the spirit of the place
January 19, 2010
As technology gets more mobile and your 3G or 4G network gets you “connected” from anywhere on the planet, social scientists are pointing toward the fact that other horizons seem to be disappearing. Nature and green space have dropped off the screen so-to-speak, because in our time-poor culture, we just don’t have time to go to the park or have a garden, because apparently we’d rather miracle-grow our farms in a game on Facebook. Nature is becoming invisible to the virtual eye, one might say. We walk down the street texting or e-mailing or chatting on the phone, and un-noticed is the silent creep of the natural world. Does this call into question the very argument of the erstwhile apostle Paul from Romans 1: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Do we no longer take time to notice?
I bring this up, because I think it has an immense bearing on what we call “spiritual formation”. When we speak of spiritual formation, we are talking about what forms us into the people we are becoming. Thus, in spiritual formation, we seek to have the Spirit of the Living God forming us unto Christlikeness, just as Jesus foretold us He would in John 16:13.
Yet a recent article in the Washington Post reported that: “According to a recent landmark study of viewing habits, adults spend an average of nearly three hours a day interacting with computer screens. Add TV viewing and you get a screen time of about 8 1/2 hours. “People are spending more time in media and especially screen media than anything else they’re doing in life,” says Bill Moult of Sequent Partners, one of two organizations that provided the study…But you don’t need numbers to know how absorbed we have become by screens and their mesmerizing qualities. In October [2009], two Northwest Airlines pilots who flew their jet 150 miles past their destination told investigators they were distracted by their laptop computers.”
The more time we spend with something the more it “forms” us, that’s basic spiritual formation 101. The more time with Jesus, the more like Him we become, however we also note that it is not just the content of material going into our brains (input) that forms us - things like scripture reading or memorization - but it is also how we are taking that information in that is just as critical. In spiritual formation studies, we note that the impact of content can suffer greatly if there is no contact - actually interacting relationally with Jesus directly via prayer and indirectly in community with others and our world.
Interviewed about what we are losing in the digital/virtual age, Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, observed that the difficulty is that we are losing something profoundly human: the capacity to connect deeply to our environments. He reminds us that landscape designers talk about bestowing on a garden its genius loci, or spirit of the place, that bubbles up into your consciousness if its presence is strong enough and the visitor meditative enough to receive it. Harrison says a garden truly reveals itself only when its own depths and those of the beholder flow together. But in our present age of rushing here-and-there, we languish in the poverty of both time and attention. Thus in an age of distraction, attention becomes a primary spiritual discipline, along with meditation, which he mentions.
Harrison claims that gardens and green space are keys to bringing us back from the virtual world to re-claim our humanity. In fact, in the initial chapters of Genesis there is a word-play in the Hebrew with regard to the Earth and the Man formed out of earth. In Hebrew, earth is ‘adamah and man is ‘ha-adam. The best translation may be ‘earth’ and ‘earthling’, and the earthling is placed in what?…a garden of delight. Thus, Professor Harrison goes on to say: “Gardens are the best place to begin this reeducation,” Without it, he fears that the prophecy of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Duino Elegies, will become so. “Earth, isn’t this what you want; invisibly to arise in us? Is it not your dream to be someday invisible? Earth! Invisible!”
Of course it is entirely possible that Paul nailed it in Romans: we, professing to be wise, became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for a virtual image flickering in HD…
- How do you connect best with God? Nature? Internet? Solitude? Community?
- Have you considered - as an earthling - how you are connected to this earth? I believe there is something significant that we are made of earth, yet the Spirit of the Living God indwells us…I like how Pierre Teilhard de Chardin turns our perspective on its head: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
- What would you say is the genius loci/spirit of the place in which you inhabit currently?
- Take time to connect with your local environment…meditate deeply on it and look for the bubbling presence of God to reveal the hidden Christ to you; journal your thoughts on this afterwards. Is God saying something to you?
Comments
One Response to “the spirit of the place”
Got something to say?
Every Monday morning when I am home, I go to a Botanic Garden or a lakeside park. It’s become sacred time for me and a sacred place. I hear God’s voice here - there are no distractions and in the beauty, I see His love for me.