Re-Placing Ourselves
Our little church by the railroad tracks
“Place is the first of all beings, since everything that exists is in a place and cannot exist without a place."
— Archytas, Commentary on Aristotle's Categories
Getting to Know My Place
By the time I was old enough to drive, I had lived in fifteen different houses in ten different towns. I had eight different schools before I graduated from high school. You might guess I was a military brat, but it was actually a combination of new jobs, a divorce and a remarriage, and … well, poverty. I think it was because of all that moving around that I never developed a strong sense of place as a child. I didn't really know what I was missing for a long time. In fact, I kind of looked down my nose at people who had lived in the same town their whole lives.
This degree of transience is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of civilization. My patronymic great-great-great grandfather, Josiah Holstead, settled in Indiana and founded a town, and he and the next three generations lived out their lives in the same area for the next 130 years. My father, like many in his generation, was the first to move away from home and family for a job. And since then, his children and grandchildren have followed that pattern of moving where opportunity took them. It wasn’t really nomadism, but more like serial settlement.
For most of history, this kind of dis-location would have been cause for lamentation (like literal books of lamentation!) and generational trauma. Separated from the land of their birth, people would necessarily be disconnected from their community and from their gods—because the gods were inseparable from the land (a fact which a lot of contemporary polytheistic reconstructionisms overlook).
When I finally "settled" down to raise my family, where we stayed for the next 15 years (so far), it was driven by factors like school district, proximity to workplaces, and the presence of sidewalks—not by any real sense of place. Over the years though, as I have lived here, I have become more aware of it as a place. I have come to know it better, its past and its present, the shapes and textures of the landscape, the rhythms and cycles of its seasons, and the diversity of its human and other-than-human inhabitants.
I live in the grassland-forest transition at the intersection of two bioregions, the Great Plains and the Northeast Forests. It lies on the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan. It is one of the most ecologically diverse and ecologically blighted parts of the United States. I hike in the national lakeshore/park that is home to no fewer than nine habitats over just 20 miles, and also is sandwiched between a coal-fired power plant to the east and a steel mill to the west. I kayak on a branch of the Calumet River, which has long been one of the most polluted waterways in the country. I share this place with endangered species of amphibians and domesticated livestock, migrating sand cranes and feral house cats, increasingly rare cicadas and fireflies, "invasive" Bradford pear trees and a few ash trees that survived the borer infestation.
I also live in one of the most racially diverse and racially segregated parts of the United States. It is a red bubble inside a blue bubble inside a red state. I live in a mixed white- and blue-collar suburb on the very edge of a suburban/urban sprawl that stretches uninterrupted for 30 miles to downtown Chicago. I share this place with "Region Rats" whose families—Black and White—have worked in the steel mills for two or three generations; Eastern Europeans, Latinos, and Muslims who are more recent immigrants; and a few American Indians whose families inhabited this place before all of them—all of us breathing the same polluted air and drinking the same polluted water.
Place as Person
I think here is a good point to explain what I mean by "place." When I use the term "place", I mean something more than a mere location. There's a quote from Moby Dick which I've carried with me through the years: "It is not down in any map; true places never are."
True places can't be found on any map. A mere location can be found on a map. A location is a set of coordinates, a postal address, the end point on a list of turn-by-turn directions. A place, in contrast, is much more than that. A place is defined by its history and by its relationships—or rather, by its relationships both past and present. And those relationships may be with humans, but they also may be with other-than-human persons.
I think it's helpful to actually think of places as persons. Like people, they have history and they have relationships. Like people, you can't know them upon first sight; you have to get into a relationship with them. As with people, that takes time and attention. And with time and attention, you can discover that a place—like a person—has a life and agency of its own, not apart from, but lived through, those relationships.
I had grown up thinking of place as like a setting in a story or a backdrop in a play. But it is actually more of a character [1]. There are authors who write like this, for whom place is a character in their stories. James Mitchener comes to mind. I had to read Centennial (1974) in my junior year of high school. (I say “had to” because it was a slog for me at the time.) Centennial is a sprawling account of the history of northeast Colorado from prehistory to (what was at the time of its publication in the 70s) present day. The land is the main character in the story. The book actually begins with the geological forces that formed the Rockies. (I haven't read Mitchener’s other books, but I’m informed that a lot of them are like that too.)[2]
J.R.R. Tolkien is another author who wrote like this. As a young reader, new to fantasy fiction, I was impatient with Tolkien's descriptions of the land called Middle Earth. I wanted to get to the (human and human-like) characters and to the action. But I've come to realize how much Middle Earth is itself a character in Tolkien's narrative. It has a rich history, only hinted at in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but elaborated in The Silmarillion. And it lives through its relationship with its peoples, the humans, elves, dwarves, ents, and of course, the hobbits.
One example of this is from Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo first sees Lothlorien: (I encourage you to read the whole thing and not skip over it like my teenage self did.)
“When his eyes were in turn uncovered, Frodo looked up and caught his breath. They were standing in an open space. To the left stood a great mound, covered with a sward of grass as green as Spring-time in the Elder Days. Upon it, as a double crown, grew two circles of trees: the outer had bark of snowy white, and were leafless but beautiful in their shapely nakedness; the inner were mallorn-trees of great height, still arrayed in pale gold. High amid the branches of a towering tree that stood in the centre of all there gleamed a white flet. At the feet of the trees, and all about the green hillsides the grass was studded with small golden flowers shaped like stars. Among them, nodding on slender stalks, were other flowers, white and palest green: they glimmered as a mist amid the rich hue of the grass. Over all the sky was blue, and the sun of afternoon glowed upon the hill and cast long green shadows beneath the trees.
“‘Behold! You are come to Cerin Amroth,' said Haldir. 'For this is the heart of the ancient realm as it was long ago, and here is the mound of Amroth, where in happier days his high house was built. Here ever bloom the winter flowers in the unfading grass: the yellow elanor, and the pale niphredil. Here we will stay awhile, and come to the city of the Galadhrim at dusk.'
“The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.”
What an amazing description of a place. Not just because of the detail, but because of the subjectivity, the way we see it through the eyes of another living person. That's exactly the kind of description that I would have skimmed over as a teenager on my way to reading about the fights with giant spiders and battles with orcs. But I was missing how Tolkien uses his characters to relate to the land: the Hobbits to the mounds of the Shire, the elves to the forests, the dwarves to the mountains and caves.
Real Places and Non-Places
Some places are mostly human places, places whose web of relationships is mostly human (though nothing in this world is ever completely humanized). We call those places “civilized” or, as I prefer, “domesticated”. Wilder places are those with more other-than-human relationships than human ones.
I should say here that a place doesn't have to be what we think of as a “natural” landscape in order to be a real place. It is possible for a mostly human place to be a real place. It can be a house, for example (though a house will have a relationship with the land too). An example from fiction that comes to my mind is the First Street house in New Orleans' Garden District described in Anne Rice's The Witching Hour.
What distinguishes a real place from a mere location isn’t its wildness or humanness, but the depth and complexity of its history and its relationships. As I've gotten older, I've become more aware of place. And consequently I've become aware of how many of the locations where my life happens are really non-places, how little history they have, how disconnected they are from the land and the other-than-human world around them. I live in a suburb, work in an office in an office park, shop at chain stores in strip malls (or, increasingly, online), travel on interstates and through airport terminals—all of these more or less identical to other non-places around the country. And I have become more appreciative of real places, places with history, places where the relationships with the human and the more-than-human have not been erased by concrete and chemical pesticides and capitalism.
For me, the experience of going across the country to visit family is a profoundly dislocating one. It’s largely because of how we travel. Because we are rushing to our destination, driven by limited time off work, we take the fastest and most economical routes. We fly through international airport terminals or drive on interstates. We eat at fast food chains and sleep in chain hotels. This always leaves me feeling unanchored, and I struggle to reground myself.
But it needs to be said that even those kinds of locations can be real places to some people. I’m thinking of teenagers who make friends while working their first job at a McDonald’s or the group of senior citizens who meet for coffee there early on Tuesday mornings. I’m thinking about the Doubletree hotel in San Jose, California, which was for many years a site of annual pilgrimage for Pagans, witches, and other assorted religious misfits.
But I still believe it is harder to experience these locations as real places. Having worked as a teenager in both a McDonald’s and in a literal mom-and-pop pizza parlor, I can say confidently that the latter was more of a place than the former. Having gone to Pantheacon for several years and loved it, I can still say that the little woodland on a remote farm in Wisconsin where I joined others in a Grand Sabbat was much more of a real place than the Doubletree hotel could ever be.
What transforms places into non-places is the same thing that is ruining everything else: carbon-fueled capitalism and human monoculture. We see the effects of it everywhere: the homogenization of diversity, the flattening of difference, the reduction of complexity, the bleaching of color, the sterilization of life. Everywhere you go, it’s the same houses and apartment complexes, the same office buildings with the same cubicles and florescent lights, the same chain stores and restaurants, the same products for sale, the same food on the menu, the same spectacle on the TV. Paul Kingsnorth[3] describes it this way in his book, Real England (2008):
“… in each case, something distinctive has been replaced by something manufactured; something definably local with something emptily placeless, something human scale with something impersonal. The result is stark, simple and brutal: everywhere is becoming the same as everywhere else. …
“Why? Because in the name of economic efficiency, investment, growth, development, or just simply money—whatever words are used—the complex web of intimate relationships between people and communities and the landscape they inhabit is being dismantled …”
There’s another name for this: globalization or global capitalism.
“We are discovering that global markets require a global identity; …We are discovering that a global market requires global tastes—that it needs us to want the same things, feel the same things, like or dislike the same things, see in the same way. …
“In order for this global consumer economy to progress, we must cease to be people who belong to neighbourhoods, communities, localities. We must cease to value the distinctiveness of where we are. We must become consumers … We must become citizens of nowhere.”
The promise of globalization was that we would become citizens of the world, that we would belong everywhere. But that promise was belied by millennia of evolution and human psychology. It turns out that belonging everywhere really means belonging nowhere. Rather than freedom and satisfaction, our disconnection from place has brought depression and despair. In today’s world, belonging to a place has become a radical state of being.
No Substitute
I've been attending a Unitarian church for well over a decade. The building dates back to 1875, and we're coming up on its 150th anniversary. It's an old brick building with not much in the way of adornment other than a simple bell tower with a steeple and yellow stained-glass windows of different hues. There are wooden pews and no decoration, except for a couple of memorial plaques. But the worship space is remarkable for the golden light that flows into the chapel on most Sunday mornings and fosters a feeling of outward peace and inward calm.
When I first started coming to the church, I appreciated the worship space, but I was not attached to it. I remember nodding my head in agreement whenever I heard someone say that "the church was not the building." I thought to myself, “We could really meet anywhere. Our little congregation doesn’t need to be saddled with the expensive maintenance of an old building."
There were some people in the congregation who had much more of an attachment to the building. And they baffled me. Those who knew its history. Those who had worked to repair it again and again. Those who had raised their children there. Those who had buried the ashes of Unitarian friends in the memorial garden. But I didn't have that connection at first, and so I saw this devotion to a building as a kind of idolatry.
Gradually, though, I came to know the church building as a place. I learned more about its history, and I contributed to that history myself. My family has stood at the pulpit together and led the congregation in worship services that we have created together. My children have lit the chalice that starts the service many times. My wife and I have cried in the pews as we sang “Blue Boat Home” and “The Fire of Commitment”. We had our 25th anniversary and renewed our vows to one another in that chapel. I have been challenged to growth while talking with others on broken-down couches and chairs in the mildewy basement during our early Sunday morning “Spirit Circle”.
And then COVID arrived. We could no longer meet at the building. For over a year, we had worship services online, most of which I hosted, since I was one of the few people in the congregation who was already familiar with Zoom.
In the meantime, all other forms of in-the-flesh human contact were being restricted (voluntarily or involuntarily). Schools closed and then went online—and stayed online, at least in part. Workplaces were closed, some temporarily, others permanently. Many shifted to remote work. The term "hybrid" became commonplace. My own workplace never returned to what it was. Other places of gathering—bars, pubs, cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, and of course, churches—were closed. Many didn't reopen. Hugs and handshakes became sources of possible transmission. Masks interfered with facial recognition and even the exchange of casual smiles that is a universal social lubricant. We were cut off from each other to a whole new degree.
Of course, in some ways, virtual connectivity increased human interaction. Some grandparents who learned to use Zoom were able to talk with their grandchildren more than they had before COVID. And yet, the limitations of online community became increasingly apparent. Soon, we were longing to return to fleshly conviviality, even if it meant braving the risk of infection.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in our weekly worship services. We strived to maintain a degree of authenticity in our services by incorporating as many of the elements from our in-person services as we could. Our church building has an antique bell, which we ring every Sunday. So we played a recording of the bell to start the virtual services. Unitarian services always begin with the lighting of a “chalice”. So one of our members brought our communal chalice to his home and continued to light it in Sundays in front of a green screen with a backdrop of the chapel. Our professional musician recorded new music every week for the service and eventually coordinated virtual multipart choir pieces. We also encouraged the members attending the services online to leave their cameras on during the service so they could see each other. During one part of the service we unmuted everyone so they could say hello all at once, and during another part we used the chat function to share our “joys and sorrows”.
As you can tell, we really tried. But it was not the same. Something essential was missing. I had participated in, and even facilitated, online rituals (Pagan and other) before, and I always felt they were seriously lacking. But if I had any doubt before, the COVID year convinced me that virtual religion is no substitute for in-person religious experience. There’s something about worshiping together in person that can’t be recreated online: standing together, singing together, shaking each other’s hands and hugging each other, just being in the physical presence of one another while we worship.
As I wrote in an essay entitled, “We Haven’t Worshiped For a Year”,
“A keyboard is no substitute for the touch of another person’s flesh. A face on a screen is no substitute for making eye contact in the presence of another person. A sound coming from an electric speaker is no substitute for hearing the resonance of another person’s embodied voice. Even the smells are important. These are the essential elements of human contact. And without in-the-flesh human contact, the experience of corporate self-forgetting that is real worship remains elusive—at least for me.”
I still feel that way. But there is one more element that I left out of my essay: the place. Being physically together implies being together in a place. It’s so obvious, and yet so easily overlooked. And the no-place that is cyberspace is no substitute for real places.
Being involuntarily separated from our church building for that year gave me a new appreciation of place. We don’t sing in a vacuum. We don’t see each other’s faces in a void. Our hymns, our sermons, our conversations, our handshakes and hugs do not happen outside of a history and a relationship to a place. For us, that place is the little church building by the train tracks. Yes, a church is not a building. But a church is not a church without a place. And we are not a congregation without a place to be together in.
Re-Placing Ourselves
Though the threat of COVID has largely passed, life has not returned to the way things were. COVID has changed our society. Or, more accurately, it accelerated a process that was already in motion. As Charles Einstein says in his controversial essay, “The Coronation”, we are now “institutionaliz[ing] distancing and reengineer[ing] society around it”. To illustrate this, he cites
“… the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the destruction of small business, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens.”
This process was already in motion long before COVID—long before I was even born, actually. Kingsnorth points to indications of it in the work of 19th and early 20th century writers. We could probably trace it back to the Enclosure Acts which made capitalism possible, and even further back to the forcible relocation of conquered peoples that is as old as civilization. For perhaps all of written history, we have been on a path toward complete disconnection, dislocation, and disembodiment. But the internet and our increased reliance on it since COVID has caused a quantum leap forward down that path.
While it’s true that the internet allows us to “connect” with people with whom we might never have interacted, even on the other side of the planet (as we are fond of saying), it has not led to the virtual utopia that many were predicting at the end of the 20th century. The internet is great for creating a kind of community for marginalized people. But it’s not been so great for more privileged people, for whom the internet functions more as a silo, further isolating them from difference. As Robert Putnam explains in his 2020 revised and updated edition of Bowling Alone, the internet has allowed us to withdraw from face-to-face “communities of place”, where we are forced to live with people who are different from us, and to isolate ourselves in virtual communities of opinion where our beliefs are safe from challenge by others who disagree with us.
And even more fundamentally, because the “connections” which are created online usually remain in the virtual realm, they remain disembodied and, importantly for this essay, dis-located. Cyberspace is the most non-place of all non-places. As virtual communities replace in-the-flesh communities, we lose the embodied connection to the real places that make us who we are together.
This is happening even in my little church by the railroad tracks. After we returned to live services after COVID, we continued to stream the services online for others who could not or chose not to attend in person. But when technology interfered with the worship service, as it inevitably did, disagreements arose over whether to privilege the experience of the in-person attendees or the online attendees. Some see online services as the future, even a way to save the church from its slow decline. Others, like me, see it as a sometimes convenient, sometimes distracting, but always poor substitute for worshiping in a real place.[4]
A lot has been written about the modern experience of disconnection. Putnam’s Bowling Alone (originally published in 2000) stands out. But what is missing from many of these analyses is an appreciation of place, an awareness that connection with others happens in places, and places mediate our connections with others. For this reason, virtual “connection” is a contradiction in terms.
In essential terms, we are embodied beings, and as such, we exist in time and space. All of our relationships happen in place. All of our lives are lived in place. To put it in Heideggerian language, human beings are always being-in-place. As Edward Casey explains in his phenomenological study of place, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time", “… we are not only in places but of them. Human beings—along with other entities on earth—are ineluctably place-bound. More even than earthlings, we are placelings”. He goes on to say, “there are no lived bodies without the places they inhabit … bodies and places are connatural terms.”
And yet, existentially, we are becoming more and more dis-placed. Our lives are increasingly lived online. Our communities of place have been largely supplanted by communities of opinion. And the few remaining real places continue to be bulldozed for the construction of more and more facsimiled non-places, all in the name of “progress”.
And we wonder why we are feeling disconnected.
My point here is this: The reason we are increasingly disconnected from each other is because we are losing the places where we connect. Real places. Places with history. Places that are bound up in a network of relationships with the human and more-than-human world. And if we are ever to find one another again, we have to find real places again. We have to reclaim them. We have to restore them. And we have to re-place ourselves in them again.
(How we might do that will be the subject of a future essay.)
Notes
Another way to think about place, suggested by Edward Casey in “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time", is as an event. “A place is more an event than a thing … places not only are, they happen. (And it is because they happen that they lend themselves so well to narration, whether as history or as story.)” In Senses of Place, eds. Feld & Basso (l997).
I’d love to hear in the comments what other books or stories you've read in which the setting is a character.
Over a period of a few years, Paul Kingsnorth’s political orientation has shifted from Green anarchism to proto-fascism. While it is impossible to draw a bright line marking when this occurred, I cannot unequivocally endorse Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. COVID and his conversion to Orthodox Christianity appear to have accelerated his slide to the right. See here for more on this.
It’s true that virtual services do allow some people who are disabled or otherwise home bound to “attend” services. However, I think both they and our church community would be better served if we were to put the effort into making our worship place truly accessible, rather than relegating them to watching the services on a screen. For example, there is an elderly, disabled woman who I bring to church every other week. Because of the internet, it would probably be easier to “bring the church to her” than it is for me to take her to church. However, her experience (and, I would add, my experience too) would be greatly diminished were she left to attend online.
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.