In stabilitas loci our late modern world confronts a way of life even less imaginable, if possible, than the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Stability of place, and even more importantly stability of community, strike our jet setting world as quaint at best or, less sanguinely, as a lamentable feature of an inferior age in which people found themselves bound to place and people. Unlike the monks indebted to St. Benedict’s reforms, for whom a vow of stability marked an occasion of grace, we imagine that most rustics chafe against the petty limits of their lives. Why shouldn’t they long, as we think we do, for lives of adventure, excitement, wanderlust, and globetrotting?
Yet one need not have an especially Christian outlook to question the merits of the typical forms of peregrination. Emerson sharply rebuked his contemporaries for their tourist mindset:
It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling…retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet. (From “Self-Reliance”)
And in her more philosophically prescient way, Simone Weil reminds us in The Need for Roots of the deep desire of the human soul for rootedness. She knew that little people in little places have the prospect, however far short the reality may fall, of a fairness of life about which our largely uprooted culture knows little.
With thoughts such as these I begin, with Michele and Zachary, our five-week period of time abroad. Even now we hurtle over the Atlantic at five or six hundred miles per hour with Paris as our initial destination. From there we travel by rail, following the route of the old Orient Express, through Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest en route to Istanbul, where we will meet up in due time with the rest of the Baylor in Turkey and Greece study abroad group.
We go not in the manner of the shiftless travelers that Emerson lambasts. Nor do we go with the self-reliant superiority of Emerson’s sovereign. Even less do I conceive of our journey in the mould of the sadly unrealistic cosmopolitanism advanced with such naive pride by the literati of our time. We three most definitely are not citizens of the world or members of a global village.
We shall find ourselves indeed among strangers no matter how greatly we admire them, and we shall no doubt be regarded as strangers no matter how hospitably we are received. In our experiences of shared strangeness, if we are blessed, we will know the better whom we are, whose we are, where we are, and wither we are going. To know those things–identity, belonging, place, and purpose–surely stand at the center of any rightly lived life.
As Gerald Schlabach so wisely puts matters at the end of Unlearning Protestantism, it is not by abandoning one’s tradition or superficially adopting others’ traditions that the gift of an enlarged community becomes possible in an age of globalization. It’s rather by living fully and authentically within one’s tradition, by practicing a form of stability, that true community flourishes in an unstable age.
Stabilitas loci for Christians above all involves remembering our true home. Through hope in Jesus Christ that home is ultimately with God and among a pilgrim people who’ve come finally to their rest. By the mercy of God that home is now with God and among a pilgrim people still on the way, trusting in the Lord, learning his ways and his world, helping one another, praying together, and practicing works of mercy borne of Christ’s love. And in God’s grace we belong to those people–at DaySpring Baptist Church, in Brooks College, at Baylor University–who with us strive daily to practice stability even in the status viatoris.
The status viatoris, the state of being on the way. We are on the way more literally now than usual. When we get “there,” if we attend carefully and prayerfully, we may just find ourselves drawing closer to our true home. How wonderful are the surprising gifts of God’s steadfast love!
