A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
― Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979

I dream in places. Generally when I wake, I have only a hazy recollection of plot or people. What lingers is a sense of place. Although Longfellow High School in Kearney, Nebraska was closed and locked up years before my time (save for the north end which housed our junior high music and geography classes), I’d peered through the windows on many occasions, imagining what lay beyond the entrance and up the staircase. And in the decades since, I’ve dreamt about being in that grand building, waking to carry the scent of wood polish and old books with me throughout the day. This place belongs to me, for I’ve been one who’s claimed it hardest and remembered it most obsessively.

Years ago when we discussed ageism in a Human Relations course I taught for educators, I used Geraldine Page’s final movie, A Trip to Bountiful. I’ve probably seen this movie a dozen times, and each time, I find myself as moved by Page’s performance as I was the first time. An aging woman stuck in a city apartment with her adult son and whiny daughter-in-law, Page’s character spends most of the day, and often most of the night, in a rocking chair by the window overlooking the yard and street beyond. Time and again, she begs her son to take her back to Bountiful, the small Texas town where she’d grown up, married, and raised him. Her yearning is palpable throughout the film. She dreams and daydreams of the place that’s defined and grounded her. Her son, a man bent on climbing the corporate ladder and providing a better life for his mother and wife, ignores her pleas. Why do you want to go back to that old place? he asks. There’s nothing there any more.

When she can no longer bear being pent up in that apartment, she decides to run away–again. This time, however, she not only makes it to the bus station but actually purchases a ticket, boards the bus, and departs before her son can find her and take her home. As she travels through the rural Texas countryside, she hums the hymns that have sustained her through the droughts of life. She tells her seat mate that she’s happier than she’s been for a long time. Because she’s going home to feel the soil between her fingers, to hear the birds, and to turn her face to the sun again. She’s going back to the place she believes will jump-start her soul and give her the will to return to the city, to commit her final days to living in that small apartment.

When her son finally catches up with her on the porch of her now dilapidated house, she’s smiling and greets him with, I’m home, son. I got my trip home. He chides her for taking such a risk–traveling alone in precarious health–but she tells him that it’s enough that she’s returned one final time, that this trip will carry her happily through the rest of her days. As she looks around one last time before getting into his waiting car, she reminds herself that when all the people are gone, the land and sky, the birds and coastal breezes will remain.

I understand this. As my father and his grandmother understood this. The open prairie of Nebraska and the timbered hills of Iowa become the protagonists of our stories. It’s enough that they will remain long after the people we love have gone and the memories we’ve made have faded. In his novel, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway writes:

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The names of places dignify those villages, rivers, roads, and fields where so many died as casualties of war. These places make the sacrifices of war real. They anchor the abstract notions of things like glory and courage in the concrete: stone, soil, water, wood. It’s no wonder that we return to these places and walk their hallowed ground. It’s no wonder that we say their names with reverence and wonder. Our most important stories inhabit these places. And they rise from the ash heap, recover, and remain when all else has disappeared. This is the power of place.

In her novel, Black Beauty, Anna Sewell contends that [i]t is good people who make good places. Having just returned from a visit to my family home in Kearney, I’m buoyed with a familiar sense of joy that emanates from this place. I walked into the closet of my childhood bedroom which spreads magically under the eaves, creating a private nook for book-reading and imaginative play. I remembered the hours I spent there in solitary contentment. I laid in bed and saw the room as it had been when I was young: an upright piano along one wall, my mom’s sewing machine on an old desk in the corner, and an ironing board under the east window. I could feel my fingers on the keys. I could hear the rumble of the old, black Singer as my mom guided a piece of fabric under its needle. Good people made this home, and within, good places abound.

In my mind, I can still walk the halls of the many schools I’ve attended as student and teacher. I can look down the aisles of the three-story department store in which I worked during high school and college. And, without thinking, I can tell you just where you’d find a bottle of calamine lotion or a 10-cent glass animal. If I close my eyes, I can climb the spiral staircase up to the balcony of the lighthouse overlooking Harmon Park’s rock garden. And when I’m miles away from and missing home, I can mentally walk the perimeter of our pond and watch sunfish travel through the shallows. I can do this because all these places–real and remembered–are sanctuaries for me.

If [a] place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, as Joan Didion contends, then I find joy in knowing that there are so many places that belong forever to me. If there are others who argue that they claim these places hardest, let it be known that I won’t release them graciously, and I won’t stop visiting them in my dreams.

Gethsemane

The olive trees drop their fruit in easy slumber,
and the ground gives up the last heat of the day,
draws the curtain, surrenders 
to sleep.

Nothing will keep watch.
The children of Jerusalem dream,
and the men who fill their nets with silver fish
curl contently into the shadows.

And we who believe we would stay awake—
for surely, we would prostrate our best selves in supplication—
sleep, too.

In dreams, we soak the earth with prayers
and wait. 
We circle the wagons, keep vigil,
stand watch.

In sleep, we are heroes
of a story that might have been.
We have eyes to see
and say all the things we might have said.

But in truth,
our intentions scatter like moths,
while the stones here               
bear better witness.

You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice.
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

Although there are days when I feel like I’m alone, alienated from the world at large, I’m pretty certain that I’m not. Alone, that is. I suspect that there are others who also feel as though the world is a place where you weren’t invited. And I suspect there may be others like me who’ve begun to feel like perhaps it’s better not to be invited, like the party just isn’t worth it, like staying home in your sweats with a bowl of popcorn is preferable.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Demon Copperhead, her protagonist is a contemporary David Copperfield born to a single, drug-addicted mother in a trailer in rural Tennessee. From the beginning of his life, Demon’s constant companions are hunger and fear. He dreams of a world where everyone is invited, a party with an all-you-can-eat buffet. His world, however, is no party. As a child, he learns to navigate the foster care system after his mother dies from an overdose. This is a world in which he sleeps in laundry rooms, works in tobacco fields, and survives on barely enough calories to sustain a mouse. This world is more like the Hunger Games where only the fittest survive. Demon often wanders this world as an alien, desperate to find a safe place to land.

Each day when I read or watch the news, I feel as though I’m looking in on a world that I hardly recognize and to which I’ve not been invited. This is a world in which battle lines are drawn with such power and certainty, that if you’re someone who finds herself taking time to carefully consider, to weigh evidence and opinions, to use your head and your heart, then you’ve not been invited. This is a world in which you can no longer send your children to school with the assurance that they will return safely at the end of the day. This is a world in which adults don’t play nicely, a world in which name-calling and shouting are expected. This is a world in which one’s convictions and principles are tested (or canceled) daily. In this world, then, it’s no surprise that many individuals feel alienated, as though they’ve been dropped unwillingly into an episode of Survivor.

Each year as we enter Holy Week, I find myself in the Garden of Gethsemane. To the extent that I’m able as a human being, I live alongside Christ as he prays in anguish that the cup might be taken from him. Author and theologian C. S. Lewis wrote that of all scenes in Christ’s life, he was grateful that this scene in Gethsemane did not go unrecorded. He contends that it was here that all the torments of fear, despair, and even hope were loosed upon Jesus. Here, he explains, Jesus was fully human, subject to utter despair and desperate hope that, like Isaac, he might be saved at the last minute. To be alienated from God is to suffer exclusion as only a human can.

Yet, Christ was not only fully human but fully divine. Even as he anguishes in Gethsemane, he prays not my will but yours be done. As Son of God, he understands that he has come to offer himself as a living sacrifice, to take away the sins of the world. And just as the world has misunderstood and hated him, he knows that the world will misunderstand and hate his disciples, too. In John 17:15-16, Jesus confirms that his disciples should remain in the world. And yet as he speaks to his Father, he says: I have given them Your word and the world has hated them; for they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Christ understood that the cost of discipleship was founded upon a profound paradox: be in the world but not of the world. This is a different sort of alienation. Disciples are to live fully in the world, while they alienate themselves from its worldliness. That is, they are to live with their eyes upon Christ, turning their eyes away from the temptations and sins of the world. This is intentional, willful alienation.

Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead doesn’t choose his alienation. In the midst of its darkness, however, there are a few people who shine a light upon his worth and potential. In this passage, we can see one of these supporters, his teacher, who continues to advocate for and encourage him:

He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”

The world may appear to be a mangled wreck, but some drivers walk out alive and well. In a world that has alienated him, Demon perseveres and becomes that driver. In a world that hated and killed him, Christ walks out of it alive. We may intentionally alienate ourselves from the world, or we may find ourselves involuntarily alienated from the world. Either scenario is lonely and difficult. But we hear about these miracles where individuals not only survive alienation but thrive–in spite of or because of it. Easter is a time for just these sorts of miracles. In a world we may struggle to call our home, this is truly the best news.