You have got to love when an author exhibits such playful candor at the outset of a book. Wilson-Hartgrove let's us know right away that he is on a mission to reset our internal default. He wants to help us to consider the value and nourishment that comes from staying put. Sending roots down in the loam of God's love and faithfulness challenges us to move beyond moving beyond. His challenge is bold and fresh, giving the heart something to keen about and the spirit a chance to soar in place.
Wilson-Hartgrove swerves in and out of stories about our homes in a comforting rhythm and a settled prose that is familiar and sacred at the same time. He reminds us that nesting in our houses, our relationships, our earth, our finances and all of life is something gracious that is pitted against the progressive call to change and upgrade lest we shrivel up and die. Constant change feels anything but gracious. We are a culture that is tired of always moving.
Wilson-Hartgrove reminds us that there is an interior life that drives the desires and yearnings we have. This interior landscape can only be truly known when we stop long enough to make love to the life it affords us; when we settle into a romance with mundanaity. This stillness proves not only a strong foundation for life, but a worthy place to live. Once there, we have found a center.
And yet, our stability can morph into stagnation. We strive against stability because we fear the treasures of sameness. Would we ever know awe if we did not see how changing comes full circle to changelessness. We learn something by noting the rebirth of the snowdrops in the field by our house - year after year. Jonathon teaches us to look and listen for the gifts of a stationary life - inside and out. This freshness will bathe us in a renewal that becomes a momentum of the heart - a growing sense of expansion. Digging deep can teach us the true freedom beyond the illusions of change: the detachment of apatheia.
We can never be set free from attachment to place until we root down deep enough within to the source of life that nourishes us to rise above one place and be in God in all places at once. Staying put can enable us to
understand and relinquish the hold that space can have on our psyches and on our hearts. Longing for motionlessness reveals that our only stillness is in God, not simply in our soma. We cease all movement when we enter into the only thing that is truly immovable: God and God's immeasurable love.
We are revisited with the tales of Jacob and the Psalmist as they wrestle with the notion of dwelling with a God that tabernacles with His people right where they are, amid the tatters of their lives and cracks in their walls. God gifts His people with relationship in space and time. God dwells with His children in order to transform their lives, not their space and time that He has peacefully thundered into.
We are lead by the author into a pathway landscaped with questions about where we find our home and how we gauge our meaning. Can we get passed the urge for newness and settle into a life of community that has no glitzy diversions and adorable notions to purchase? When we find God in our angst, despair, and boredom we have grown beyond the shifting trendy fashion of pop-theology and smile-ology. Can we find strength in wrestling with God amid struggles and trouble, and not simply in the glory of denial and change. It is tough making a home in God, it demands we face things again and again.
The ambling Jonathon does in the ideas of what it means to be home, to find rest, and abide are as familiar as our own ancient lurking passion to belong. You cannot help but feel like you are living the old Hasidic tale of the humble seeker who has a dream that a treasure is out there for him, under a bridge in a far away village. When he awakes and takes to the road to find his treasure, he happens on a guard who mumbles to him that he has just had a dream that a poor beggar is wandering the earth looking for a treasure that is buried behind the wood stove in his own home. He scurries home to find his wealth where he had been all along.
While making HOME is something we long for desperately, it does not come easy. It takes work to be set free into the wisdom of stability and rootedness. But, we can gather around us practices and people that point us in - that help us uncover the hidden riches. We can find this in the repetition of our own hugger mugger, but we must be intentional about looking.
Jonathon has set up chairs on his front porch and is asking us to sit with him, have sweet tea, and look at the stories about movement and stillness, about being called out and being called to stay. Whether it is Jesus and the possessed man, Levi, Saint Benedict, Saint Anthony, or the man and woman next door or around the corner, it does not matter, Wilson-Hartgrove is a master storyteller who invites us in to his tales, his community, and his life. He asks us to look at our lives through the eyes of the wise Fathers and Mothers from Church history. This lens is critical to the current need in the church for grass-root rebuilding of the early church and house-church models of celebrating God's Presence with us.
This book is a must read. And, it is a must read for small groups, house-churches, communities, new monastic devotees, and folks who are hungering to find out what the Spirit of God is calling the Church to in a Post-Denominational day and age. Don't wait too long, the hour is now!
Watch a short trailer by the author himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4KBRL8NjJk
Ciao!
Tom+
I can't wait to read it! Just finished his book, Free to be Bound.
ReplyDeleteElisabeth Crosby Daley