Reading and conversation are continual helps to keep mentally alive and engaged in the world. Reading asks for active participation, unlike scrolling through some social media or watching tv. These can be quite passive. And good conversation both asks for something and gives something. Good conversations are alive and often vibrant. I value both of them highly.
All this came to mind recently in a good conversation centered around a book we are reading in common. Sophfronia Scott’s book, The Seeker and the Monk, is a rewarding account of a knowledgeable African American woman in an imaginary dialogue with the 20th century monk, Thomas Merton. She never met Merton, who died in 1968. I never met him either. But I know him fairly well by reading extensively in his prolific works. And clearly, Scott also has done much reading. The group spent considerable time focused on one sentence from early in her book.
In a section dealing with the question, “Are you ordained?” Scott answers in the negative. (14) She says, “That’s not my job. I believe it is my specific vocation not to be ordained, to model how a layperson can engage with faith, the Bible, and Christ.” I like her answer. I appreciate the fact that she claims a vocation, but it is not to the priesthood. And then she finishes that paragraph with these challenging sentences. “I’m like a scout on a spiritual frontier. I send back missives in my writing.”
When I initially read this paragraph, I was drawn to the image of being a scout. But the group conversation instead went to the idea of “spiritual frontier.” Quickly, we began to explore and elaborate what the idea of frontier meant to us. I became entranced by the various ways folks articulated their notion of frontier. Typically, a frontier is “out there” or “over there.” We talked about the frontier as a place of mystery and the unknown. It can be fraught with potential danger. In my own mind I was imagining the frontier as the boundary or the margin. I think it was this pondering which led to me contribution to the group.
Probably what I said came out of my own sense of the frontier as margin. It occurred to me that many of us have spent most of our time domesticating and being domesticated. If you look up the word, domesticate, you find that it means to tame an animal. It means to make something agreeable and acceptable. Obviously, it has the idea of house or even home in the idea of domestication. It underscores the fact that there is a settling in---making a secure place to dwell. It can be a literal place---a home. Or it might be an internal space---feeling psychologically safe.
All this makes sense, and it describes much of life as I have lived it. I am ok with it; I am not complaining. But it began to occur to me that there are some perils in being domesticated. I would even like to think about spiritual domestication. I am not so sure this is good for human beings. Humans are, after all, evolving organisms. We cannot stand still. In this sense, we cannot just be at home. We have to be careful not to be so comfortable that we dry up, spiritually speaking.
As I understand the Spirit, it is a vibrant, moving energy in our lives and our world. The Spirit is indeed love in action. In effect, the Spirit warns us that we cannot just “be in love.” Rather it is more like “be loving.” Grammatically, it is a verbal noun, what once upon a time we called a gerund. Effectively, that is what the Spirit is: a verbal noun. The Spirit is a noun---God---in motion doing things like an active verb. God is creating, redeeming, loving, judging, forgiving and all the rest.
Thinking further into this, it strikes me that so much of God’s work in us takes us to the frontier of our spiritual life. I think we grow and change at the margin of life, not in the middle of our domestication. The frontier challenges us; our domesticated place assures us that nothing else is needed. The peril of being too domesticated is we lose our sense of curiosity, we refuse to risk going to the frontier, and we become spiritually fat and lazy. We become complacent instead of obedient.
The perils of being too domesticated is we lose any sense of adventure. We close the windows, lock the doors, and turn our domesticated place into an artificial environment. If we are attracted to adventure, we do it as voyeurs of others’ spiritual adventures. We risk nothing of ourselves. We have locked out the Spirit from our own safe spirits. The frontier calls us to adventure and asks us to be willing to risk.
As I sat in the group listening to their perspectives and tending to my own racing mind, I knew I wanted to be more willing to risk and become more adventurous. If I think life is an adventure---as I believe it is---then I want to live more consciously the adventure to which I am called. I want to accept Scott’s sense of vocation. My vocation, my calling, it to balance domesticated living with frontier living. It does not mean having two homes. But it probably does mean spending more time with adventurers like Scott, Merton and other “frontier folks” I know.
How ironic…the real peril for me is domestication, not the frontier!
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