People of Dirt

Published in the Concord, 16 March 2011

If the theme behind this issue is confusing the blame is mine but I’m not going to apologize. We are a people who don’t understand what ‘place’ means, and the only way I can imagine talking about it is holistically. Rural and urban, district and state, domain and environment are all words that try to describe where we are at and the area around us, but none of them gives meaning to that place. None of them speaks the reality of relationship between its constituent parts.

This starts with the term ‘environment’—perhaps the stupidest word in common practice in the English language. ‘Environment’ is defined commonly as one’s surroundings or something along similarly simplistic lines. This leads politicians and activists to talk about ‘using’ it or ‘saving’ it, as if the environment were something outside of us to be exploited or protected. Smoke in the air enters our lungs; wildflowers, deer, pine trees, and every other living thing inevitably come back to us in calories, whether directly or indirectly through the digestion of plants and animals along the way. The idea that we are completely distinct from the creatures around us is not only nonsense, it is border-line heretical. Paul says in Romans 8 that creation is “subjected to futility” but awaits redemption—just like us, because it is us.

            This isn’t some smarmy, spiritual piece on the theology of nature, but—I believe—a deeply practical one. Most people—myself included—are as much aliens where we are now as any new immigrant to this country. We mostly don’t know the hands that produce our food. We buy things in the store made in China, Indonesia or Mexico because they are cheap. “Free market” economics treats the earth as a resource rather than a place where we live, benefitting corporations who produce more and cheaper products over local businesses who understand the features and limitations of a place. These days, family farmers are some of the few who understand the inestimable value of caring for the land. For them the land is not a political cause but a necessity for the continuation of livelihoods and life itself.

As the family farm dies before our eyes, the rest of us are only a degree of separation away from the same fate. This is more a religious issue than a political one. Politics will always seek to justify itself, but Christianity is grounded quite literally in the ground. ‘Adam’ is from the Hebrew for ground or dirt or plot of land, and when he and Eve are sent from the Garden of Eden it is with the directive to cultivate the ground from which he was taken (Gen 3:23). As we have distanced ourselves from toiling in the soil we have lost our identity as people of the dirt. So when we pass the Mississippi River we might remark on its muddy water as an aesthetic deficiency, but we rarely consider the top soil erosion that gives the water that tint or our implicit guilt in it. To fail to acknowledge the dirt is to forget who we are.

This is also as much an urban issue as it is rural. Not everybody can work directly with the earth, but just because our vocations now take us to places quite distant from the land does not mean we are excused from knowing our origins. Cities, in spite of their confluence of people, often lack essential elements of community. Instead of being self-sustaining, their people rely on external services. Cities are places with specialists instead of generalists, places that expect and indeed require a level of specificity to an individual’s vocation that separates us from one another. To be a specialist (for example, a pastor) is to rely on a chain of individuals, stretching back to the farmer who grows her food, the craftsman who builds her home, the automaker, mechanic, and gas station owner who build, tune and fuel her car, the stylist who cuts her hair, etc. These dependencies are largely without deep connection because each individual vocation, though dependent on one another, is involved only in a small part of life, which is more and more disconnected from the place where she lives.

I can state my belief no more clearly than this: the specialist way of life is insufficient for deeper meaning. Young people are leaving the mainline churches not because we are too traditional or too modern. We are leaving because we see what our parents and grandparents do not—that we are no longer grounded. We are leaving for churches with little theological depth, churches that cater to specialists. Instead of building community these churches offer entertainment; they are more like a sports team than a religious institution. And this is happening in settings big and small; urban, suburban, and rural.

It is a strong word of judgment against mainline churches that we offer less community than an evangelical tradition focused on individual salvation. Nonetheless, we have the opportunity now to reaffirm the centrality of place, and only in this way recreate the possibility for a healthy community. If we stop caring about our place—which is to say the people, the land, and all living things therein—we might as well give up on theological depth.

To value place means to take back the word ‘salvation’ from the evangelical traditions and expose its narrow view of individualism as a lie. Salvation is about health—both in the present and future—and health is never an individual state.  As Wendell Berry writes, “Community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health and to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction of terms.” The smallest unit of salvation is not individual salvation; the smallest (and only) unit of salvation is Jesus Christ (I am indebted Adam Morton for this insight). It’s time for our churches to say that Jesus Christ came for ‘you’, in the knowledge that ‘you’ are not just an individual—you are a part of a community embedded in a location. You are a person of the dirt. Stop pretending like you’re not.