I live in Indiana, and have for over nine months now. It’s my second tour of duty in the Midwest, as I went to college in Holland, MI, a couple hours north and west of here. I love the people of this congregation and of this community, and I can honestly say I’m glad to be here. But I’m not a Midwesterner; and however long I stay here, I may never be.I remember talking about that in a sermon one time while I was still in Grand Lake; Trinity Church in the Pines may have been in the Colorado Rockies, but there really weren’t all that many of the congregation who were true Coloradans. More of them were Midwesterners who had retired there or who spent the summers there. I remember telling them that I knew I’d never really qualified as a Midwesterner because I still didn’t get Garrison Keillor—and I ended up with one of our part-time members (born and raised Columbus, Ohio) taking half an hour and more after the service patiently and earnestly trying to correct the problem. Tell truth, it’s a couple years on, and I’m back in the Midwest, and you know what? I still don’t get Garrison Keillor.It probably doesn’t help that even nine months on, I continue to get the occasional amazed comment that we actually moved from Colorado to Indiana, usually accompanied by comments about how beautiful Colorado is. I tell them that with all the trees dying from the mountain pine beetle, it was a lot less beautiful than it had been when we moved there, and that it’s really a relief to my soul to be back someplace where the trees are all alive—which is true, and it makes sense to people; when I follow that up by pointing out that at least here, we have the lakes, and then note that it’s nice to have a big grocery store, a Lowe’s and a Walmart in town, that’s usually enough to satisfy them, and we can move on to talking about other things. But none of that is the real reason why we were happy to make the move.The real reason has much more to do with something Larry Bacon said during my last year there: “I liked Grand Lake a lot better before I moved here.” I had to agree with him. It was a beautiful place with a lot of people I enjoyed; what it wasn’t was a community in any functional sense. It was, rather, a lot of little cliques who didn’t get along, producing constant infighting between and among the mayor, the town council, the Chamber of Commerce, various business owners, the recreation district, and pretty much anybody else with any sort of stake in the area. John Pritchard once said wryly that the problem with the town was that the original settlers hadn’t built in the valley, they’d built on the hills on either side so they could shoot across at each other, and it had been that way ever since. Unfortunately, rather than being an agent of God’s reconciliation in the community, the church tended rather to reflect its divisions, at least in its decision-making. (To its credit, in the ordinary life of the congregation, it was a remarkably cohesive group given that half its people were only there 3-5 months out of the year.) It may not be as scenic here, but it’s a strong functional community for all its challenges, and that’s a wonderful change.Sara tells people that the big thing we learned from our five years in Colorado is that scenery isn’t everything, and that’s a true thing; but for me, it isn’t the big thing. For me, I think the big thing I learned has more to do with my sense of place. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I posted on “sense of place and the ’08 election” a month ago. I think of myself, broadly speaking, as a Westerner; I don’t have deep roots in any one town in the Western US, but that’s where I’ve spent most of my life (well, that and just across the Canadian border), and the cultures of the rural and small-town West are where I feel most comfortable. It’s not a matter of conservative vs. liberal, either; as it happens, I’m probably no less conservative than most folks here in northern Indiana, but it’s different. I don’t know that I could define all the differences in mindset and expectations, but they’re there and I can sense them. I grew up in the West, in the land of mountains and great distances, and it shaped me, and it shaped my sense of where I belong.At the same time, though, as I noted in that previous post, I also grew up with the sense that the particular place where I belonged was not a location but a community—or rather, two communities: the Navy and the church. I didn’t keep the immediate connection to the Navy, since God didn’t call me into the chaplaincy (I still feel that connection, but more distantly, as a part of my heritage), but the church has continued to be my home; and then, of course, in getting married and having children, home has become wherever Sara and the girls are. Home, in other words, is not primarily about where but about who; my sense of place is less about the location in which I live than it is about the community of which I am a part. I think I might have known that before we went to Colorado, but at the time, Sara still didn’t think I could be content living someplace without mountains, and at the time, she may well have been right—I hadn’t really learned that lesson. Now, I have; and while I still have the mountains in my soul, I can be content living without them. Indeed, I’ve learned that as beautiful as they are, they aren’t a healthy place for me to live, because they work against true community, and I need the beauty of community (for which they are a hostile environment) more than I need their beauty.So in a way, maybe I did move for scenery after all: I traded physical beauty for spiritual and emotional beauty, and I do not regret the trade. Even if I never feel like Indiana is truly my home, if I always feel that this church is my home, I will be well content.
