Placed in Creation

I remember the summer time visits with my grandparents. They lived in northern Montana where they raised cattle and grew wheat.

My grandparents would travel once a week in the car to the nearest town. My brother and I would sit in the back seat and look out at the fields for the hour-long trip. The trip seemed endless, as we traveled dirt roads and a bumpy highway. It appeared to us that there was “nothing” to look at.

       
But it was not that way for my grandparents. We would listen in on their conversations in the front seat. 

 “Say, Floyd’s crop looks good this year,”

 “Don’t think Irving planted soon enough,”

 “Look at the weeds on that place! Terrible what its come to since Joe left.”

It seemed to me and to my brother that the conversation was always the same. We would look at each other, roll our eyes in our heads and grin…what was to talk about? It was just dirt and grass and field after field to us. Boring!

They knew every inch of that ground, however, and they paid attention to it. For them, it was sacred place.

The sacred wasn’t something unusual or astounding to them. The sacred was familiar ground, the land and life that sustained them. Sacred was something they knew and had known each and every day for months and years on end. Sacred was what they  commented on… repeatedly! Sacred was the place that called them into fidelity; they had to tend it or they would lose it. It called them into fidelity with each other and with their neighbors because they needed each other in order to receive the life the earth offered.

I know there is no ‘going back’ to the life they knew, not for me anyway. But I wonder how I can find that deep connection to place and people.  What ways can I pay attention, come to know, and be faithful so that I may find my place in the world?

My grandparents helped me see that certain places invite us into fidelity; they call us to tend to them. Certain places get our attention. We keep looking at them, we forever comment on their existence. My grandparents helped me look for the sacred place right before my eyes.

Kari Reiquam