauty of the Plains is like that of an icon; it does not give an inch to sentiment or romance. . . . Maybe seeing the Plains is like seeing an icon: what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state.”
I don’t pretend to understand this, or to be able to articulate what that openness is, or what we find in it. Likely it’s different for each of us. But the same is true for any chosen limitation: a Lenten fast, a marriage vow, a creative practice that limits itself to working within one set of materials or one style, a choice to stay in one home for a long time instead of looking for a “better” place to build the life we think will make us happy. By submitting to finitude we find it a doorway into openness. We find it redeemed and imbued with a grace that deepens us.
I cannot recommend Norris’s book to your attention highly enough. It is a life-changing read.
And may grace, peace, and perseverance meet you in your fasting. May we be given the humility to keep a good Lent.