Last weekend, I flew back home from Washington, D.C., where I spent a week at a writing program for Christian college students. We talked about philosophy and culture and publishing, but unofficially, we talked about our theological convictions, our church backgrounds, our hometowns. I am normally fairly protective of my bedtime, but here I found it easy to stay up until three in the morning discussing everything from Reformed theology to the meaning of weakness in 2 Corinthians 12 to the first-world woes of being a college student. I met people―or rather, made friends―whom I regretted to leave after just a week of getting to know. I think I will see some of them next year. Others I may never see again. It is a hard, awkward, always insufficient thing to say goodbye to friends like that.
And as I sat by the window on my flight from D.C., the sun just sinking below the horizon, the sky slipping from amber and blue into dusk, I thought about goodbyes and airports and parting hugs and last looks. I have had many of these in the past year. Every time I go away to school, I must walk away from my family, suitcase in hand, and every time I go back home on break, I must walk away from my friends and my church. My heart is necessarily riven, polarized.
I wondered if I am what Wendell Berry calls placeless, uprooted by modernity and machinery, enchanted by the fantasy of limitlessness. I have always thought that I would like to live somewhere else from my hometown, that for my future children to go to my high school would somehow be a loss. Like I have the capacity to be endlessly attached to place after place, putting down threads here and there, like these will fill the cistern inside of me. But perhaps I wasn’t made human only to try and swallow the world. What if accepting my limitedness means accepting a narrowness of place? Berry writes of “only so much land, so much water in the cistern, so much hay in the barn, so much corn in the crib, so much firewood in the shed, so much food in the cellar or freezer, so much strength in the back and arms—and no more.”
And there is only so much of me. I am not omnipresent. I cannot exist in both New York and California at the same time. Yet I have put down roots in both places, and I feel strangely stretched, insufficient, always absent from a part of my life. Perhaps it is true that there is a multiplicative effect: I have some version of home in both of the two biggest cities in America. But it feels more like division―there are more pieces, yes, but they are broken off from a single mass, cast apart from each other.
People ask me if I will stay in New York after college. I always tell them that I think I am an East Coast person deep down, that I would stay in New York for a little bit, but I don’t think I could settle down there because it is too far away from family (five or six hours on a plane). For all the innovations of the modern age, there is no solution to distance. I have often wished, perhaps because I am ruthlessly impatient, that scientists would develop a teleportation device that eliminated the need for all travel. Or perhaps some seismic event could cause a molten fold in the middle of North America, swallowing everything between New York and Los Angeles, and then the two cities I tentatively call home could touch.
But that is all fruitless, desperate, spiteful thinking, and here I am in reality, trapped on either side of the country like a swinging pendulum. Was it a mistake? I do not think so. Is it so bad to feel like a sojourner―if not placeless, not yet bound to a place, not yet arrived? I think also of Augustine’s two cities, and particularly of the heavenly one, composed of citizens both on earth and in heaven. There is a far wider distance between heaven and earth than the span of miles between New York and California. But while imagining the entire middle of the U.S. shrinking away is useless fantasy, there will finally, one day, be a union of the heavenly city. It will be one. “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2).
When I became a member of my local church in New York, I signed a covenant that included in its vows a commitment to gather “as often as providence allows.” The phrase is precious to me because I see it in the congregation as they act like―and are―family to one another. It is convicting because when I am there, still I let other things pull me away from the people I profess to call family. Yet it is also a reminder that I do live under the providence of God, that I am dependent on his gracious will, that the One who is omnipresent and infinite does not require limitlessness from me. He only requires my faithfulness and my desire to love and be present with those I love “as often as providence allows.”
I was not nearly so sure of this as I sat by myself in a plane going west. Yet there was something about the clouds, cloaking the world far below, streaked over the glowing horizon. Nothing profound: just an odd mixture of beauty and silence. I looked at the airplane wing and wondered how the science of flying worked. I was sure there was a perfectly logical explanation, but I was also sure that if not for the careful providence of an attentive God, we would not stay so peacefully airborne. I watched the colors of the sky shift. It looked so vast. As it turned deep blue and then dark, I thanked him for the blessing of sad farewells, shut the window, and closed my eyes to sleep.