A Place Where God Has Shown Power

What is a spirituality of place?

1. 

A professor once told our theology class about his early days as a novice in the monastery. One day a fellow brother died and following the tradition of the abbey, he was laid in a plain pine casket in the center of the cavernous church. 

“I looked at his coffin during prayer and realized one day my body would lie in that exact same place. Right there was where and how things would end for me, too. 

Or begin, I suppose.”

2. 

I never believed in The Spirit of the Place. Until I decided to nudge the chip off my shoulder as a high-school junior and visit for myself the college where my brother had gone, and my father, and both grandfathers, and a pack of uncles, and on and on.

So I signed up for the campus tour, dutifully trooped after a chirpy guide, met some undergrads, ate in the dining hall, went to a class, walked around the quads, ignored the stadium. I stayed the night in a dorm, not a historic one dripping with nostalgia and charm, but a cinderblock lump on the edge of campus. And yet.

When I woke the next morning, staring at twinkle lights strung beneath my host’s loft bed, I realized I wanted nothing more than to come here and make this school my own.

I had never felt more strongly the Spirit of a place.

3. 

In the Book of Genesis, Jacob wakes from a dream, shook and startled after a vision of angels and a ladder stretching to the sky and the Lord speaking straight to him. 

He scrambles to his feet, takes the stone he slept on, and sets up an altar in Bethel, proclaiming, “Surely, the Lord is in this place and I did not know it!...How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” (Genesis 28:16-17).

Jacob has deceived his brother and stolen a blessing and set out into the wilderness, but still God finds him there. Exclamations are barely enough to make sense of what he has seen and known in this surprising sacred space.

Later in life he returns to Bethel, an older man limping from his wrestling with God along the way. He brings his whole household with him this time, wives and children and servants, and he builds another altar there “to the God who answered me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone” (35:3).

Surely God was in this place. Surely God has gone with me to every place, too.

4. 

Once you start to notice the spirituality of places, you can’t unsee it.

Churches, cemeteries, sacred sites and shrines—these are easy.

But once in a rare moon, my cells go electric on a sudden street corner or a quiet park or a dusty highway, and I realize—God was in this place, too, and I did not know it.

As a child I wondered: Did God’s feet walk over every inch of creation?

(I wonder still.)

5. 

After leaving home as a young adult, I’d cringe to feel myself curl back into the shell of my former self each time I crossed the railroad tracks on the drive into town. Like the place itself was pressing me back into a version of me I no longer was.

Now I come home carrying more peace, gentler and forgiving. Of the place and of myself.

“Here we are,” I whispered this summer as familiar homes and trees raced by the car window.

Not known to each other as we once were, both of us changed now.

But still together.

6.

Here is a delightful game to play while waiting at the DMV or inching through traffic or running errands in soulless strip malls or stuck in a hotel conference room.

The rules of the game are simple, born of boredom:

Peel back layer after layer. 

Ponder what (and whom) you might find.  

Start with the walls and the floors. The brick-layer. The cement mason. The day laborer. The architect. The former tenant. The long-gone business. The customers. The students. The thousands who have walked in and out the doors. Every hand who worked to make this corner of God’s green earth. Every foot that trod its ground.

What would the first people who lived here say if they could see the land now? What might the place say to them in return?

How many stories of labor, love, and loss have layered themselves like soil and silt upon this ground over centuries of living? How many more will come?

7. 

Lourdes keeps haunting me. 

Too much happened on pilgrimage to process, too much prayer and quiet and grace. I must let it settle; I cannot find the words yet; most of them won’t be shared once I do.

But the last place our feet walked in France is haunting me, night and day.

I had been there before, but I wasn’t awake to the place yet; I barely remember it.

This time I could see through the trappings, the stores flashing with souvenirs, the tourist spectacles. The holy ground itself startled me into silence. The grotto, the river, the baths, the chapels of light. I could barely breathe while I walked alone to the water (and I couldn’t stop walking there, drawn like a magnet to the source).

My brother went to Lourdes once, 20 years old, bones riddled with cancer. “He wanted to visit a place where God had shown his power,” my mother told me as we walked to the grotto this time.

The cure didn’t come. 

A museum on the plaza records each official miracle with photos on the wall, and there are thousands more, tiny and personal, or emotional and spiritual, pressed into the corners of the churches, walls lined to the ceiling with marble plaques of gratitude.

But what I felt in that holy place were all the prayers, billions upon trillions, pressed by hands onto stone, lit in heat waves of melting candles, prayers answered and unanswered, all of them held and hallowed by this place, all of them the same mystery. 

I cannot make sense of what is there as someone whose deepest prayers in the face of death for the ones I love have gone statistically south. But it is a place where God has shown power, though not in the ways pilgrims wanted or expected or could even see.

My feet walk that holy ground every night in my dreams. I wake with silent prayer on my lips. The mystery of how a place can keep changing you, thousands of miles away.