A Sense of Place

To be rooted, Simone Weil once remarked, 'is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.'1 To feel oneself at home in the world. To have a sense of place. Can the soul deepen and grow without such basic security? This question presses itself upon us with ever greater urgency in our own time. 'Isn't the twentieth century', Elie Wiesel asks, 'the age of the expatriate, the refugee, the stateless - and the wanderer? Enforced movement, driven by chaotic social, political or economic forces is increasingly common; persons, indeed whole communities, are turned, sometimes overnight, into chronic wanderers. The destruction and disappearance of natural places also contributes to this sense of homelessness; as business and technology reach ever further into the wilderness, marshalling its 'resources' for our use, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine the living world as home. Nor do the basic patterns of so-called 'modern' life help us to cultivate a sense of place. We spend increasing amounts of our time, the anthropologist Marc Aug~ suggests, in 'non-places' - in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on highways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. Gradually, we are losing the sense of what it means to dwell within a particular place and community, to become intimate with the landscape, to enter into and be shaped by the stories and the culture of the place. We are losing the sense of place.
It is not easy to calculate the costs of such loss, its effects on our sense of well-being, on our sense of involvement in and commitment to the places we call home, even on our sense of the sacred. But, as an ever-growing body of evidence suggests, the costs are immense. This is an issue calling out for attention from theology and spirituality. Gradually, one is beginning to see the emergence of a sustained inquiry on the part of theologians and historians of spirituality into the issue of place and its influence upon the spiritual life of persons and communities. This inquiry is taking place as part of a broad interdisciplinary conversation about the meaning of place currently unfolding within and between a wide range of fields. If we hope to arrive at a better understanding of how place shapes our lives, both personally and communally, if we are to articulate for ourselves the way in which place influences our sense of the sacred, and if we are to discover a more adequate ethic of place so that we will learn to cherish and preserve the places we inhabit, we will do well to enter into this conversation.
This means situating the work of theologians and scholars of spirituality within the wider ambit of work currently under way among writers and poets, cultural historians, architects, philosophers, • literary critics, anthropologists and geographers, as they inquire into the meaning of place in human experience. An adequate theology and spirituality of place, I am convinced, will only emerge if we learn to attend to this conversation and incorporate its findings into our ongoing sense of self, God and world. In what follows, I want to sketch briefly some of the emerging trends in writing and thinking about place and suggest their significance for spirituality and theology.