Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home
Jen Pollock Michel
Top 10 Best Quotes
“They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live “above” our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, “We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve’s calling to care for a specific place, and God’s instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities.”15”
“They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live "above" our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, "We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve's calling to care for a specific place, and God's instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities[...]" We cannot hurry the church's work of faithful presence, which is rooted in a particular place and committed to blessing a particular group of people. If Jesus has loved the world, the church must love its city.”
“The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long for home because welcome was our first gift of grace and it will be our last. The settings of our first home and our last home will testify to the nature of the embodied story God is writing in human history. Because God's story begins in a garden and ends in a city, place isn't incidental to Christian hope, just as our bodies aren't incidental to salvation. God will resurrect our bodies, and he will -- finally -- bring us home.”
“Stability, as commitment to place, and enclosure, as commitment to people, aim to prove that demons are not easily left behind. Home, on this earth, is no perfect place, and one of our greatest acts of faithful courage might be abiding the weariness of imperfect company, both that of ourselves and others.”
“Bethel reveals that God is present in every liminal place, lending his anchoring weight to our weightless lives. Our in-between places--between jobs, between cities, between houses--can easily feel like a bookmark, as if their only job was separating past from future. But these places are indeed part of the story, even when we have failed to give them a name... A nameless place can be the site of tentatively taking our first step toward trust; it's at Bethel that we can begin believing in a God, who journeys with us.”
“no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well.9”
“To feast on the one body and blood given for the sustenance of the world and then forget the world's hungry is anathema to the gospel.”
“They depend on daily efforts and ordinary gestures, neither is once and done. Each requires a kind of liturgy, or routine, as an anchoring weight against the hosts of disordered desires that greet us in the morning before we've put a foot to the floor: selfish ambition, acedia, megalomania, greed. The liturgies of housework and practices like daily prayer ground us in a proper estimation of ourselves -- we are creatures, not the Creator. Our quotidian routines return us to our bodies of dusk, forging humility on the anvil of repetitive motion. We can't abandon the housekeeping, either the laundry or the liturgy[...]”
“Their stability was an obedient commitment to whatever was daily and whomever was closest; in devotion to God, they kept up the practice of embodied, localized love.”
“The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that ‘families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.’”14 But whether we baptize our infants or not, the principle is the same: our active participation in the church—and our willingness to see it as home—relieves some of the onerous burdens of childrearing, often made heaviest by our sense of limitation. We can’t parent alone. And we aren’t meant to. We have friends—better, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—to help carry some of the worry and weight of the family housekeeping. And as I’ve learned from recent research, the most important predictor of whether children from Christian families keep their faith into adulthood is the number of multigenerational connections they enjoy at church. Teenagers may not need a youth group populated by hundreds of peers, but they do need other Christian adults in their church to take an interest in them and communicate that they belong.”
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Book Keywords:
salvation, resurrection, home, place
