Abstraction is crippling to spirituality...

In the Christian imagination, where you live gets equal billing with what you believe. Geography and theology are the biblical bedfellows. Everything that the creator does, and therefore everything that we do, since we are his creatures and can hardly do anything in any other way, is in place. All living is local, this land, this neighborhood, these trees and streets and houses, this work, these shops and markets.

This is, of course, obvious, but all the same it needs saying- sometimes requiring a raised voice. I have spent an adult lifetime with the assigned task of guiding men and women into living out the Christian faith in the place in which they raise the children and work for a living, go fishing and play golf, buy the groceries and park their cars. In the course of this work, I find that cultivating a sense of place as the exclusive and irreplaceable setting for following Jesus is even more difficult than persuading men and women of the truth of the message of Jesus. Why is it easier for me to believe in the holy (because God inspired it) truth of John 3:16 than the holy (because God made it) ground at 579 Apricot Lane where I live?

One of the seductions that continues to bedevil Christian obedience is the construction of utopias, whether in fact or fantasy, ideal places where we can live the good and blessed and righteous life without inhibition or interference. The imagining and attempted construction of Utopias appears is an old habit of our kind. Sometimes we attempt it politically through communities, sometimes socially in communes, sometimes religiously in churches. It never comes to anything but grief. Meanwhile, that place we actually are is dismissed or demeaned as inadequate for serious living to the glory of God. But Utopia is literally “no-place.” We can only live our lives in actual place, not imagined or fantasized or artificially fashioned places.

Our scriptures that bring us the story of our salvation, ground us in place. Everywhere they insist on this ground. Everything that is critically important to us takes place on the ground. The mountains and valleys, towns and cities, regions and countries: Haran, Ur, Caanan, Hebron, Tekoa, Bethlehem, Gibeon, the Kidron Valley, Ashkelon. Big cities and small towns. Famous landmarks and unvisited obscurities. People who want God or religion as an escape from their place because it is difficult, (or maybe just mundane), don’t find this much to their liking. But there it is- there’s no getting around it. But to the man or woman wanting more reality, not less, this is insistence that all genuine life, life that is embraced in God’s work of salvation, is grounded, is good news indeed.

We must ourselves, attend to a consideration of the place where we live and explore the ways in which the place itself with its many dimensions is integral to the Gospel way we live. We are used to having natural places, our mountains and rivers, appreciated his sacred places. And we are used to having secularized and problem ridden cities targeted as places for critical and sometimes dramatic missions. But we aren’t used to this, seeing the ordinary places where we live as gift places, as holy sites. Eugene Peterson